APPROPRIATELY, as we head towards midsummer, the Guardian has published a list of the Top Ten cricket books.

Though my collection could line if not the Long Room then certainly one or two village cricket pavilions I have known, only one of my books makes the Guardian’s cut – Days in the Sun by Neville Cardus.

Since Cardus was the Guardian’s cricket writer for decades, ultimately knighted for his renowned reports, its place at No 1 is unsurprising. Yet the compiler of the list, social historian David Kynaston, admits that Cardus’s reputation has waned in recent years. He observes: “Too many inaccuracies, note the pedants.”

Rightly, however, Kynaston credits Cardus with laying “the foundation” of modern cricket writing. When Clive Taylor, in the Sun, famously described David Steele, the stolid, grey-haired Northants batsman, stepping out to face the virtual Blitz of the West Indian pace attack in 1975, as resembling “a bank clerk going to war”, he was himself treading firmly in the footsteps of Cardus.

For Cardus was the first writer to invest cricketers with personalities (which might not have been their real ones). Through Cardus’s eyes, in Days in the Sun and other volumes, I can picture players from long before my time as vividly as any I have seen. His portrait of Patsy Hendren, a short, genial man, opens: “He was baptised Elias but the crowds would have none of it; they were right too, for he is Patsy not only by name but by nature. His smile says Patsy; sometimes it is so enormous it hides the little man; one fine day he will be given out smile before wicket.”

The Guardian might have said more in praise of Cardus. For, waning star or not, his writings are bang on in today’s endeavour to save real cricket. For Cardus regarded the competitive element of the game, fast becoming the be-all-and-end-all with ever-shorter formats, as only part, and not the principal part, of cricket’s appeal.

In Days in the Sun, published in 1924, he identified the crowd, its humours, its feeling for the character of players, among first-class cricket’s pleasures. And he always wished results placed a value on aesthetic quality, which mattered more to him than the scores.

In 1951, he wrote: “It will be a sad day if and when crowds at cricket matches are absolutely dependent on the scoreboard for the clue to the match. There are better games than cricket if combat and competition are the main need.”

The same piece incidentally shows Cardus’s gift for spotting talent. A short innings by 18-year-old Colin Cowdrey persuaded him that the teenager would soon join “that company of really master batsmen”.

The Guardian’s Top Ten is on line. My ten would have to include three anthologies, which I believe offer the best of the very best cricket writing: The Cricketer’s Companion edited by Alan Ross (1960, expanded 1979); Lords and Commons edited by John Bright-Holmes (1988), cricket in fiction; and The Poetry of Cricket edited by Leslie Frewin (1964).

But do look out also for Herbert Farjeon’s Cricket Bag, engaging light essays and excellent poems (1946), and – most glaring omission from the Guardian list – Carr’s Illustrated Dictionary of Extra-Ordinary Cricketers, by J.L. Carr (1983). Its entries include an Eton head who thrashed the First XI, including the scorer, for losing to Westminster School.