There are some mightily evocative photographs in Afzal Ahmed's Pakistan Cricket Chronicles, a new coffee-table book that came out last month. None more so than one of Richie Benaud walking out for the toss with Hanif Mohammad for a game in March 1968, from a tour to Pakistan by a Commonwealth side. A generation of us mostly remembers Benaud as broadcaster, white-haired and beige-suited - neat and smart always, but in a decidedly old-man way. Whereas in this image he cuts a vital, dashing figure in a white - linen? - suit, like he's strolling along an Italian riviera. So dashing, in fact, he makes Pat Cummins look dowdy.
Anyway, photographs are only one part of this wonderfully nostalgic curation. It is actually a showcase of Ahmed's private collection of all kinds of Pakistan cricketana: tour brochures, rare books, autographs, and various other bits of memorabilia. In it you'll come across the momentous, such as an image of the original scorecard of Majid Khan's legendary pre-lunch hundred in November 1976. Also, the genuine little curio, like the luggage tag of Caribbean-bound Sheikh Fazal-ur-Rehman, the leggie who played a solitary Test for Pakistan on the historic first tour of the West Indies in 1957-58. The accompanying note, that the hosts wondered whether his bowling was as good as his dancing (it wasn't) elevates it.
Ahmed, a banker and cricket tragic, has built his collection diligently over many years, and in the way the book is structured - unfolding season by season - it also serves as a quirky history of Pakistan cricket. It's heartening to see the books about the country's cricket being logged, for instance, dispelling the notion of a lean literary tradition. A discovery: Fazal Mahmood, befitting of his status as Pakistan cricket's first superstar, published an autobiography, in Urdu, as early as the mid-'50s, when at the very peak of his fame.
Fazal, or rather his bowling action, was also the subject of a 63-page flip - or flicker - book released in 1960 (where each page captures one photographed frame, and when you flip through them in sequence, it produces a moving image of his action). In those days this would have been the only way to "see" him bowl, other than going to the stadium to watch.
Ahmed's book, by its very nature, is also a reflection of the changed nature of cricket fandom and following. Just as the playing of the game is unrecognisable today from what it once was, so too is our consumption of it. We have more broadcast options and more means than ever to watch cricket, and also greater inclination to consume it in byte-sized clips or highlights packages, or to periodically dip in and out of ball-by-ball commentary. If, outside of the UK, cricket books have dried up, there have never been more podcasts to listen to.
Invariably cricket today has to fight to find space in your day, where once it could occupy the entire day, or week. Increasingly our consumption feels transient (not least because there's just so much more cricket) - though, in theory, the internet means everything can have a permanent home. Which is great, because a moment, a memory or a memento is only ever a click away. Just that it'll probably never singe itself into the imagination in quite the same way as Ahmed's book shows us it used to.