There are few things in life more pleasing than giving one’s friends a good kicking, but I’m afraid sometimes only an ovation will do.
There are few things in life more pleasing than giving one’s friends a good kicking, but I’m afraid sometimes only an ovation will do. And this is one of them. My old chum and colleague Amol Rajan has just come up with an enchanting new book about spin bowling, Twirlymen (Yellow Jersey), and an absolute snip it is too at fifteen quid.
It was my dad who first introduced me to the joys of spin. He bowled good off-breaks at minor county level for 40-odd years before my mother put her foot down. He learnt to bowl in the 1920s in the garden of my grandparents’ terraced house in Long Eaton. The grass strip measured exactly 22 yards, the length of a cricket pitch, but that was it: no room for a run-up.
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