Lost Histories of Indian Cricket studies the personalities and controversies that have shaped Indian cricket over the years and brings to life the intensity surrounding India's national game.
It may be true that that cricket today arouses more passions in India than in any other cricket playing country in the world. Yet, when it comes to writing on the history of the game, Indians have been reticent and much of the past has been obscured and lost. Majumdar here recovers this history and restores it to its rightful place in India's rich sporting heritage.

The 2003 World Cup was of vital importance to the participating countries. For India, a world cup triumph would make cricket the nation's leading industry; for the host, South Africa, a successful campaign might realize its dream of political unity.
Dealing with themes of racial/political unification, commercialization, the media and globalisation, this book explores the role of cricket and sport in each of the competing nations.
Looking at recent developments such as match-fixing, the abolition of the quota system and the performances of the South African national team, the collection examines the importance of the Cricket World Cup in providing a unified political, social and economic stage from which a united South African identity can finally emerge. The book also explores the role of the Cricket World Cup in relation to West Indian unity, Pakistani economic regeneration, Sri Lankan, Kenyan and Zimbabwean peace.

One of the great rivalries in sport returns this summer, but what is it about a six-inch terracotta urn that en flames the passions of Poms and Aussies? Why do the English think that all Australians are alcoholic simpletons? Why do Australians think the English all have a stick up their backside? And why do they need (and needle) each other so much? In this humorous look at one of the truly great rivalries, written by "The Times'" cricket blogger and a professional Australian bar-room pontificator, the grudges, sledges, heroes and villains are laid bare.

A study of how cricket in England between the Wars reflected the social relations and cultural values of the time. The authors explore English social and cultural history through the sport by analysing the relationships between classes, Church and society, as well as gender roles. They point out cricket's role as part of the national image and the influence it had on evaluating the 'English character'. They carefully outline how the sport demonstrates the tendencies and morals of the time; for example, in the game of cricket social and economic differences were made obvious. The game was intertwined with the convictions of whether a person's moral fitness for political and social leadership was a shown by prowess in the sport. Examining cricket playing among women and their support for the sport provides an unusual perspective upon gender roles between the Wars. The study the beliefs that cricket sportmanship expressed Christian teachings and how the Church's presence in recreational cricket established the role of Christianity in English social life and ethical values. The images of cricket and how far the world of cricket conformed to these ideas are essential for understanding English culture and society between the Wars.

*Standard hardback edition* The 159th edition of the most famous sports book in the world - published every year since 1864 - contains some of the world's finest sports writing, and reflects on a year when Azeem Rafiq forced the sport to examine, more painfully than ever, its attitude to racism. The launch of The Hundred gave a huge boost to the women's game while raising many questions about the men's. Then, in the last two months of the year, Australia's men won the World T20 and retained the Ashes. Writers include Lawrence Booth, Stephen Fry, Mike Atherton, Gideon Haigh, Henry Blofeld, Vic Marks, Tanya Aldred, Andy Bull, Tim de Lisle, Emma John and Scyld Berry. As usual, Wisden includes the eagerly awaited Notes by the Editor, the Cricketers of the Year awards, and the famous obituaries. And, as ever, there are reports and scorecards for every Test, together with forthright opinion, compelling features and comprehensive records. "There can't really be any doubt about the cricket book of the year, any year: it's obviously Wisden" Andrew Baker in The Daily Telegraph @WisdenAlmanack

Many books have been written about cricket, cricketers, the grounds they play on and the tours that the players and supporters undertake during the winter months. Writers on the English summer game have looked at the game's history and economic development, but one vital ingredient has been ignored: the game's geography, and how it has changed from a rural, meadowland pastime into a multinational sport and multi-million pound business, based largely in urban agglomerations.
This volume fills this void, looking at the fundamental geography of cricket, especially in England where the game is played by county sides. Besides looking at socio-economic influences, the book examines the physical geography of cricket, in particular, its interrelationship with the local environment and microclimate, and looks ahead to the likely impact that global warming and altered weather patterns will have on the county game.

This book explores how cricket in South Africa was shaped by society and society by cricket. It demonstrates the centrality of cricket in the evolving relationship between culture, sport and politics starting with South Africa as the beating heart of the imperial project and ending with the country as an international pariah. The contributors explore the tensions between fragmentation and unity, on and off the pitch, in the context of the racist ideology of empire, its 'arrested development' and the reliance of South Africa on a racially based exploitative labour system. This edited collection uncovers the hidden history of cricket, society, and empire in defining a multiplicity of South African identities, and recognises the achievements of forgotten players and their impact.

Updated edition to include the 2017-18, 2019 and 2021-22 Ashes series.

