Cricket Book Captures Quintessential Kiwi Summer

Media release for immediate use: 14 November 2006

Cricket Book Captures Quintessential Kiwi Summer

From the time the first game was played in New Zealand in December 1842, sitting on the bank watching a cricket match has become an essential part of the Kiwi summer.

As Wellington writer, poet and cricket fanatic Harry Ricketts writes in his soon to be published Ginger Series book, How to Catch a Cricket Match, the sport’s grip is astonishing: Indians consider cricket to be an Indian game (accidentally discovered by the English), West Indians see it as integral part of their national identity, and the same is true of Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Zimbabweans, Australians, Bangladeshis, South Africans… and New Zealanders.

References to the sport crop up throughout our cultural history: Rudyard Kipling called cricketers ‘flannelled fools’. As comic relief Alfred Hitchcock put two archetypal English cricket fans in his thriller, The Lady Vanishes. Groucho Marx, when taken to a cricket match, asked halfway through when it was going to begin.

Yet despite the jibes, weird practices, strange language, eccentric umpires and frequent scandals – or perhaps because of them – cricket is today one of the world’s most passionately followed and played sports.

For cricket aficionado or learner alike, Harry Ricketts’ How to Catch a Cricket Match will enthrall and enchant.

Endorsements:

‘Harry Ricketts has written a classic cricket essay, a fascinating and beautifully crafted addition to the literature on the alluring game’ - SPIRO ZAVOS

‘As elegant and economical as a Martin Crowe straight drive, this slim volume contains an admirably clear and concise introduction to cricket, a potted history of the game, a guide to the many and varied pleasures available to the serious cricket follower, and some beguiling fragments of autobiography. Well played, Mr Ricketts.’ - PAUL THOMAS

‘A beautifully crafted innings of a book – stylish, perceptive, superbly focused and vastly entertaining’

- KEVIN IRELAND

ENDS

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