'Is there anything in sport to compare with the sustained excitement of a cricket match, especially a Test match, in which the advantage continually fluctuates one way and then the other, and when the match enters its last few minutes, all four results are still possible?' After entertaining countless radio listeners around the world for decades, who better to convey the breathless drama of a Test match cliffhanger than Henry Blofeld? Now, in Ten to Win . . . and the Last Man In, he has personally selected thirty matches featuring unforgettable finishes and brought them vividly to life again in his own inimitable way. Ranging from the match-winning bowling of F.R. Spofforth against W.G. Grace's England in 1882, via the first tied Test between Benaud's Australia and Worrell's West Indies in 1960, to the never-say-die batting of Ben Stokes in 2019, he picks out the key events and performances of each memorable match and describes them as only he can. Alongside the big-hitting heroics of Jessop in 1902 and Botham in 1981, he revisits less celebrated matches such as South Africa's hard-fought first Test win in 1906, as well as a crucial innings from Denis Compton in 1948 and a match-saving performance by a young Alan Knott in Guyana in 1968 - one of the most exciting matches he has ever witnessed first-hand. Filled with colourful detail and informed by insight gained from a lifetime immersed in the sport he loves, Henry Blofeld's latest book will leave the reader in no doubt - as he himself puts it - about 'what an absurdly irresistible game cricket can be'.

*Large-format hardback edition* The 158th 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 an unprecedented year dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Writers include Lawrence Booth, Sir Garfield Sobers, Ebony Rainford-Brent, Gideon Haigh, Andy Zaltzman, Tom Holland, Duncan Hamilton, Robert Winder, Matthew Engel, Scyld Berry, Derek Pringle, Jack Leach and James Anderson. 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

'Crazy' Chris Lewis played in 32 Test Matches and 53 One-Day Internationals for England. At one point he was regarded as one of the best all-round cricketers the country has ever produced. However, feeling at odds with the middle-class nature of the sport, he regularly courted controversy off the field. The tabloids happily lapped up Lewis' transgressions, such as missing a Test with sunstroke, arriving late to a match due to oversleeping, as well as naming England players involved in a match-fixing scandal, something which led to his early retirement at the age of just 30. From there he became a loner, before he was arrested in 2008 for importing cocaine from the Caribbean and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In Crazy, Lewis recounts his remarkable, redemptive story, firstly as a child arriving in England from Guyana with his parents, through to his burgeoning cricketing career, international recognition, his arrest and subsequent trial, his time in prison, and how he finally put his life back together.

The 150 editions of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack have contained a total of more than 133,000 pages since the first edition was published in 1864. Over the years the Almanack - published every year without fail - has charted the highs and lows of the game, giving its authoritative opinion on the players, the matches and the pressing issues of the day. The Essential Wisden provides the highlights of all 150 years for the first time. From the forthright Editor's Notes by the likes of Sydney Pardon, Norman Preston, John Woodcock and Matthew Engel, through reports on key matches around the world, and features on the game's top players, to the renowned obituaries of people in and around the game, and a range of cricket's idiosyncratic "Unusual Occurrences", John Stern and Marcus Williams distil the Almanack's most significant and fascinating writing into one anthology. With the pick of a century and a half of the best cricket writing from leading writers on the game, including John Arlott, Mike Atherton, Neville Cardus, Gideon Haigh, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and E. W. Swanton, and famous players such as Don Bradman, Denis Compton, Learie Constantine, Fred Spofforth, Mike Brearley and Michael Vaughan, The Essential Wisden provides a fascinating lens through which to view the evolution of the game.

