In the 1940 edition of Wisden, RC Robertson-Glasgow wrote that looking back at the last pre-war summer of 1939 was “like peeping through the wrong end of a telescope at a very small but happy world”. The cricket season had ended with handshakes and a round of draws on the first of September, the day Germany invaded Poland. It would be seven years before Wisden was published again, cricket having resumed in earnest with the “Brylcreem summer” of 1946, when Dennis Compton batted like a lord at a picnic and spectator sport helped the nation forget what a parched, ramshackle, soot-stained state it was in behind the sheen of pageantry.
On the face of it there isn’t a great deal of shared ground between Robertson-Glasgow’s beautiful, war-shadowed image of a more vital sporting world, and the unusually strident overreaction last weekend to Manchester United’s impressive performance against West Ham on the opening day of the Premier League season. On the face of it, anyway.
Related: Romelu Lukaku gives Manchester United dream start against West Ham
Related: Eric Bailly: ‘We are going to demonstrate that Manchester United are world class’
Continue reading...