A SUMMER sport for all? Despite the Cricket World Cup and a home Ashes series, not too many will be picking up bat, ball and stumps for a knockabout.

If anything gets us off the sun loungers, it’s likely to be a bike. Cycling’s temporary success in boosting numbers on two wheels coincided with unprecedented British cyclists’ success at both the Olympics and Le Tour.

How to Ride a Bike by Chris Hoy handily combines both, all the glamour of a six-time Olympic gold medallist with a how-to-guide for those who’d like to cycle both further and faster.

Of course there’s not much doubt what was the highlight of cycling’s 2018, Geraint Thomas surprising everybody, not least himself by winning Le Tour, a story he retells in his own inimitable way in The Tour According to G.

Meanwhile, for those who, despite all the physical evidence against, still hanker after this kind of two-wheeled speed and endurance Peter Cossins has written the near-perfect book Full Gas in which Cossins seeks to instruct mere mortals in the tactics of the peloton.

If we cannot dream, well what exactly is the point of doing, or watching sport? 

Off the sun-lounger and back to the sofa, in years gone by an Ashes summer would have soared in the TV ratings but not anymore since the disastrous decision to sell live and free-to-watch Test cricket to the satellite TV moneymen. 

[[{"fid":"14411","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]And cricket has its own problems as a sport too, Australia’s fall from grace, if not cricketing prowess, via a ball tampering scandal brilliantly chronicled by Geoff Lemon in his Steve Smith’s Men. 

The British Open in July is another domestic summer sport highlight. Tiger Woods is the one golfer of the current era to reach beyond the sport’s core support to spur some kind of revival of interest, his April 2019 win at the Masters an absolute testament to that. 

A hugely talented, but much troubled figure, Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian’s unauthorised biography Tiger Woods Tiger helps untangle the reason for why Tiger is, and remains, a figure who towers above his sport.

Wimbledon fortnight is almost upon us, providing a sudden burst of interest in tennis. Apart from that it’s down there with the also-rans. 

Gregory Howe’s Chasing Points is a welcome insight therefore into the pro-tennis tour as players scramble points to climb up the rankings. A revelation, it helps to put the world of All England’s SW wotsit into some kind of perspective. 

Cricket, golf, tennis – all sports in decline when it comes to participation despite the appeal of so-called “role models” who never had it in the first place because that attraction lies almost solely in watching others’ success on the TV.

[[{"fid":"14412","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"2":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"2"}}]]Helen Croydon’s This Girl Ran provides the kind of inspiration sport can provide, in shedloads rather than the odd spoonful, to enjoy the doing rather than the watching, of sport. 

Helen’s tale takes this to extremes, the triathlon, but the maxim remains pertinent, we can all run. 

Of course, most won’t. This has precious little to do with individual choices, rather it is down to the social construction of sport. 

Vikki Krane’s Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Sport is as near as we’re ever likely to get to a comprehensive analysis of just one dimension of the exclusions sport both produces and reproduces. 

There are, unfortunately, plenty more. Despite this, it is rare indeed to find any kind of politics that takes this seriously. 

[[{"fid":"14413","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"3":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"3"}}]]Gabriel Kuhn has done an excellent job, therefore, rediscovering and translating from the 1930s Julius Deutsch’s writings Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety for a model of the possible.

But one writer, and political activist, above all others effortlessly made the connections that others either struggle with, or dismiss entirely. 

In his classic work Beyond a Boundary, pan-African, Marxist and cricket-lover CLR James asks the rhetorical question: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” 

The same question could be asked, and answered for each and every other sport too. 

My pick of this summer’s sporting reads therefore is Marxism, Colonialism, Cricket.

[[{"fid":"14414","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"4":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"4"}}]]What the editors David Featherstone, Chistopher Gair, Christian Hogsberg and Andrew Smith have achieved is truly special mixing James’s personal and political life story, the context of cricket in the West Indies, the past, present and future of cricket writing. 

Superb, just the read while that old imperial encounter, The Ashes, seeks to nudge the Premier League’s off-season from the back pages this sporting summer. 

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ aka philosophyfootball.com.