PLAYING HARD BALL is a unique sports book, a cultural comparison of two national games - cricket, English in origin and American baseball - written from the viewpoint of a top-class practitioner of both codes. Ed Smith - the young Cambridge University and Kent batsman - has spent the winters since 1998 in Spring Training with the New York Mets baseball team. It has enabled Ed to contrast and compare arguably the two most iconic of sports from the inside. In fact, baseball had a thriving following in Britain until the Great War: Derby County's former stadium was called the Baseball Ground; Tottenham Hotspur was at first a baseball club. Apart from learning two very different techniques, Ed learned that the sports' ultimate heroes, the Babe and the Don - Babe Ruth and Don Bradman - might as well have come from different planets, whilst baseball's pristine Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is a far cry from the ramshackle cricket museum at Lord's. Ed Smith's PLAYING HARD BALL draws on these intriguing comparisons to paint a two-sided portrait of sports most illustrous 'hitting games'.
 

For many decades, women and girls' cricket has been under-represented, under-financed, undervalued and lacking in true organisation. Despite this, many thousands of female players over the years have fought against the barriers, developed their skills and fallen in love with this incredible sport. Recent years have seen an explosion of female participation, broadcast coverage, new teams, new clubs, new competitions and an undeniable sense that women and girls' cricket is establishing itself as the most significant growth area of the game. We've seen full houses at Lords and the MCG, we've seen the success of the Hundred, the Women's Big Bash, the prospect of a Women's IPL and most importantly, thousands of new players across the world benefitting from everything cricket has to offer. What is needed now, is to build on these successes, to provide resources and information for clubs, schools and coaches to start, to grow and to coach their own programmes. This book is the answer. Lydia Greenway has written a full guide on coaching, administration, formats, techniques, EDI and more. Packed with practical advice, the book has original contributions from some of the most influential players, administrators, coaches and broadcasters in the world, including: Charlotte Edwards, Alyssa Healy, Heather Knight, Kate Cross, Ebony Rainford-Brent, Henry Moeran, Nat Sciver, Isa Guha, Lisa Sthalekar, Mel Jones, Lisa Keightley, Alex Hartley, Clare Connor, Ali Mitchell, Charles Dagnall, Katherine Brunt, Amy Jones and more.

Readers of the 1917 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack were advised by the editor, Sydney Pardon: “Its chief feature is a record of the cricketers who have fallen in the War – the Roll of Honour, so far as the national game is concerned.� By the time the conflict was over, Wisden had carried almost 1,800 obituaries. Test players like Colin Blythe were far outnumbered by men with a lesser claim to fame, as schoolboy cricketers were sent out to the battlefields fresh from their playing fields. Amid the carnage and confusion, errors inevitably crept in: names were wrong and there were cases of mistaken identity. Some mistakes have lain buried in Wisden’s pages for a century: as this book discloses, three men outlived their obituary by many years. All the obituaries have been updated in Wisden on the Great War with new information about the subjects’ lives and deaths, their families and memorials, and ordered by the year of death. There is a listing of the 289 men who had played first-class cricket, while the 89 who did not get an obituary in Wisden are now recognised. The book also lists for the first time the 407 first-class cricketers who were decorated for gallantry, of whom 381 survived. Among the men included is an officer who as a boy was an inspiration for J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and one whose agonising death on the battlefield is movingly described in Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That. These men now receive proper tribute, along with literary names that are already well-known, such as Rupert Brooke, who headed his school’s bowling averages in 1906 and received an obituary in Wisden that mentioned that, at the time of his death, he ‘had gained considerable reputation as a poet’. The wartime Wisdens have long been cherished by families whose relatives are commemorated in them, but the originals are scarce and command a high price. Now the lives of the men are properly celebrated, enhanced by many remarkable stories of courage and coincidence. The result is a poignant insight into the cohorts of cricketers who played the ultimate game for their country.

