A GOOD INNINGS

Cricket to us was more than play, It was worship in the summer sun. 
Edmund Blunden

The late Edmund Blunden was one of the First World War poets and is among those commemorated in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. 
Passionate about cricket, Blunden was the author of Cricket Country, the tale of a man whose interest in the game was, in the words of one critic, "fanatical".
In his review of Cricket Country, George Orwell referred to Blunden as "the true cricketer", and went on to say that the test of a true cricketer is that he prefers village cricket to 'good' cricket, that his fondest memories are of the informal village game, where everyone plays in braces, where the blacksmith is liable to be called away in mid-innings on an urgent job, and sometimes, about the time when the light begins to fail, a ball driven for four kills a rabbit on the boundary. 

THE CRICKETERS

A makeshift platform in a cherry tree
afforded views beyond the garden wall
and far off in the distance I could see
some cricketers, with pads and bats and ball,
at play, all shining white. 
A stirring scene
with radiant figures on a field of green
which, to the naive child that I was then,
spoke of a wider world, somehow more true,
inhabited by dashing, fearless men:
a braver, wider world than that I knew.