Book excerpt: 'It is now thirty-five years since Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote his cricket classic The Best Loved Game, which also seems unimaginable, but only because it feels like last week. Even so, in that time the game has changed, in many respects beyond recognition, which makes the book more valuable than ever - as an elegy for a lost world.' Matthew Engel, in his new Preface Geoffrey Moorhouse spent the summer of 1978 sampling cricket at every level: from Eton v Harrow to the Lancashire League; from Cambridge undergraduates getting a lesson from Zaheer Abbas to Ian Botham excelling with bat and ball at Lord's; from a farmer's boy making an unbeaten 24 at an Oxfordshire village match to the incomparable clowning of Derek Randall at Trent Bridge. 'Surely destined to rest beside the finest works of this nature in the library of cricket.' David Frith, Wisden Cricket Monthly