Hugh de Sélincourt (1878–1951)

The classic novel about village cricket. Selincourt presents a full day in the lives of a village cricket XI, including an important game against their local rivals. He draws his characters skillfully, and provides enough insight into their lives to animate them on the pitch. Readers of Selincourt's well-anthologised cricket short stories (collected in The Game of the Season) may find The Cricket Match more solemn and serious – closer to Woolf than Wodehouse – but his writing about the game is superb and his characterisations memorable. Recommended (for cricket fans).… (meer)

Enjoyable collection of stories that suffers from sameness. The Game of the Season will be sought out by all fans of Selincourt's perennial novel The Cricket Match. But, while the novel puts the cricket life of the players into the context of their daily lives, the short stories are more narrowly focussed on the game itself. Selincourt's descriptions of cricket are unsurpassed, but reading these stories one after the other exposes their lack of variation. This is less noticeable when reading them in anthologies, where they frequently appear. The collection includes two stories where the village cricketers of Tillingfold take on 'golden age' Australian Test teams of the 1920s and 1930s. Recommended (for cricket fans).… (meer)

The Cricket Match tells the story of a small rural country town in England between the world wars and the cricket match between this town (Tillingford) and a rival team (Raveley). We are introduced to the characters one by one and how they feel about the game in the morning of the match followed by what happens during the afternoon match. You do not have to like cricket to get something from this book. Anyone could recognise the ups and downs and tension known from any local sporting event. I really enjoyed the simplicity of the time portrayed and the how the whole book was structured.… (meer)