The Cricket Game III
Top Edge Press, £9.99
Cricket art is pretty much confined to cricket pavilions. Portraits of old captains, bucolic scenes from the game’s beginnings, wan-eyed Edwardians with cigarette card moustaches, you know the sort of thing. MCC has a large collection, so big in fact that only a percentage of it is on display at any one time in the Long Room and around the pavilion’s stairways. The remainder is carefully catalogued and stored away. I was once given a tour, and there’s some amazing stuff. A lot of amateur artists paint something and send it in, and that has to be kept, too. I remember a couple of portraits of Kevin Pietersen that well… they live on in the mind’s eye, put it that way.