Cricket Merry Go Round

Stanley Paul. Very Good/Good. 1956. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo Dust jacket unclipped in clear protective sleeve, chunks missing. Green cloth boards with black titling on spine. No ownership marks. Frontis plate. 28 illustrations photographs. 192 pages clean and ti8ght. In June, 1950, Brian Statham bowled his first ball for Lancashire. Six months later he was being flown out as a reinforcement to F. R. Brown's M.C.C. team in Australia. By the spring of 1955, Statham, not yet twenty-five years of age, had completed his fourth overseas tour. Cricket has certainly been a merry-go-round of five crowded years for the young Lancashire fast bowler . . . five years at the end of which he has emerged, in the opinion of the shrewdest judges, as the best consistent fast bowler in the world. Statham has been a key player in the period between the dark post-war years of English cricket, when a sequence of humbling defeats were experienced against Australia, and the present day; a period in which the balance of cricket power has swung back to England. He tells the full, absorbing story of these five years, in which he was the only bowler to encounter in Test matches the batsmen of all the other cricket nations: Australia, South Africa, West Indies, New Zealand, India and Pakistan. He writes not only of these clashes, but of the many-sided aspects of tours in all corners of the Empire. Here, too, is an account of the birth of his famous fast-bowling combination with Frank ("Typhoon") Tyson. It is a full and varied merry-go-round of the cream of cricket. .