THE SPORT WITH the greatest literature of them all – that's cricket. Or so we are told. Which, even if true, is not a terribly lofty claim. It does not stand up to much examination. Perhaps the sport's claim to literary pre-eminence is based on quantity. The industry seems convinced that cricket enthusiasts will read any amount of old tosh. Or at least buy it.

There is plenty of very good cricket writing about, but that is not the point. And there are plenty of books that are very decent journalism inside hard covers. But that is only very decent journalism. Not literature, which aims for something a little bit more enduring. Something that is fresh as a newly-mown sward when you pick it up again ten years on. Or a hundred. Or half a millennium. Ezra Pound summed up: `Literature is news that stays news.'

This is a good working definition. Sports journalism deals with the swiftly passing, the ephemeral. It seeks to answer the absorbing question of who will beat whom today. It ignores the question of who will give a toss about tomorrow. To pluck something long-lasting from sport's eternal, self-absorbed and hectic present is a very tough task indeed. Few manage it; few even try.

Neville Cardus is the great sacred cow of cricket writing. A maker of delightful phrases, certainly a man who invented his own genre, the cricket writer as fantasist. `Often when I quoted a player he may not literally have said those things. But he'd have like to.' Which is neither quite the art of fiction nor quite the craft of reportage. But it always read with great sweetness.

John Arlott is another sacred cow. He was a man of boundless humanity, and a broadcaster of genius. But as a writer he was a very good reporter. His match reports only came alive when you read them to yourself – as I expect everyone always did – in burring, slurring Hampshire tones.

Is there any writer who has written cricket news that has stayed news? I recall a lunch-interval discussion, in which my opponent claimed that CLR James was considered the greatest cricket writer of them all for the excellent reason that no-one actually read him. Well, they should. I was recently asked to review a new edition of his best book, Beyond a Boundary, and in re-reading was once again struck by the book's power.

Its subject and its technique is the weaving of personal and public history. Its unflinching vision of cricket as a powerful force in the making both of 19th-century England and the independent nations of the anglophone West Indies is bold, original, and manifestly true. I have lent the book to people who believe that sport is an activity suitable only for the brain-dead, and they returned it to me with changed minds.

Few other cricket books go beyond that boundary. Most are so full of technical and specialised language that they are comprehensible only to the converted. I always admired Peter Roebuck's angst-ridden confessions in It Never Rains. I am not sure whether this is a tribute to the book's own worth, or because I read it at the moment in life when you begin to understand cricketers as vulnerable, fallible men, rather than super-heroes from Planet Zod.

It is not portentousness that makes a sports book into something called literature. One of my favourite sports books is a slight and airy book, the non-ghosted autobiography of the jump jockey John Francome, Born Lucky. `I had been going out with her for six months, and she still wouldn't let me sleep with her, but by then I was determined to marry her if only out of curiosity.'

Cricket is a nice game to write about. Its pace gives you to think about your piece for the day, not always an advantage, admittedly, but easier on the nerves than filing 800 words the instant the final whistle goes in a football match. Cricket is a game of many variables, too, and many, many different ways in which its players reveal themselves, expose their gifts and their flaws for all to see. Which makes it a game of very vivid reportage, certainly. But it is seldom carried though to the point at which its news really does stay news. I do not exempt from these strictures my own cricketing biography Phil Edmonds: A Singular Man.

I might re-read, say, Mike Brearley's account of the 1981 Test series, Phoenix from the Ashes, which is certainly a good read. But I would do so not because of the eternal truths it reveals, but because of the grand occasion it recalls. Which is, I suspect, the reason most cricket books are treasured: not for themselves but for the memories of pleasant days that are found between their covers.

Most cricket books are ghosted autobiographies, full of self-pity, mock-modesty, and sniping little revenges. Most books that aim beyond the ambition for getting paid for getting your own back tend to stumble into other traps. `Cricket, more than any other game, is inclined to sentimentalism and cant.' This was Cardus again. And he was right, alas.

Simon Barnes is a sports columnist on The Times and The Spectator. His first novel Rogue Lion Safaris (HarperCollins, £12.99) contains nothing about cricket.

IN BRIEF

There are many thought-provoking facts: Willie Bates played 15 Tests, all in Australia (eight at Sydney, six at Melbourne); Devon Malcolm played six Tests against six different opponents in mid-career; and J. C. W. MacBryan didn't bat, bowl or take a catch in his only Test. The statistically minded will enjoy the tables – although they might bemoan the omission of batting positions – and the updated England and world Test records which conclude the book. It was obviously a labour of love: shame about the pictures.

SL

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