To investigate the past and present of village cricket, Tim Heald set off on a tour that took him from Cornwall to Lancashire, from the cradle of cricket in Kent and Sussex to Lord's itself. Tim tells the story of a match in each village he visits as a mix of history and anecdote about the "grass roots." He even returns from retirement to venture on to the field of play.
Tim Heald (b. 1944) is a journalist and author of mysteries. Born in Dorchester, England, he studied modern history at Oxford before becoming a reporter and columnist for the Sunday Times. He began writing novels in the early 1970s, starting with Unbecoming Habits (1973), which introduced Simon Bognor, a defiantly lazy investigator for the British Board of Trade. Heald followed Bognor through nine more novels, including Murder at Moose Jaw (1981) and Business Unusual (1989) before taking a two-decade break from the series, which returned in 2011 with Death in the Opening Chapter.
A lovely book - a must read for village cricketers, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, psychologists and those curious about the peculiarities of the British.