Author: Wasim Khan and Alan Wilkinson
Buy 'Brim Full of Passion' and get 'The Birth of the Ashes' FREE!
Brim Full of Passion: The Official Autobiography of Wasim Khan-
Eight-year-old Wasim Khan yanks a board out of the garden fence, nicks his Mum’s only decent knife, and starts whittling. A month later he’s putting his first bat to good use: sending the school’s tennis balls high onto the roof so that he can sneak back over the gate at night and liberate them.
Brim Full of Passion follows this son of Kashmiri immigrants from the grimy streets of Small Heath to leafy Edgbaston, where he breaks in through the fence to watch England play Pakistan. A year later he’s there legitimately, batting for the under-13s.
The dream is simple: Warwickshire, England, the world. After four gruelling years as an apprentice pro he makes the all-conquering Bears team of 1995, and is on the brink of the England ‘A’ squad. But a loss of form, a dodgy selection policy, and the first British-born Asian to make the county grade loses his confidence. A move to Sussex is a disaster: he falls out with captain Chris Adams, can’t get a game, and winds up playing for Derbyshire for nothing. At 30 it’s all over and he's embarking on a new career as a coach. Anything to stay in the game he loves.
Brim Full of Passion takes the reader into dressing-rooms from Edgbaston to Sydney; to the Kashmiri village where Wasim goes to bury his father; onto the field with Mike Atherton and Wasim Akram, deep into the heart of the pro game where players share the joy of success but feed off each other's failures. It charts Wasim’s extraordinary journey from ghetto to county circuit, from one-man coaching outfit with an office in his bedroom to his job as Operations Director with the Cricket Foundation and his role with the £50 million Chance to Shine initiative, the most expensively funded sporting initiative the country has seen.
Brim Full of Passion was named Wisden Book of the Year
(Full price: £16.99)
The Birth of the Ashes-
What is the reality behind the mythology of The Ashes? The amazing and unexpected answers are revealed in this deeply researched book which will fascinate every cricket lover round the world. Here, for the Birth time, the Oval Test match of 1882 – every bit as dramatic as anything in the 2005 season – is recreated ball by ball all the way to the agonising climax when Australia won by 7 runs.
Here, too, is the social context of that match, from the founding of Australia, spiced with a host of insights into how cricket was born and how it grew in a vast, rugged land - and how the Australians first came to England to take on the Mother Country.
The story of The Ashes is more, much more. When the Hon. Ivo Bligh took an England team to Australia in 1882–83 he said he was going to reclaim the Ashes of English cricket, lost at the Oval.
That led to a meeting with a property baron near Melbourne, an invitation for the team to stay at his mansion for Christmas … a knock-about match against the staff … and the baron’s wife, who had a little urn on her mantelpiece. She felt she ought to put some ashes into it for Bligh.
It led Bligh to a love affair with an Irish music teacher at the mansion, marriage and residence in his family mansion in Kent. It was this Irishwoman who, in 1927 when Bligh died, carried out his final instructions and sent the urn to be displayed at Lord’s, where it remains today as the living symbol of 130 years of titanic struggle between the old enemies.
(Full price: £4.99)
