Compleat Cricket

On Monday 18 September 2017, while Essex had won the cricket County Championship, Warwickshire were in the relegation slot; the next two rounds were to decide which of five teams would join them in going down. The result was eight days of hard-fought cricket, exploiting the game's thrilling capacity for snatching victory from defeat, triumph from disaster - and vice versa. On Thursday 28 September, in the last hour of a county cricket season that had begun six months and fifty-six days of cricket earlier, the matter was finally decided, leaving a trail of 'what ifs' ruefully in the mind. COMPLEAT CRICKET is a richly illustrated account of those last two rounds, eight days of intense battling to score runs, take wickets and hold catches. It contains a light-hearted discussion of the relative merits of slow and fast cricket, blast and block cricket, but it chiefly aims to tell a story that shows off the excitements, tension and drama of slow cricket to perfection. 110 pages, 112 photographs