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Fatty Batter
How Cricket Saved My Life (Then Ruined It)
- Author:
- By Michael Simkins
- Format:
- Paperback (Paperback)
- Availability:
- Out of print. Try our second hand search facility.
- Price:
- £10.99
- Tagged with:
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Further Details
- Published: 5th Apr 2007
- ISBN: 0091901502
- Pages: 320
- Size: 215mm x 135mm
From the Publisher:
Michael Simkins is in desperate need of some quiet coaching. In middle-age he still believes, despite what everyone tells him, that the England middle order might usefully benefit from his hard-earned skills. He's also a man who thinks it is OK to get your wife to spend the whole of your wedding anniversary operating a scoreboard in what she describes as 'a meaningless encounter between pathetic no-hopers'. Even when scattering his own mother's ashes his thoughts stray to another urn.
This is the hilarious story of one man's lifelong obsession with cricket. From his earliest awkward days as a fat boy growing up in a Brighton sweetshop to his years running a team of dysfunctional inadequates still chasing the sweet spot, cricket has offered a shelter from life's irksome realities and a place in which to quietly dream. That place is a peculiarly English arcadia of occasional wondrous beauty, forests of comforting statistics and the endless life-affirming rituals of defeat, humiliation and disappointment – the perfect net practice for life.
From the Critics:
“Once you've read this account of one man's love affair with cricket, you'll never want to read another ghosted autobiography by a Pietersen or a Vaughan again - incompetence and failure is far more fun.”
Michael Atherton
“The childhood recollections, suffused with warmth and spangled with pain and humour, are the book's unique selling point. Lovely stuff.”
Daily Telegraph
“The King of Comic Self-Deprecation, Michael Simkins has turned his self-destructive wit to cricket and produced an instant classic.”
Stephen Fry
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Yeovil Town are the FA Cups greatest Giantkillers, beating 20 league teams during their time as a non-league club.
Submitted by: sebytfc