30 AUGUST 1946, Page 22

In Praise of Cricket. An anthology compiled by John Aye.*

(Muller. 2s. 6d.) IT is rather surprising that a first-rate game like cricket should inspire prose and verse which is mostly second rate, or worse. Functionalism has this in its favour—that a single good newspaper report of a county match holds more of interest and worth than fifty pages of the maudlin gush that makes up this bock. Never- theless, so pretty a little volume will be read with pleasure by Many people, not so much for what is in it as for what is in the readers themselves, who know the true pleasure of playing, watching or remembering the English game. They may not even notice that Mr. Neville Cardus uses the phrase "Charles Lamb" as an adjective.