Burning fierce passions and divided loyalties place Frith on a pedestal

NOT many authors come recommended by the late Sir Donald Bradman, the greatest batsman cricket has known.

Then again, not many authors possess the aptitude and authority of David Frith, who is to the preservation of cricket history what Bradman was to the art of run-making.

On the dust jacket of Frith On Cricket: Half A Century Of Writing By David Frith, published by Ilkley-based Great Northern Books, Bradman's endorsement shines like a beacon.

"Thank goodness the cricket world has always thrown up men like David Frith, who seems to regard a contribution to cricket history as a duty to mankind," proclaims Bradman – the cricketing equivalent of a papal blessing.

Although right on the second point, Bradman was wrong on the first.

For the fact is, the cricket world has not always thrown up men like David Frith, who is as much a one-off in his field as Bradman was in his.

As the former Times correspondent John Woodcock puts it so well in his foreword to this welcome collection of Frith's best writings: "No-one can have steeped himself in cricket more assiduously or with more singular intent than David Frith. Indeed, there is no-one else quite like him in the game."

David Frith, born in London in March 1937, is a man of burning passions and divided loyalties.

He spent his first 11 years in England, his next 15 in Australia and, in his own words, has since "bobbed about like a cork in the ocean, with cricket and family the lifelines."

His twin allegiances were highlighted by the title of his wonderful 1997 autobiography – Caught England Bowled Australia: A Cricket Slave's Complex Story.

He is thus never entirely dissatisfied with the outcome of Ashes series, although no-one was more delighted when Michael Vaughan's men triumphed in 2005 to end almost two decades of Australian hegemony and thus breathe overdue life into cricket's oldest rivalry.

As founding editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly, a magazine he ran and edited for 17 years, Frith developed a reputation for strident comment and incisive analysis which put the interests of the game first, second and third and occasionally made him enemies – as those with the courage to express their convictions invariably do.

In his preface to Frith On Cricket, the author rails against "administrative greed and negligence", those who "refer to cricket as a 'product', a term which makes the flesh creep" and, echoing the words of Mary Russell Mitford almost 200 years previously, "people who make a trade of that noble sport".

Frith prides himself in having been "a bit of a visionary" in calling for video technology to eradicate injustices on the field and declares: "When umpiring blunders never again derail an important match, it's a better world by far."

He also highlights administrators' "slackness in dealing with the brutal excesses of bouncers" and the pitfalls of selling the game in Britain to satellite television, thus depriving millions the chance to watch live Test and one-day cricket in the land where the game began.

The scope is broad and the collection comprehensive, and there is much for Yorkshire cricket lovers to enjoy.

There are recollections of the great Fred Trueman and a photograph of the fast bowler taken by Frith at Sydney in 1959 – despite Trueman's protestation that: "It won't come out, son!"

There is a warm appreciation of Len Hutton, memories of Herbert Sutcliffe, a tribute to the much-missed David Bairstow and a fascinating pilgrimage to meet Wilfred Rhodes, one of the greatest all-rounders the game has known.

When Frith interviewed Rhodes in the early 1970s, Rhodes was 93 and blind but still passionate for the game.

"He seems happy in his darkness. He chuckles frequently – something he rarely did in his playing days, if we are to believe his contemporaries. His memories of players and places are clear, particularly those of the earlier days, when he joined battle with MA Noble, whose fast one he foresaw by the finger grip ('That's being observant, isn't it?') and Arthur Shrewsbury (the 'nice little fellow') and WG, who made him slightly nervous but drew out the best in him."

Touchingly, Frith declares that "to visit cricket's senior citizen is to feel as John Mitford must have felt in 1833 when he went to Tilford to seek out Silver Billy Beldham."

And that, in a nutshell, is the great joy of this anthology – beautifully produced.

For Frith, at heart, is a romantic, a man who conveys his love of times past in a way that cannot help but captivate the reader.

It shines through in his encounters with such distant luminaries as Rhodes, the Aboriginal fast bowler Eddie Gilbert, the great West Indian batsman George Headley and George Geary, the former Leicestershire bowler who once held the world-record first-class bowling figures of 10-18 before being trumped by Yorkshire's Hedley Verity, who took 10-10 against Nottinghamshire at Headingley in 1932.

Indeed, what Frith does not know about the game, its history, its personalities, its issues, even its memorabilia could be scribbled on the back of a scorecard.

For what it's worth, I first met Frith in 2001 while covering an Ashes Test at Trent Bridge.

We sat next to one another in the press box and I had no idea then I was in the presence of a man whose knowledge of cricket history is surely unsurpassed.

I remember telling him of my interest in Alfred Shaw, the Nottinghamshire and England bowler who delivered the first ball in Test cricket in 1877 and who hailed from Burton Joyce, a little village to the east of Nottingham where I then resided.

To my amazement, Frith reeled off a succession of facts about Shaw as surely as a modern connoisseur could reel off facts about Kevin Pietersen.

"You've heard of him, then?" I asked, my voice radiating with surprise.

Looking back, it was akin to asking Bradman whether he had heard of the cover drive.