Cricket, Lovely Cricket

Author:

By Lawrence Booth

Format:

Paperback

Availability:

Not yet published. You can order now and we will dispatch as soon as it is available.

Price:

£10.99

Tagged with:

Cricket, The Guardian, OBO

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Further Details

• Published: 7th Aug 2008
• ISBN: 022407914X
• Pages: 272

From Word of Sport:

To those familiar with Booth's musings via The Guardian's Over By Over and his weekly email, The Spin, this should be a treat. He writes with obvious passion and much humour - his anecdote about a former England test player wearing a thong "that even Peter Stringfellow might have baulked at" has already left an indelible impression on me - and presumably the player in question.......

We've only got our hands on a couple of advance chapters so far, but those have been extremely enjoyable. Watch out for this one.

From the Publisher:

"The Thing About Cricket..." is a sports book with a difference. It is an original and engaging journey around the perennially curious world of cricket, leaving no metaphorical leg-break unturned and peering at the game from every conceivable angle. Written by Lawrence Booth, who had little option but to turn a youthful obsession with cricket into a means of paying the mortgage, it seeks to answer the questions that crop up on a daily basis but rarely receive a satisfactory answer.

What are the players really like? What is the secret of sledging? Why get so worked up about the Ashes? Why all the cliches? And when will India take over the world?Fittingly, for a sport that can last up to five days without a result, "The Thing About Cricket..." is rambling but probing, humorous but insightful, sweeping but reflective. It is underpinned by the essential - and slightly frightening - truth that cricket does not actually matter at all, yet continually finds itself relating the game to the wider world. By examining what cricket tells us about the nations who spend vast chunks of their existence fretting over the fate of a small red ball, it attempts to get to the heart of a sport that seems more capable than any other of bewitching its followers.

Full of stories, observations, jokes and whimsy, this book is a captivating look at the way in which the game has become what it is today - and what, given a fair wind, it might be like in the future.