The grade cricketer is a brilliant read funny for all of us older blokes still rolling them arm over in 40 degree heat and wondering why. A really good laugh
Got a few books for Christmas and one of them was Phillip huges auto and must say one of my best reads for a while,gives you a real insight to him as a person,not just a cricketer and not hard to see why he was loved so much around the world as well is here in Australia
Would recommend to anyone and especially to the young people out there
Enjoyed reading all these.
Adam Gilchrist True Colours
Matthew Hayden Standing my Ground
Glenn McGrath Line and strength
Ricky Ponting captain diaries 2009
Botham The Autobiography
Freddie The biography of Andrew Flintoff
Currently reading Nasser Hussains Playing with fire. Enjoying this too.
Not cricket but Andrew Johns The Two Of Me is worth reading too.
Mike Atherton's autobiography, "Opening Up", is fantastic. I love Athers as a commentator and a journalist - I appreciate his dry wit. You can get copies of "Opening Up" on eBay. It was published in 2003 from memory.
I see that Chris Gayle is publishing his autobiography - titled "Six Machine" - in June. (Insert "he's WRITTEN one more than he's READ" gag here! )
Mike Atherton's autobiography, "Opening Up", is fantastic. I love Athers as a commentator and a journalist - I appreciate his dry wit. You can get copies of "Opening Up" on eBay. It was published in 2003 from memory.
I see that Chris Gayle is publishing his autobiography - titled "Six Machine" - in June. (Insert "he's WRITTEN one more than he's READ" gag here! )
Finished reading "Decima Norman: The First Golden Girl" - the biography on the first athlete to win five gold medals at any International Track & Field event (1938 British Empire Games) - brilliantly researched story on a pioneer of Australian Athletics and forerunner to Cuthbert, Strickland, Flintoff, Boyle, Freeman etc.
Also just read Richard Cashman's great little book on the legendary "YABBA" - the great SCG sports barracker of the 1920's & 30's and my current read is Max Bonnell's "Lucky", the story of Australia's 1926 Ashes Captain; Herbie Collins which I can recommend so far
I have just started "Sex, Drugs and Rebel Tours - The England Cricket Team in the 1980's" by David Tossell (he also wrote "Grovel", about the West Indies tour of England in 1976) and it is great!
My favourite ever cricket book is "Captains on a Seesaw" by Phil Tressider, about the 1968-69 West Indies tour of Australia. I'm not sure where you could get a copy now but if you can source one, it is excellent read.
More recent books that I recommend are:
Fierce Focus - Greg Chappell autobiography
The Captains - Malcolm Knox (history of Australia's Test captains)
Bradman's War - Malcolm Knox (story of the 1948 Invincibles tour)
The Rebel Tours: Cricket's Crisis of Conscience - Peter May
True Colours - Adam Gilchrist autobiography
Glorious Summers and Discontents - Michael Atherton (selection of his newspaper columns)
There are books from Jonathan Trott, A.B de Villiers, Michael Clarke, Mitchell Johnson, Mark Nicholas, Dennis Lillee, Brad Hogg and Brad Haddin being released over the next few months.
Right, thanks to a subscriber email from Ken Piesse (www.cricketbooks.com.au) we can now match book cover images to some of the authors I have listed above. There are others as well, including the autobiography of Chris Rogers!
These guys do an amazing job and in my experience are very fair-minded and accurate in their appraisal. Might be a useful tool to use before buying physical or electronic copies of this summer's new releases
These guys do an amazing job and in my experience are very fair-minded and accurate in their appraisal. Might be a useful tool to use before buying physical or electronic copies of this summer's new releases
Six chapters in, it seems to me that George Bradley Hogg has written the cricket book of the summer. It is a great mix of humour, hard lessons and reflection. All this, and I'm only up to the second match of his Western Australian career.
Never before have I read the words "I was leaking bum gravy" appear in ANY autobiography!!