da betano casino： This collection of obituaries of cricketers whose careers and lives were cruelly cut short by the First World War is one of the books of the year
da bet sport： Paul Edwards04-Aug-2014″… Rather hoped I’d get through the whole show, go back to work at Pratt and Sons, keep wicket for the Croydon Gentlemen, marry Doris.” Thus, Captain Kevin Darling in outlines the future he knows he will never have.Rather like Richard Curtis and Ben Elton’s situation comedy is a work that transcends its category. The cover has Eric Ravilious’ famous woodcut at the top but it also features a prominent red font and a poppy; the sombre, poetic subtitle, “the lives of cricket’s fallen”, completes the carefully designed effect. You can tell this book by its cover.Not that this makes the contents any less moving. By careful scholarship Andrew Renshaw has assembled brief, often very brief, lives of the cricketers who died in the First World War. He has taken their obituaries in ‘s Five Cricketers of the Year in 1909. He died in Imtarfa Military Hospital, Malta, on July 23, 1915 after serving in Gallipoli. Or there is Norman Callaway, who made 207 for New South Wales in his only first-class innings, and died at Bullecourt on May 3, 1917, aged 21.Every careful reader will find his own way around this book. Those looking for specific individuals would have been helped by an alphabetical index at the end of the work, but that is the only serious criticism one would wish to make. Certainly it is not a book to be read in conventional fashion; rather, readers might want to dip into the major sections before going off to do something both trivial and important like buying a loaf of bread or walking the dog. helps one to value the simple joys of being alive.There could, of course, be other books on very similar themes. The fallen on the Western Front included German footballers and Austrian skiers. In due course, perhaps, Renshaw can be persuaded to assemble and enlarge upon the lives of the cricketers who died in the Second World War. For the moment he deserves a break and can relax in the confidence that he has given us one of the books of the year.Few cricket writers produce a work that makes the game seem both irrelevant and essential. By putting together , Renshaw has called his almost 2000 subjects to report for duty once again and remind us of the lives they had no chance to lead. Included in their number is the member of the Canadian Infantry who was wounded at Neuve-Chappelle and died in London on April 19, 1915. His name – wouldn’t you guess it? – was Captain Darling.Wisden on the Great War: The Lives of Cricket’s Fallen 1914-1918
by Andrew Renshaw
Bloomsbury
£40