Skip to main content

My Book - A War to the Knife

My Book, "A War to the Knife" is finished and available from

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/sport-hobbies/a-war-to-the-knife/ 


A WAR TO THE KNIFE tells the story of two test match series: England vs West Indies in 1933 and West Indies vs England in 1935.  The England team was one of the best to ever play the game, including Herbert Sutcliffe, Wally Hammond and Harold Larwood and captained by Douglas Jardine they had just crushed Don Bradman’s Australia in the infamous bodyline series.

The West Indian side, made up from the populations of Britain’s scattered possessions in the Caribbean and divided by race as well as island loyalties, seemingly had little chance against Jardine’s juggernaut.  But cricket in the West Indies was more than just a game, it allowed the island’s multi - racial populations to compete as equals and the cricket that emerged was exciting and new, suffused with athletic excellence, passion and the desire for dignity and financial security.

Could men like Learie Constantine, Manny Martindale and George Headley take West Indian cricket out into the world and beat the best the British had to offer?

To purchase the book please go to:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09PWQPSMD 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

County Championship Salary Cap

This is post about salaries in county cricket. The first class counties are subject to a cap and a collar on amounts paid in wages to cricketers.  They must pay above a collar, currently £0.75m, and below a cap, currently £2m. There is an agreement for both the collar and the cap to increase over the next funding round to 2024. In 2024 the collar will be £1.5m and the cap £2.5m What is less clear is what payments count towards the cap and collar.  I assume employers' national insurance (a 13% tax on wages) isn't included.  Similarly I assume payments to coaching staff don't count towards the cap as if they did, Somerset, Lancashire and Yorkshire would all be over the current £2m cap.  I've gone through the accounts of the first class counties to see what, if any, disclosure, they include on players' wages.  What gets disclosed varies enormously, quite a lot for some counties, nothing for others.  Additionally there is a possibility the information include

Mo Bobat and County Cricket

Cricinfo has this  interview with ECB "Performance Director" Mo Bobat.  Bobat makes an interesting claim about county cricket, "Take something like county batting average. We know that a county batting average does not significantly predict an international batting average, so a lot of the conventional things that are looked at as being indicators of success - they don't really stand true in a predictive sense."  And later in the article there is a graph, showing county averages plotted against test averages for 13 English test batsmen.  This is reproduced below. better than random? raw data suggests no meaningful link between championship and test averages 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Test County Championship Sam Curran England players' batting averages

English County Cricket Finance: 2018 Bentley Forbes Rankings

I have gone through the most recent financial statements for the English first class counties,  made an estimate of the financial strength of each and given them a Bentley Forbes Consulting ( TM ) financial sustainability ranking.  The overall table looks like this. County      Profit Assets Ranking Position Essex   4   4   4   1 Surrey   1   7   4   1 Nottinghamshire   5   5   5   3 Somerset   2   8   5   3 Derbyshire   8   3   5   5 Leicestshire    6   6  6   6 Sussex  15   1  8   7 Middlesex  14   2  8   7 Kent     9   9  9   9 Worcestshire    3  15  9 10 Gloucestshire   7  12  9.5 11 Northamptonshire   11  13  12 12 Glamorgan   16  10  13 13 Durham     12  14  13 13 Yorkshire    10  17  13 15 Warwickshire   17  11  14 16 Lancashire   13  16  14 17        The approach is to rank the counties for profitability and balance sheet strength and combine the two measures in a sustainability ranking. The balance sheet strength is itself a combination of thre