THE HILARIOUS NEW BOOK FROM ONE OF BRITAIN'S BEST-LOVED NATIONAL TREASURES! This is not a book of life lessons. But Freddie Flintoff has had a moment to reflect and he's noticed that throughout his four decades, although there's been little method in the madness, there has been the occasional common thread. The Book of Fred is filled with anecdotes, observations and the odd opinion all told with Fred's trademark humour and no-nonsense style. Fred's approach to life draws on the sublime (his series winning performance in the 2005 Ashes) and the ridiculous (singing Elvis Presley's 'Suspicious Minds' in front of a live audience), from highs (making the transition to top TV presenter) to occasional lows (accidentally upsetting the lovely Bruce Forsyth), from the profane (discussing Shane Warne's barnet with Hollywood royalty) to the profound (why 'having a go' leads to self-respect). Throughout, Fred shares his code for success, happiness and a life fully lived - and gives his readers a laugh, some joy, and (the occasional) pause for thought along the way.

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack was first published in 1864, and a new edition has been published every year since then. While limited-edition reprints of every edition of Wisden from 1864 to 1946 have been published over the past few decades, collecting these limited-edition reprints is not cheap as each one has normally been priced between GBP50 and GBP100. Now, for the first time, John Wisden & Co is offering a bundle of the print-on-demand reprints of the editions between 1916 and 1919, to allow cricket lovers more affordable access to this historic book which forms such a significant part of the game's great heritage.

Samir Chopra is an immigrant, a "voluntary exile," who discovers he can tell the story of his life through cricket, a game that has long been an influence-really, an obsession-for him. In so doing, he reveals how his changing views on the sport mirror his journey of self-discovery. In The Evolution of a Cricket Fan, Chopra is thus able to reflect on his changing perceptions of self, and of the nations and cultures that have shaped his identity, politics, displacement, and fandom. Chopra's passion for the sport began as a child, when he rooted for Pakistan and against his native India. When he migrated, he became a fan of the Indian team that gave him a sense of home among the various cultures he encountered in North America and Australia. This "shapeshifting" exposes the rift between the Old and the New world, which Chopra acknowledges is "cricket's greatest modern crisis." But it also illuminates the identity dilemmas of post-colonial immigrants in the Indian diaspora. Chopra's thoughts about the sport and its global influence are not those of a player. He provides access to the inner world of the global cricket fan navigating the world that colonial empire wrought and that cricket continues to connect and animate. He observes that the Indian cricket team carries many burdens-not only must they win cricket matches, but their style of play must generate a pride that assuages generations of wounds inflicted by history. And Chopra must navigate where he stands in that history. The Evolution of a Cricket Fan shows Chopra's own wins and losses as his life takes new directions and his fandom changes allegiances.

The Wisden Collector's Guide is the definitive companion to one of the world's most important sporting publications. It begins with an overview of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, introducing the original John Wisdenand describing the history of the publication. The next section contains highlights and information from each of the 147 editions, including bibliographic details (page extent, price, reprints etc), excerpts from the best articles, cricketers of the year, obituaries, and noteworthy events and matches. There is also additional information of interest to collectors and historical context in the form of news 'headlines' from each year. The guide concludes with a section dedicated to the serious collector. Covering everything from reprints to rebinds and from pagination to publishers, it is a vital resource for collectors. Affording a glimpse of the cricketing and historical landscape of the last 147 years, this is an accessible and fascinating volume for cricketing fans generally and a must-have item for Wisden collectors.

AB de Villiers is one of South Africa’s most celebrated sporting heroes. He has captained the national ODI team since June 2011, and has been a member of the national team for 11 years since his debut test as a 20-year-old in December 2004. AB has excelled on the sporting field throughout his life and today he is considered one of the leading batsmen in the world in all forms of the game.

AB: The Autobiography will cover key events and influences that have shaped his life and career, from his childhood and schooling at Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool (Affies) through to his present successes, experiences and controversies as captain of the ODI team. AB will offer access to the man behind the bat and beneath the helmet, exploring career-defining moments, on-and-off the field events and his relationship with various mentors. The reader will be transported to the backyard of AB’s childhood home where he first learnt to play cricket with his brothers, and will be introduced to colourful characters and sportsmen along the way.

The autobiography will also explore AB’s interests in music and business and how he pursues these alongside his international cricket career.