Spirit of Cricket

Time after time, Brearley takes familiar cricketing dilemmas - balltampering, Mankading, sledging, etc. - and with elegant prose and courteous intelligence sheds fresh light on them, including areas on which he has changed his mind over time. This delightful book would make a great gift for any cricket-lover who also has a brain, or even a soul.

Mike Brearley is a thoughtful and meticulous author. He regularly displayed similar traits when captaining England (he did so on 31 occasions, losing only four Tests) and he applies them again in Spirit of Cricket, a book he was born to write. Brearley is an intelligent guide, well-qualified to lead readers through cricket's occasionally byzantine moral maze

[Brearley is] a thoughtful, engaging and eclectic thinker . . . There is something intrinsically fair-minded about Mike Brearley, open to exploring ideas wherever they come from, seeking out common ground, but at the same time anxious to avoid giving offence by reaching too-easy conclusions. That is the process that is at play in the pages of Spirit of Cricket. This is no ordinary sporting hero's memoir, though it does include plenty of stories from his glory days

One of my favourites of 2020 . . . a generous book