by Mayukh Ghosh
In 1929, Grant Richards and Humphrey Toumlin published The Summer Game: A Cricketer’s Journal by Neville Cardus.
It was republished another three times. Most recently in 1948 by Rupert Hart-Davis.
In 1994, Moa Beckett published cricket historian Don Neely’s book on the history of New Zealand cricket. It was called The Summer Game.
Three years later another book with the same name was published. This time written by 31-year old Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh.
He had by then written a few books, most notably The Cricket War chronicling the Kerry Packer years.
The years covered in The Summer Game were 1949 to 1971. Haigh wrote: “The choice of the start and end points for the book is deliberate. Australia’s 1949/50 tour of South Africa was our first after the retirement of Sir Donald Bradman. It begins with the departure of one epoch-making captain and ends with the appointment of another, Ian Chappell. It commences when the Test match was undisputed as the game’s summit. It concludes with the traditions of Test cricket faltering, and just before the limited-overs international began its astonishing growth and popularity.”
The emphasis of The Summer Game is the people and the period rather than the matches and scorecards.
Some matches are of course covered in detail but much of the attention has been given to the unsung cricketers from that era and their lives as professional cricketers.
When I asked Gideon Haigh about what led him to write this book, he gave a detailed answer:
“The Summer Game followed The Cricket War in my oeuvre. I was interested in the preconditions of the turmoil of the 1970s, and also in what cricket had been like before my experience of it. The recent past is an elusive period - not quite recent enough to be current affairs, not quite far enough back to be history. My publisher Michael Heyward had a nostrum: 'The decades we know least about are those immediately before we were born.'
“The nearest book I had to as model was David Halberstam's The Summer of '49 - so rich and flavoursome. But, really, the sources were its strength. Usually retired, seldom previously interviewed, they were wonderfully forthcoming and patient. My favourite was probably the elusive Pat Crawford, scarcely seen in forty years, whom I traced to a shack in Miranda. He told the tale of his disillusioning Ashes tour, where his wife was thrown off the ship, and chose to stay in England, then his harrowing fall from grace afterwards. When we were finished talking, I asked if he had any mementos of his cricket. He handed me a small envelope on which the word 'Cricket' was handwritten, and which proved to contain a few treasured clippings. That was all he had. They made little from the game in those days, and when the game finished with them it moved on quickly and unfeelingly.”
The book didn’t make it to the U.K., much like The Cricket War. It received nice reviews, but it sold poorly- 2500-3000 copies. It was reissued in paperback a few years later but again failed to make an impact.
Not many came to know of the book in time and it faded away rather quickly. When I asked the author about the possible reasons, he said, “Perhaps because of the context of the surrounding player autobiographies and tour diaries, which tend to define the cricket book market.”
Haigh was ‘dead broke’ when he finished writing it. He had only $12.16 in the bank.
He recovered, with the aid of his exceptional skills as a cricket writer.
This book, moreover, gave birth to his next book, on Jack Iverson. Haigh wanted to explore the lives of some of the characters he wrote about in this book. Iverson was one of them.
The Summer Game is one of Gideon Haigh’s best works. It’s a pity that it has not been read by many.
I myself had to hunt for two years before getting a copy.
The odd copies do appear at Roger Page’s or John McKenzie’s, albeit rather infrequently.
But, for a student of the game’s history, if there’s one book that’s worth hunting down, it’s this one.