That Will Be England Gone: The Last Summer of Cricket

That Will Be England Gone is a book by Michael Henderson that explores the changing landscape of cricket in England since 1965. It revisits much-loved places, watches schoolboys, club cricketers, and professionals, and reflects on the author's childhood hero, Farokh Engineer, and other great players. The book is filled with a love of landscape, poetry, paintings, and music, and is an extended love letter to a world that Henderson is desperate to keep alive for others to discover and share.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 06 May 2021
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

For those who fear the worst for the sport they love, this is like cool, clear water for a man dying of thirst. It's barnstorming, coruscating stuff, and as fine a book about the game as you'll read for years.

Mail on Sunday

Charming. . . a threnody for a vanished and possibly mythical England. Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times

Lyrical. . . [Henderson's] pen is filled with the romantic spirit of the great Neville Cardus. . . . This book is an extended love letter, a beautifully written one, to a world that he is desperate to keep alive for others to discover and share. Not just his love of cricket, either, but of poetry and classical music and fine cinema.

The Times

To those who love both cricket and the context in which it is played, the book is rather wonderful, and moving.

Daily Telegraph

Philip Larkin's line that will be England gone is the premise of this fascinating book, which is about music, literature, poetry, and architecture as well as cricket. Henderson is that rare bird, a reporter with a fine grasp of time and place, but also a stylist of enviable quality and perception.

Michael Parkinson

Neville Cardus once said there could be no summer in England without cricket.

The 2019 season was supposed to be the greatest summer of cricket ever seen in England. There was a World Cup, followed by five Test matches against Australia in the latest engagement of sport's oldest rivalry. It was also the last season of county cricket before the introduction in 2020 of a new tournament, The Hundred, designed to attract an audience of younger people who have no interest in the summer game.

In That Will Be England Gone, Michael Henderson revisits much-loved places to see how the game he grew up with has changed since the.

Weight: 238g
Dimension: 126 x 196 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781472132871