ABSTRACT
Cricket is a sport, at its genesis a very English sport, and like all sports it is much more too. As a young English cricketer of the 1950s and 1960s who was passionate about the game, I sensed and intuited this, but it took C.L.R. James’ epochal book on cricket, history and the relation of sport to social and political reality, Beyond a Boundary, to begin to articulate this to myself. James’ narrative and reflections also brought cricket into my consciousness of anti-racist action, both in England and the Caribbean, and as his words have done for thousands such as I, made political sense out of apparent leisure, and struggle out of bat and ball.