Wisden on the Ashes: The authoritative story of cricket's greatest rivalry is a detailed chronological journey through the history of this famous English-Australian contest. With Test reports, scorecards, "Great bowlers of the year" and other fascinating material from the archives, together with new editorial pieces, this is a remarkable record of cricket's most enduring battle.

The book begins its journey with England's first tour of Australia in 1876 and the subsequent three series prior to the 1882 tour that led to a mock obituary being placed in the Sporting Times "In affectionate remembrance of English cricket, which died at The Oval on 29th August, 1882. ... The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia." Celebrating the players who made their mark on the game and the controversies that shook the sport, the book covers every series since then through to the most recent series. In 2005 England won a highly competitive series that helped raise the popularity of the sport, and each series since then has attracted huge attention.

This book will be a welcome addition to all cricket enthusiasts' collections, as well as an ideal gift purchase.

This updated edition includes the 2017-18 series, which saw England fail to defend the Ashes, the summer 2019 series held in England, which was the first drawn series since 1972, and the Covid-affected 2021-22 series. It also includes a colour photo section celebrating the players, the matches and the key moments from an ongoing rivalry.

Ed Cowan, opening left-hand batsman for Tasmania, has always been a bit of a scribbler. It started with to-do lists and notes to self, but then he started keeping a cricket diary - a 'batting bible' with thoughts on the game, other players, motivational philosophies and records of performances. The diary has become so much a part of his routine that he admits to being a little upset if he can't see it in his cricket bag. Other cricketers have found the habit a little odd. But for Cowan it's been a way of keeping an uncluttered head and making sense of the game. In the Firing Line, based on the diary Cowan kept while playing his second season for Tasmania over the summer of 2010-11, reveals with intelligence and a touch of humour the excruciatingly shaky position of the domestic cricket player. It's far from the glamour of playing for Australia and uncomfortably close to the long drop to amateurism, yet every match is rife with the possibility of being discovered and propelled into international stardom in the baggy green.

"In a League of Their Own" is an insightful look at how many of the game's great players rate their best cricketers of the 20th and 21st century. One hundred World XI's have been selected. Players from the days of Jack Hobbs and Donald Bradman right up to Shane Warne and Sachin Tendulkar of the current day are all discussed. Find out which fast bowlers Sunil Gavaskar chose in his team - as one of the best opening batsmen of all time there is no better judge. Discover the most popular choices from over a century of Test cricket culminating in the best team of all-time selected by the greats themselves.

'Cricket's Burning Passion' is at once an historic account of the very first Ashes tour and a love story involving England's aristocratic cricket captain and a young Australian piano teacher.

From one of India's finest writers, thinkers and commentators, a memoir of a love affair with cricket. As a fan, player, writer, scholar, controversialist and administrator, Ram Guha has spent a life with cricket. In this book, Guha offers both a brilliantly charming memoir and a charter of the life of cricket in India. He traces the game across every level at which it is played: school, college, club, state and country. He offers vivid portraits of local heroes, provincial icons and international stars. Following the narrative of his life intertwined and in love with the sport, Guha captures the magic of bat and ball that has ensnared billions.

'A tour de force of scholarship and storytelling. There have been plenty of good books on Sri Lankan cricket, but few as comprehensive or as entertaining as An Island's Eleven. Ambitious in scope and lovingly compiled, it's packed with anecdotes, insights and surprises. An enthralling read.' - 2022 Booker Prize Winner, Shehan Karunatilaka From Sathasivam to Sangakkara, Murali to Malinga, Sri Lanka can lay claim to some of the world's most remarkable cricketers - larger-than-life characters who thumbed convention and played the game their own way. This is the land of pint-sized, swashbuckling batsmen, on-the-fly innovators and contorted, cryptic spinners. More so than anywhere else in the world, Sri Lankan cricket has an identity: cricket is Sri Lanka, and Sri Lanka is cricket. We all know the story of the 1996 World Cup: how a team of unfancied amateurs rose from obscurity and changed the way the game was played. Yet the lore of Sri Lankan cricket stretches back much further, from early matches between colonists andlocals, and Ashes-bound ships bringing in cricket's biggest stars, to the more recent triumphs and tragedies that stem from cash flowing freely into the game. An Island's Eleven tells this story in full for the first time, focusing on the characters and moments that have shaped the game forever.

With poems, stories, extracts from novels, essays, speeches, and cricket journalism, this account is a multifaceted portrait of the significance of cricket to the Caribbean and the attraction of Caribbean cricket to the outside world. From the global playing fields to the bumpier village fields and sugar estates, this is a celebration of those who forged an art out of a game, transformed a colonial sport into the cutting edge of Caribbean nationalism, and, in the 1970s and 1980s, changed forever the nature of the game.

