The Summer Field

162 Watching A three-day match at Repton School near Derby in June 1907, as part of the school’s 350th anniversary celebrations. The Old Reptonians, including England all-rounder J.N.Crawford, had the worst of a 12-a-side draw against the school team which included H.S.Altham. 2008 book Pommies argued for reform of English cricket. Buckland sat in a long tradition of metropolitan know-alls urging England to copy whatever country was in fashion and doing well – once the United States, Germany or Japan, in this case Australia. As so often, what Buckland assumed and left unsaid was as revealing as what he did say. When he wrote of county cricket as, for decades, a ‘millstone’ around the England team’s neck, it