English cricket has reached crisis point once again — a place, so Duncan Stone’s Different Class explains, it has never drifted far from. Should popular cricketing books or magazines be believed, the sport has died in England upward of a dozen times before. Each time, the occasion is marked with heated debate, columns penned of the catastrophe as though this, finally, is it. Fans, journalists, and commentators alike all gather to lament the cause: incompetent management, too many or too few first-class counties, the Indian Premier League, and so on.

If you’re lucky, one of these debates might tag on the afterthought of class (or, more likely, the nebulous “elitism”) as one of many small contributing factors which add up to one irresolvable whole. The rest dismiss focusing on the subject as agenda-driven bitterness, an extraordinary disrespect of the hard work undertaken by the ruling class — through their education systems or otherwise — to benevolently bestow cricket on the rest of the nation.

Different Class makes no such concessions in shielding the cricketing establishment from the ugly truth of its own history. Where C. L. R. James’s “aesthetic conclusions” in Beyond a Boundary fall short of the demystification which cricket was overdue even in the ’60s, Stone’s analysis is unmarred, recognizing cricket’s idyllic image as a construction of nostalgia for a past which never existed. His book provides real answers to crisis through what is essentially a dialectical materialist approach — the game analyzed in its historical and material context, freed from mythology and the ever-present haze of the “spirit of cricket” which inhibits so many other publications.