More Than a Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years

Major traces the history of the game from its nebulae origins in the medieval games "creag" and "club-ball", through its denunciation by the clergy and violence in the 17th and 18th century, to the exuberance of Victorian players, concluding at the end of the first world war.^[2][4]

Roger Mosey, writing in The Guardian found that Major's enjoyment of the game shone through his history of it, and particularly enjoyed Major's personalisation the narrative.^[1] Historian Dominic Sandbrook, in The Daily Telegraph, was also positive of the book, finding it "very charming and quintessentially English".^[2] Jack Williams, of The Independent, was more critical, finding that the biographical approach taken by Major resulted in "a potted history of a particular time in a chapter's first pages without any explanation of the effects of social and economic changes on cricket" and opining that academic historians would find the background history to be simplistic.^[4]