Raymond Rhodes

I’m a huge cricket fan of long standing, so have a natural bias towards any cricket book. There are many interesting titbits in this volume - although some stories are well-documented in other works - and the research involved in its creation is impressive, given the pagination given over to sources and references. However, it reads more like a list rather than providing further depth and interest to the items covered; for me, less examples but more detail would have been better. It is a show more book to dip into now and again rather than for long immersions. The subject matter is worthy of attention; cricket is not alone in deserving of merit in a study of debuts but the game has aspects that do not feature as prominently elsewhere: there is the individual v. team factor; the key differences when a side is fielding or batting; characteristics of batmen v. bowlers; the gaps or breaks in play and pressures that ensue; and when a side is touring it can be away from home for weeks/months, with associated problems pertaining to family and mental health issues. Cricket is a sport with a long history of individual breakdowns and even suicides. Understanding some of the pressures involved is certainly worth studying and recording. This work illustrates some of those pressures from the viewpoint of a cricketer making his/her foray into the Test arena. show less