Cricket
Diane Stubbings reviews 'The Bodyline Fix: How women saved cricket' by Marion Stell
At the conclusion of the third women’s cricket test against England in 1935, Victorian all-rounder Nance Clements souvenired her name plate from the Melbourne Cricket Ground scoreboard. What she discovered on the reverse side of the plate, as Marion Stell recounts in The Bodyline Fix: How women saved cricket, was the name Larwood.
... (read more)John McCarthy reviews 'After Stumps Were Drawn: The best of Ray Robinson's cricket writing' edited by Jack Pollard
After nearly a lifetime of giving pleasure to those who read about cricket, Ray Robinson died in 1982. This collection of thirty-one articles which previously had appeared in various publications over a span of sixty years, has been admirably selected and introduced by Jack Pollard. Moreover, it is accompanied by a graceful and generous foreword by Sir Donald Bradman. Some pieces are better known than others. Certainly are those which first appeared in Robinson's hardbacked books. What we must particularly thank Pollard for is collecting some of that writing which was first published in not so durable magazines or newspapers. This commemorative volume therefore should delight many.
... (read more)Michael Costigan reviews 'The Big Ship: Warwick Armstrong and the making of modern cricket' by Gideon Haigh
New Year’s Day 2002 marks the centenary of Warwick Windridge Armstrong’s Test cricket début for Australia. At the age of twenty-two, the promising all-rounder carried his bat in both innings on the Melbourne Cricket Ground against Archie MacLaren’s English side. Almost twenty years later, a much heavier and more famous Armstrong, then aged forty-one and nicknamed ‘The Big Ship’ because of his size, captained Australia for the tenth time in his fiftieth and last Test match, played at The Oval in London.
... (read more)The first words I ever read by Mike Brearley were in my first Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, the 1976 edition: they were a tribute to his long-time teammate at Middlesex, wicketkeeper John Murray. The tone was warm, generous, and largely conventional, with a single shaft of ...
... (read more)Bernard Whimpress reviews 'Feeling is the Thing that Happens in 1000th of a Second: A season of cricket photographer Patrick Eagar' by Christian Ryan and 'Lillee & Thommo: The deadly pair’s reign of terror' by Ian Brayshaw
A modern cricket photographer using digital single-lens reflex cameras and high-speed motor drives can take 5,000 photos in a day’s play. With such a surfeit of images, the quality of seeing is diminished. For most of his career from the 1970s to the 2010s, English photographer Patrick Eagar would shoot four or five rolls of film ...
... (read more)Varun Ghosh reviews 'Benaud: An appreciation' by Brian Matthews
For more than half a century, Richie Benaud (1930–2015) graced the game of cricket around the world. A dashing batsman and fierce leg-spinner, Benaud was the first ...
... (read more)Bernard Whimpress reviews 'The Keepers' by Malcolm Knox
Second ball, day three of the 2014 Boxing Day Test match and Australian wicket-keeper Brad Haddin dives full length in front of first slip Shane Watson to catch Indian number three batsman Cheteshwar Pujara off Ryan Harris single-handed in the webbing of his glove. Virat Kohli replaces Pujara, and in the last over of the day he is still there, with 169 runs. He flas ...
Bernard Whimpress reviews 'The Strangers Who Came Home' by John Lazenby
Enterprise and energy are integral to this story. Without the enterprise of James Lillywhite and John Conway there would have been no Australian tour to England in 1878. Nottingham professional Lillywhite, who captained England in the first-ever Test matches at Melbourne in March-April 1877, arranged the English fixture list and former Victorian all-rounder Conway c ...
Bernard Whimpress reviews 'The Invincibles: New Norcia’s Aboriginal cricketers 1879–1906' by Bob Reece
Emeritus Professor Bob Reece has published widely on Aboriginal history and on New Norcia history in particular. In a brief preface he notes that his paternal grandfather and father were fine cricketers and that he (a poor player) has followed the game from the time of Don Bradman’s Invincibles in the late 1940s. When he learned of the Benedictine Mission’s Aboriginal cricketers who played between 1879 and 1906, the story demanded to be told. Without doubt Reece is the best person to tell it.
... (read more)Bernard Whimpress reviews 'Bradman’s War: How the 1948 Invincibles Turned the Cricket Pitch into a Battlefield' by Malcolm Knox
At last, new Bradman territory to be conquered: the Don 1939–45 or, if we discount the ‘phoney war’ (‘Business as Usual’, as Robert Menzies said of that first phase in World War II), perhaps 1941–45. I imagined a slim volume. Not so! Instead, there is a catch to the subtitle of Bradman’s War: How the 1948 Invincibles Turned the Cricket Pitch into a Battlefield, which indicates that we will be on more familiar terrain.‘More familiar’ because this book is an attempt at revisionist history. Questioning the Bradman idolatry and the invincibility of the Invincibles is a suitable aim. However, the main task for the revisionist historian is to provide either fresh new evidence or a powerful reinterpretation of existing evidence as part of formulating a balanced argument: Malcolm Knox does neither.
... (read more)