Time again to turn to my right, and take down from the shelves by my desk the dog-eared copy of War Minus The Shooting from its spot between Bradman’s ABC of Cricket, and Cardus’s A Cricketer’s Book. Its author, Mike Marqusee, died on Tuesday; all too young, at the age of 61. He had been seriously ill since 2007 with multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer.

He chronicled his experiences of the illness in his occasional articles for the Guardian, lacing them in between with his pieces about his enduring passion for Bob Dylan, and his love of cricket. Mike was born in New York, Jewish, and a Marxist, and as Marcus Berkmann once put it in Wisden Cricket Monthly, “what English cricket has done to deserve him is anyone’s guess”. In the last piece Mike had published in the Guardian, an extract from Wisden India, he turned to address that same question: why?

“Sports are wonderfully pointless,” Mike wrote. “They are their own means and ends. That’s central to their appeal.” And cricket? “Cricket offers all the pleasures of sport in general, plus a highly distinctive appeal of its own to which many elements contribute. One of the chief of these is the way it treats time and space.” And off he went, roaming through the landscape of the game as he saw it, through anthropology, psychoanalysis, post-modernism, politics, poetry, and drama. Reading his work you spent precious time seeing cricket through a rare pair of eyes.

For a time English cricket journalism was full of people who wanted to write like Cardus. Mike was one of the very few who could genuinely claim to be in the radical lineage of the great critic’s colleague at the Guardian, CLR James. Certainly few have better embodied James’s familiar maxim, “what do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” So turn again to War Minus The Shooting, about the three months Mike spent travelling around the subcontinent during the 1996 World Cup. Flick past the cover, the brief biography inside, and the contents, to the first page:

“It had rained overnight and the pathways to the Gaddafi Stadium were choked with mud. I felt giddy with nervousness as I hurried past the giant billboards erected by the ruling Pakistan’s People’s Party, past the police armed with automatic rifles and long bamboo lathis, past the well-guarded entrance to the International Management Group’s ‘hospitality village’, towards the inevitable rendezvous of dreams and realities. Not since I was a child, investing my untrammelled hopes in the New York Yankees, had I wanted a team to win a contest so badly. All morning my fragile but persistent faith in a Sri Lanka victory warred with the dour knowledge that, by any rational calculation, the Australians would emerge as victors in this thirty-seventh and final match of the 1996 World Cup.”

That passage contains so many little hints of the delights that follow, and of the qualities which made him such a fine writer. There’s the keen eye, and the graceful, poetic, twist to the prose; the conviction that to write about sport is to write about society and politics, and the essential lesson that the three things are inextricably bound; the irritation with corporations, and with cant; and above all there is enthusiasm, the giddy and gleeful appreciation of the game. That enthusiasm, that joy, runs right through War Minus The Shooting, and makes it, to my mind, a still better book than his better known tome Anyone But England. On the one occasion I discussed the subject with him, he agreed with me. Anyone But England was a condemnation, War Minus The Shooting a celebration. Only, he added ruefully, it hadn’t sold nearly so well.

Anyone But England is a glorious book too, one of the great iconoclastic take-downs of the English mythology of cricket, along with Derek Birley’s The Willow Wand. “The hypocrisy that has long been regarded as one of the chief characteristics of the English takes root early in cricket,” Mike wrote. “And is indeed one of the things that makes English cricket English – the way it lies about itself to itself. The Englishness is in the lie, in the cult of the honest yeoman and the village green, in the denial of cricket’s origins in commerce, politics, patronage and an urban society.” It was acidic stuff, and gave indigestion to those members of the establishment who read it.

Mike was an outsider. He had discovered cricket only at the age of 23. And yet he skewered it so well, with such eloquence and precision, that even his staunchest critics admitted a measure of admiration for his work. Few reviews, you imagine, gave him more pleasure than the one by EW Swanton: “He writes well, if with a warped intelligence.” Likewise, Tim Rice told the readers of the Daily Telegraph that Mike’s work was “slightly barking, but always readable”. And Christopher Martin-Jenkins said it was “a very intelligent book, very cleverly written, with a lot that provokes thought. But I am uneasy about the way he has a go at just about everything cricketers hold sacred”.

But cricket was “sacred” to Mike too, though I somehow doubt he would ever have used that particular word to describe his feelings. In the 10th anniversary edition of Anyone But England he wrote: “I prefer my cricket unbranded – by either nation states or multinational corporations. The history of the game is intertwined with the formation of social identities – national, imperial, post-imperial. But that has only been possible because the game itself is so protean, so durable, so forbiddingly idiosyncratic … That is why one should never be too pessimistic about its future.” There is hope too, so long as cricket has the capacity to captivate such people, and space in its ranks to accommodate them.