Neville Cardus, officially born April 2, 1889, revolutionised cricket reporting, transforming it from a staid description of events on the field to a series of metaphors invoking Greek gods and heroes. However, he was also notorious for his refusal to let the facts get in the way of a good story: he frequently wrote supposed “first-hand” reports of matches at which he was not present, and sometimes of ones which never actually took place. Michael Jones discovers that this cavalier disregard for the small matter of truth was exhibited in accounts of his own life as much as in his cricket reports.