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Cricket and Tim
Heald
Always a keen fan, an avid reader of
Wisden and listener to Test match
ball-by-ball commentary on the wireless, he first saw first-class cricket at Lord's when
Edrich and Compton were still playing for Middlesex...
| Tim's latest book Village
Cricket, published in May 2004 by Little
Brown, was written while filming a six part series on the same subject for Carlton TV.
Order Village Cricket
from:
As the dust-jacket of the book
describes,Tim 'sets off on a tour that takes him from Cornwall to Lancashire,
from the cradle of cricket in Kent and Sussex to Lord's itself. He pores
through the pages of Wisden, Dickens and A G Macdonnell and even returns from
retirement to venture on to the field of play. The eleven that he
captains against a scratch team from his local club includes the formidable
talent of two of his sons, a very modern major-general and the Bishop of
Truro. Yet somehow the author still ends up with dramatic bruising to
his calves, chest and ego.' (see The Heald Report #6)
'One great historian wrote that
if the French had played cricket they would never have had a revolution.
While Tim Heald never goes quite as far as this, he demonstrates that,
contrary to what some sceptics believe, there is much more to it than just a
game. Village Cricket is an examination of Englishness,
and a portrait of the nature of our best-loved sport - quirky, elusive, funny,
friendly, and socially fulfilling.'
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Tim Heald with editor Steve Dobell at Lord's for the launch of Tim's
biography of Denis Compton.
TIM HEALD
is the author of authorised biographies of the legendary English batsman,
Denis Compton, and the BBC's most famous cricket commentator, Brian Johnston. He
has
also written for many English newspapers and magazines including The Times,
The
Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph as well as
The Cricketer,
Cricket Lore and Wisden Cricket Monthly. He once reported the finals of the
Italian
cricket championships for The Observer Magazine and the same publication gave
him his
most memorable cricketing assignment when it sent him to Barbados for a net
with Sir Garfield Sobers at the Kensington Oval.
As a player he was less than wonderful and finally laid down his pads at Oxford
after
opening the innings for his college's "social" team and making a
golden duck against the
village of Great Tew. Years later he took a team of middle-aged contemporaries
back to
Oxford and led them to victory over the same team, the Balliol Erratics, by then
under the
captaincy of his elder son. During the summer of 2003, as mentioned above, he
devised yet another come-back by
raising a
second "Major Rodney's XI" to play a Cornish village team for the
benefit of his new book and the forthcoming
Carlton TV series on village cricket.
Always a keen fan, an avid reader of Wisden and listener to Test match
ball-by-ball
commentary on the wireless, he first saw first-class cricket at Lord's when
Edrich and
Compton were still playing for Middlesex, and at Taunton where he saw Hall and
Griffith
open the bowling for the West Indians against Somerset in 1957.
His first published piece of cricket writing was an essay on Somerset which
appeared in an
anthology published in the 1970s. Later he wrote The Character of Cricket
a book about
English cricket grounds from world famous Test match arenas to little known
places in the Lancashire League. It was widely praised by such doyens of the
cricket-writing world as
John Arlott and E.W.Swanton.
As a result of this he was asked by Swanton, on behalf of MCC, to edit an
anthology about cricket's headquarters and this was published under the title My
Lord's. It contained some fifty original pieces, including poetry by William
Douglas-Home and Gavin Ewart and a childhood memoir by Harold Pinter.
More recently his books on Compton and Johnston have been widely acclaimed - The
Daily Mail called the latter "a Masterpiece" - and in 1995 his
Johnston book was in the
top ten of the national bestseller lists for several weeks.
Heald has been a member of MCC since 1973. He continues to be a keen
follower of the
game though he no longer really plays. As a player he has turned to Real
Tennis though he has
never been quite the same player since since rupturing his Achilles tendon
in a tournament
at Hampton Court Palace in 1995.
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