England has won the cricket championship. But where is the cricket literature? “I cannot think of any fictional depiction of cricket – and, even as I write this sentence, I expect to be contradicted – that goes any way towards capturing the heroism, the beauty, the sheer glory that cricket is capable of conjuring in a series like the one we have just witnessed. English cricket writing is too busy observing the social niceties and oddities of the game at a local level – where it is heavenly but not always inspiring – to raise its eyes to higher things. In this it is entirely different from American literature’s treatment of baseball.”