The great game

Some of the best writing about sport in recent years has been done by journalists who tend their soil, so to speak, in another parish. Peter Oborne’s biography of the Cape Town-born England cricketer Basil D’Oliveira was a deserved prize-winner, and another political scribe, Leo McKinstry, has done justice to Geoffrey Boycott, the Charlton brothers and Sir Alf Ramsey. Now he has turned his attention to a batsman whose career, measured in statistics, goes a long way to justifying the subtitle of this latest book, ‘England’s Greatest Cricketer’.

Born in a modest Cambridge home, admired by all who played with him for his decency as well as his skill at the crease, Hobbs was the first professional cricketer to be knighted. McKinstry quotes the journalist and broadcaster, John Arlott, who established the Master’s Club in his honour, saying that Hobbs ‘wore the knighthood with the dignity of a prince’. It is a world away from our age, when people take honours for granted. Only last month Shane Warne, the great Australian spin bowler, used his newspaper column to advertise the fact that, now that he had retired, he too would like to feel the monarch’s sword upon his shoulder.

In 30 years of relentless batting for Surrey and England Hobbs scored 61,237 runs, more than any other cricketer. When he retired in 1934 he had made 197 centuries; again, more than any other player. Not that he was a selfish man. ‘If he had played for Yorkshire,’ said Wilfred Rhodes, who wore the White Rose, ‘he would have scored 297.’ Upon his retirement Hobbs told guests at a gala dinner that ‘it has been a wonderful life, full of delightful associations, varied experiences, happy memories, enriched by friendships formed at home and beyond the sea’. How many of today’s players would have the grace to put it like that?

Yet, although he was named one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Century in 2000, his name is honoured more in the breach than the observance.