THE sheer variety of recent cricket books is the most striking aspect of the shortlist of five for this year’s Cricket Society Book of the Year award, sponsored by The Times. The winner of the £1,000 prize will be announced after a Cricket Society reception at the Royal Overseas League in London tomorrow.

It is curious, perhaps, that none of the accounts of last year’s England v Australia Test series is included, the nearest thing to it being Stephen Fay’s description of Tom Graveney’s year as president of MCC: part biography, part insight into the workings of the world’s wealthiest, and most altruistic cricket club.

Also on the list are a vibrant account of India’s momentous tour to Pakistan in 2003-04 by a talented young Indian writer half Fay’s age; Eric Midwinter’s nostalgic story of the two Old Traffords and the clubs that (for a while at least) still grace them — Lancashire and Manchester United; and two very different biographies.

Douglas Miller’s life of Charles Palmer is as straight down the middle as the man himself, one who gave most of his time to cricket and, specifically, to Leicestershire cricket, although he was both chairman of the former TCCB and president of MCC.

If his selection as player-manager on England’s tour of the West Indies in 1953-54 owed something to his being an “old-fashioned” amateur, Palmer was indisputably a fine player.

He scored more than 2,000 runs in the 1952 season and three years later enjoyed his amazing spell of medium-pace bowling against the virtually invincible Surrey of that era: 11 overs, 11 maidens, eight wickets for nought. Jim Laker, having once famously taken eight for two in a Test trial, then had a slog and Palmer finished with eight for seven. John Lazenby’s subject is a much more distant figure, the gifted amateur J. R. Mason: Kent stalwart, friend of W. G.and grandfather of the author. Mason’s old leather cricket bag in the attic tickled his curiosity before his discovery of a priceless collection of letters sent home from the 1897-98 tour of Australia.

They formed the basis of Lazenby’s research and the reason for a pilgrimage to the places that Mason described.

THE SHORTLIST

Pundits from Pakistan: On Tour with India, 2003-04
By Rahul Bhattacharya
Published by Picador

Tom Graveney at Lord’s. A Year at the Home of Cricket
By Stephen Fay
Published by Methuen

Test of Time: Travels in Search of a Cricketing Legend
By John Lazenby
Published by John Murray

Red Shirts and Roses
By Eric Midwinter
ublished by The Parrs Wood Press (copies available from eric.midwinter@virgin.net)

Charles Palmer: More than just a Gentleman
By Douglas Miller
Published by Fairfield Books