The Cricketer's Progress - Meadowland To Mumbai

The Cricketer's Progress - Meadowland To Mumbai

In this delightful synoptic history of the game, Gideon Haigh finds Midwinter to be ‘fond without sentimentality, thorough without pedantry, and wears his learning lightly’.

J. Neville Turner writing in the Australian cricket magazine The Yorker claims that By virtue of its wit, scholarship, mastery of language, vision, modesty and wisdom, Eric Midwinter’s The Cricketer’s Progress has persuaded me that it is the finest book on cricket of all time.

J. Neville Turner writing in the Australian cricket magazine The Yorker claims that By virtue of its wit, scholarship, mastery of language, vision, modesty and wisdom, Eric Midwinter’s The Cricketer’s Progress has persuaded me that it is the finest ook on cricket of all time.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MCC/CRICKET SOCIETY BOOK OF THE YEAR - the citation reads: The distinguished writer Eric Midwinter has produced a book that could be classified as social history, were that not an inadequate term for what is contained within. Conscious of the salient point that to study history one must needs study the historian as well, the author takes us on a journey from cricket’s uncertain origins to its equally uncertain present state.

The journey, however, is the point and a skilled and witty mind traces the fortunes and misfortunes of cricketers, not just cricket itself, and places the players and the game squarely in the context of contemporary history.

AUTHOR DETAILS

The social historian, Eric Midwinter, is the author of many books, among them several on cricket. These include: W.G.Grace; His Life and Times (1981). The Lost Seasons; Cricket in Wartime 1939-45 (1987). The Bass Illustrated History of County Cricket (1992). Red Shirts and Roses; the Story of the Two Old Traffords (2005, winner of the Cricket Society/Times Cricket Book of the Year Award).