Author Duncan Hamilton is a raving sentimentalist. He admits as much in this book. Cricket is a game that he learnt to love through his grandfather who fought in The Great War and regaled him with stories of Hammond, Sutcliffe, Lindwall and more. References to cricketers from an earlier, lost age are punctuated throughout with mellifluous analogies that are indicative of Hamilton's poetic licence.

Often, it works. After all, the author has won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year twice, most recently for his widely acclaimed biography on Harold Larwood. Some of the more descriptive parts of the book on favourite grounds and the sights and sounds that make English cricket are beautifully judged. He writes movingly about the unique pull of nostalgia tied up with a longing for all his yesterdays "Our emotional response to most things - books and places, sounds and scents - is grounded in the age at which we first experience them."

The trouble is that, excuse the analogy Duncan, but Toy Story 3 has just done this far more subtly. Some of our heartstrings might get fatigued by the lashings of prose that, sometimes, appear to be shoehorned in to ram home a point that needs no seconding. If a quote by Anthony Trollope or whichever literary master is relevant to embellish something, that is all very well, but at times you wished Hamilton hadn't spent so much of his youth in the library.

Hamilton is brilliant on the minutiae of the game, especially when discussing the congregation of spectators and arenas that make up the County Championship. It is a Championship "which seems to be dying inside", despite the ECB's attempts to stonewall by manufactured statistics. He saves his best lines for the patronising passport control office that is Lord's: "Sometimes it acts like a hostess, who professes that she's so pleased to see you while at the same time edging you out of the door and on to the pavement."

The real vitriol concerns the shortest form of the game, which has decimated other fixtures with its constant spread, "like ivy". Hamilton is scathing on Twenty20's in your face nature, in that it is unable to do anything quietly or subtlety knowing the modern world has the attention span of a gnat. "Every crowded minute has to be filled with noise and dumbed-down distractions....It's as though the cricket itself, however compelling, lacks confidence it itself..."

Perhaps A Last English Summer should have been published a decade ago when the County Championship was split into two divisions, England were at the bottom of the Test pile and two men called Nasser Hussain - called Hussein here, not the only embarrassing typo - and Duncan Fletcher began to drag the national team up from the bootlaces. Ah. Now, those were the days. Mullally, Giddins and Tufnell fighting over the number eleven spot.

A Last English Summer by Duncan Hamilton (Quercus Publishing, £20)

Tim Ellis