The Green & Golden Age

Gideon HaighOCOs 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 subjectsa great cricketers of the past, cricketing controversies, forgotten heroes. In this new book he concentrates on the modern gamea 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 Langera 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 Twenty 20 game and the shift of gravity in the gameOCOs 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."