Author: Christopher Hilton
Buy 'Cricket's 300 Men' and get 'The Birth of the Ashes' FREE!
Cricket's 300 Men-
It is the ultimate in cricket - to score a Test innings of 300. And Brian Lara has now pushed that on to 400.
In the long history of the game only 17 batsmen have become triple centurions, beginning with Surrey’s Andrew Sandham in the West Indies in 1930 and culminating in Lara’s astonishing feat in 2004.
The story of these epic innings has never been gathered into a book before – and some of the innings are barely known. It makes them even more fascinating because each innings became immortal as well as rare. Christopher Hilton, who has been a cricket lover all his life, worked as a sports journalist on the Daily Express and is now a successful author. He re-creates each innings in great depth, setting them into their context and letting all the intrinsic drama unfold using original source material, much of which has lain unseen for decades.
Here, striding to the crease again are the great ones: Wally Hammond, Don Bradman – only he and Lara have ever scored 300 twice – through Len Hutton and Garfield Sobers all the way to Matthew Hayden and Virender Sehwag in our own time.
The book has a full scorecard of each innings and is lavishly illustrated.
(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)
