The Press: Thin-Spun Runs

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Admiring the "good grammar" of a cricket player's batting, the Manchester Guardian's scholarly Neville Cardus once called the batsman, a Lancashireman named Watson, "the [Samuel] Johnson of cricket." Demanded outraged Cricketer Watson: "Who did this bloke Johnson play for?"

Players are often baffled by the allusions that Neville Cardus, who usually lugs a good book along to the cricket field, chips into his cameo-chiseled reports on Britain's national game. Slight, myopic Cardus is probably the world's only cricket critic who also doubles in brass and woodwinds as a music reviewer. For 30 years, in covering his "strange dichotomy," first for the Guardian and now for the Kemsley newspapers (the Sunday Times, the Sunday Chronicle), Cardus has played a deft prose symphony of his own that weaves through both his fields the tonal majesty of one, the rhythmic action of the other. The result bewitches more readers than it baffles.

Last week Cardus fans all over Britain could admire his virtuosity in both specialties. A new anthology, The Essential Neville Cardus (Jonathan Cape; 12 s. 6 d.), was selling at the impressive rate of 1,000 copies a week.

Fresh Flavors. In one of the book's 45 essays, Cardus compares Dr. W. G. Grace, the bearded, burly Babe Ruth of cricket who scored 54,986 runs in 43 years, to Prime Minister Gladstone, Violinist Fritz Kreisler, Bach and Falstaff; he surmises that even the champion's name was foreordained ("Could Grace conceivably have [played like] Grace, known as W. G. Blenkinsop?").

Of Frank Woolley of Kent, another of the game's immortals, Cardus writes: "His cricket is compounded of soft airs and fresh flavors. The bloom of the year is on it [and] the very brevity of summer is in it ... Woolley, so the statisticians tell us, often plays a long innings. But time's a cheat . . . The brevity in Woolley's batting is a thing of pulse and spirit, not to be checked by clocks, but only to be apprehended by imagination. He is always about to lose his wicket; his runs are thin-spun ... An innings by him is almost too unsubstantial for this world."

Reviewing Cardus, the Guardian was moved to a flattering comparison: "Where would Homer's gods and heroes ... be without Homer, now?"

Musical Kidneys. Cricket's Homer, a self-described bastard, was born 54 years ago in a Manchester slum. His buxom mother and her two sisters took in laundry until they learned that taking lovers was more rewarding; Neville was one of the rewards. His father, whom he never knew, was first violinist in an orchestra.

Imaginative, sensitive, scarecrow-thin Neville had only four years of school, "a place of darkness and inhumanity." The public library was his university: "I discovered Charles Dickens and went crazy. I read at meals. I read under the [street] lamps. I read myself to [acute] myopia."