England, summer 1975. The Australian cricket team, visiting for an Ashes series, fields players who will become legends of the game: Ian Chappell, Rodney Marsh, Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson. But cricket is about to undergo a revolution, and the Establishment about to get hit for six. This book is the story of World Series Cricket and the Australian media mogul Kerry Packer.

A celebration of 100 Test matches at Lord's - the home of English cricket. Each of the matches, from the first in 1884 to the hundreth against the West Indies in 2000, is recorded with full scores, analysis and commentary. It also recalls the feats of cricketing greats such as Grace and Gooch.

'A highly entertaining read, deftly melding social history with sporting memoir and travelogue' Mail on Sunday A history of Latin America through cricket Cricket was the first sport played in almost every country of the Americas - earlier than football, rugby or baseball. In 1877, when England and Australia played the inaugural Test match at the MCG, Uruguay and Argentina were already ten years into their derby played across the River Plate. The visionary cricket historian Rowland Bowen said that, during the highpoint of cricket in South America between the two World Wars, the continent could have provided the next Test nation. In Buenos Aires, where British engineers, merchants and meatpackers flocked to make their fortune, the standard of cricket was high: towering figures like Lord Hawke and Plum Warner took star-studded teams of Test cricketers to South America, only to be beaten by Argentina. A combined Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean team took on the first-class counties in England in 1932. The notion of Brazilians and Mexicans playing T20 at the Maracana or the Azteca today is not as far-fetched as it sounds. But Evita Burned Down Our Pavilion is also a social history of grit, industry and nation-building in the New World. West Indian fruit workers battled yellow fever and brutal management to carve out cricket fields next to the railway lines in Costa Rica. Cricket was the favoured sport of Chile's Nitrate King. Emperors in Brazil and Mexico used the game to curry favour with Europe. The notorious Pablo Escobar even had a shadowy connection to the game. The fate of cricket in South America was symbolised by Eva Peron ordering the burning down of the Buenos Aires Cricket Club pavilion when the club refused to hand over their premises to her welfare scheme. Cricket journalists Timothy Abraham and James Coyne take us on a journey to discover this largely untold story of cricket's fate in the world's most colourful continent. Fascinating and surprising, Evita Burned Down Our Pavilion is a valuable addition to cricketing and social history.

The most up-to-date and in-depth book on the business of professional team sports Pro team sports are the biggest and most important sector of international sport business Strong focus on applied analysis and performance measurement, invaluable real-world skills Covers sports, teams and leagues all over the world from the EPL to the NFL Addresses key themes from ownership and competitive balance to media revenue and the role of agents

While women's cricket, and women's sport in general, has gained enormously in popularity in terms of both spectators and TV audiences, comparatively little is known about it and its participants, and there are few, if any, quantitative assessments of the game. The Economics of Gender and Sport: A Quantitative Analysis of Women's Cricket fills that gap. The work analyses the different forms of cricket - Test cricket, One-day, T20 - and is based on the latest sets of available data. It seeks to answer questions such as how well female cricketers play, how well they are paid, who the superstars are, and how competitive women's cricket is. It also examines more general issues which affect men's cricket too, with the over-arching theme of this book being inequality. First, the chapters discuss inequality in the distribution of luck. The book discusses the importance of luck in cricket and suggests a way of distinguishing between luck and ability in determining match outcomes. Second there is access inequality, which means that players from certain groups have an advantage in terms of being chosen to play in representative teams. Third, there is inequality in tournament outcomes, and this carries implications for the degree of competitive balance in contests between teams. Fourth is the issue of inequality in the quality of umpiring in men's and women's cricket. Fifth, there is inequality between men and women in their respective remunerations as cricketeers. Lastly, there is inequality in performance between players: the book explains how batting and bowling averages can be adjusted to better reflect player performance. The volume will find an audience among advanced students and researchers in sports economics, sports-related and gender studies. More generally, it will appeal to lovers of cricket who wish to read about the game in terms which are more than simply anecdotal.

The story of global sport is the story of expansion from local development to globalized industry, from recreational to marketized activity. Alongside that, each sport has its own distinctive history, sub-cultures, practices and structures. This ambitious new volume offers state-of-the-art overviews of the development of every major sport or classification of sport, examining their history, socio-cultural significance, political economy and international reach, and suggesting directions for future research. Expert authors from around the world provide varied perspectives on the globalization of sport, highlighting diverse and often underrepresented voices. By putting sport itself in the foreground, this book represents the perfect companion to any social scientific course in sport studies, and the perfect jumping-off point for further study or research. The Routledge Handbook of Global Sport is an essential reference for students and scholars of sport history, sport and society, the sociology of sport, sport development, sport and globalization, sports geography, international sports organizations, sports cultures, the governance of sport, sport studies, sport coaching or sport management.