 | |
| Author | John Major |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
Publication date | 2007 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 400 |
| ISBN | 9780007280117 |
More Than a Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years is a 2007 book about the history of cricket written by former British prime minister John Major. It was published by HarperCollins.
John Major had been known to have a life long love of cricket. [1] After losing the 1997 United Kingdom general election, he went to the Oval for an afternoon of cricket. [2] Major would become the President of Surrey County Cricket Club from 2000 to 2001 (and Honorary Life Vice-president since 2002). The launch of the book was done at the Oval in a room named after himself. [3]
Major traces the history of the game from its nebulae origins in the medieval games "creag" and "club-ball", through its denunciation by the clergy and violence in the 17th and 18th century, to the exuberance of Victorian players, concluding at the end of the first world war. [2] [4]
Roger Mosey, writing in The Guardian found that Major's enjoyment of the game shone through his history of it, and particularly enjoyed Major's personalisation the narrative. [1] Historian Dominic Sandbrook, in The Daily Telegraph, was also positive of the book, finding it "very charming and quintessentially English". [2] Jack Williams, of The Independent, was more critical, finding that the biographical approach taken by Major resulted in "a potted history of a particular time in a chapter's first pages without any explanation of the effects of social and economic changes on cricket" and opining that academic historians would find the background history to be simplistic. [4]
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