The Green and Golden Age

'The star writer of the moment and the latest in a blue-blooded lineage, reaching back to Neville Cardus through CLR James and Matthew Engel' Wisden Cricketer Gideon Haigh's previous collections of cricket writings, Game for Anything (978 1 84513 0787) and Silent Revolutions (978 1 84513 226 2), both published by Aurum, have concentrated primarily on historical subjects - great cricketers of the past, cricketing controversies, forgotten heroes. In this new book he concentrates on the modern game - cricket for the twenty-first century. Above all, of course, it is a game, at least at Test level, dominated by the green-and-gold wearing Australians, so Haigh includes a number of pieces on the great Australian Cricketers of our day like Shame Warne, Glen McGrath, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting and Justin Langer - many of whom have been exciting figures on the English county scene. He also considers the precipitous and regrettable decline of the West Indies, the advent of the new Test-playing countries like Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, the pyrotechnic thrills of the new Twenty20 game and the shift of gravity in the game's finances to the subcontinent.
And he ponders, from bitter experience, such eternal verities of the game as the gratuitous rudeness and xenophobia of the gatemen at the home of cricket. Gideon Haigh's other books for Aurum include Mystery Spinner, Many a Slip, Ashes 2005 and Downed Under, as well as two Wisden anthologies Peter the Lord's Cat and Parachutist at Fine Leg. He lives in Melbourne, Australia