Buy 'Sussex County Cricket Club' and get 'The Birth of the Ashes' FREE!

Author: Paul Weaver and Bruce Talbot

Buy 'Sussex County Cricket Club' and get 'The Birth of the Ashes' FREE!

Buy 'Sussex County Cricket Club: The Golden Age' and get 'The Birth of the Ashes' FREE!

Sussex County Cricket Club: The Golden Age-
The history of Sussex, the oldest of the county cricket clubs, is nothing if not dramatic. In 2003, after an excruciating wait of 164 years, Sussex seized the Championship title for the first time. Since then, they have been the dominant force in the domestic game, winning the title twice more in 2006 and 2007, and the C&G Trophy in 2006.
That first Championship five years ago was the subject of the critically acclaimed The Longest Journey. Now authors Paul Weaver and Bruce Talbot return to explain why this has been the richest period in the club’s already vivid history.
Going behind the scenes, Weaver and Talbot talk to players and coaches, old and new, to explore the big questions surrounding the club. Why, they ask, did a club with some of the most exciting players in the game find the big prize so elusive for so long? And how, after a revolution in 1997, did the club embark on one of the headiest voyages in the history of county cricket? For fans who want to discover all this and more, Sussex County Cricket Club: The Golden Age is a must-buy.
(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)