Graham Thorpe's achievements on the cricket field contrasted wildly with his personal problems, where drink and depression combined to send him spiralling off the rails. This is his brutally honest life story, including his dramatic retirement from Test cricket, and updated to include England's 2005 Ashes win, and his new coaching career.

Graham Thorpe was one of the best batsmen in world cricket for more than a decade. Yet the national press hounded him as 'English cricket's most disturbed player' for pulling out of a series of tours and turning his back on the game more than...

George B. Kirsch takes us back to amateur playing fields around the country to re-create the excitement of the early matches, the players, clubs, and their fans. As a narrative history, "Baseball and Cricket" places the growing popularity of the two sports within the social context of mid-nineteenth-century American cities. The book's comparative analysis follows baseball's transition from a leisure sport to a commercialized, professional enterprise and offers the first complete discussion of the...

Cricket Explained offers the sports enthusiast a user-friendly introduction to baseball's British cousin, a game that shares with America's national pastime the common ancestor "rounders."
This is the definitive beginner's guide to the game of cricket, written by a world authority on the sport, the co-inventor of the Coopers & Lybrand World Cricket Ratings System. Cricket Explained takes the reader from the game's fundamentals -- basic rules, terminology, equipment -- to the finer points of strategy, individual playing styles, and cricket lore.
The book includes a combined...

In the last twenty years, Indian cricket has been transformed. With the arrival of global television networks, mass-media coverage and multinational sponsors, cricket has become big business and India has become the economic driving force in the world game. For the first time a developing country has become a major player in the international sports arena.

This fully updated and revised edition of Mihir Bose's classic history is a unique account of the Indian cricket phenomenon. Drawing on a combination of extensive research and personal experience, Bose traces the development of...

In the last twenty years, Indian cricket has been transformed. With the arrival of global television networks, mass-media coverage and multinational sponsors, cricket has become big business and India has become the economic driving force in the world game. For the first time a developing country has become a major player in the international sports arena.

This fully updated and revised edition of Mihir Bose's classic history is a unique account of the Indian cricket phenomenon. Drawing on a combination of extensive research and personal experience, Bose traces the development of...

Bringing together leading international writers on cricket and society, this important new book places cricket in the postcolonial life of the major Test-playing countries. Exploring the culture, politics, governance and economics of cricket in the twenty-first century, this book dispels the age-old idea of a gentle game played on England's village greens.

This is an original political and historical study of the game's development in a range of countries and covers:

* cricket in the new Commonwealth: Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Caribbean and India
* the cricket cultures of...

Cricket, law and the meaning of life ...

In a readable, informed and absorbing discussion of cricket s defining controversies bodyline, chucking, ball-tampering, sledging, walking and the use of technology, among many others David Fraser explores the ambiguities of law and social order in cricket.

Cricket and the Law charts the interrelationship between cricket and legal theory between the law of the game and the law of our lives and demonstrates how cricket s cultural conventions can escape the confines of the game to carry far...