Cricket, Lovely Cricket?: An Addict's Guide to the World's Most Exasperating Game - Softcover

"It is a great virtue in a cricket writer, the ability to flourish a polished anecdote or a droll quotation like a man embellishing an engaging conversation... Anything [Booth] writes is going to be worth reading" (Wisden)

"Engaging... a delight" (Peter Wilby Observer)

"One of England's funniest and most engaging cricket writers" (Independent)

"Lawrence Booth has put together a sports book like no other" (Daily Express)

"Wry, affectionate, irreverent and full of delicious anecdotes" (Metro)

Cricket, Lovely Cricket is a journey around the perennially curious world of cricket, leaving no metaphorical leg-break unturned and peering at the game from every conceivable angle. Here, Lawrence Booth, who had little option but to turn a youthful obsession with the game into a means of paying the mortgage, seeks to consider the questions that crop up on a daily basis but rarely receive a satisfactory answer. What are the players really like? What is the secret of sledging? Why get so worked up about the Ashes? Why all the clichés? And how did India take over the world?

Taking the reader to the heart of a game that seems more capable than any other of bewitching its followers, this is a captivating look at the way cricket has become what it is today - and what, given a fair wind, it might be like in the future.