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More Than a Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years
More Than a Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years is a 2007 book about the history of cricket written by former British prime minister John Major. It was published by HarperCollins. BackgroundJohn Major had been known to have a life long love of cricket.[1] After losing the 1997 United Kingdom general election, he went to the Oval for an afternoon of cricket.[2] Major would become the President of Surrey County Cricket Club from 2000 to 2001 (and Honorary Life Vice-president since 2002). The launch of the book was done at the Oval in a room named after himself.[3] ContentMajor traces the history of the game from its nebulae origins in the medieval games "creag" and "club-ball", through its denunciation by the clergy and violence in the 17th and 18th century, to the exuberance of Victorian players, concluding at the end of the first world war.[2][4] ReceptionRoger Mosey, writing in The Guardian found that Major's enjoyment of the game shone through his history of it, and particularly enjoyed Major's personalisation the narrative.[1] Historian Dominic Sandbrook, in The Daily Telegraph, was also positive of the book, finding it "very charming and quintessentially English".[2] Jack Williams, of The Independent, was more critical, finding that the biographical approach taken by Major resulted in "a potted history of a particular time in a chapter's first pages without any explanation of the effects of social and economic changes on cricket" and opining that academic historians would find the background history to be simplistic.[4] References
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