Cricket on the Edge

2019 ONE BIG YEAR FOR ENGLAND CRICKET England won the cricket World Cup on 14 July. They followed that with a pulsating Ashes Test series over 25 days, marginally shaded by Australia. The third Test produced one of the great innings in the history of Test cricket - Ben Stokes's 135 not out. In the background, the well established one-day competition took place, the newly established T20 Blast ended in a cliffhanger on Finals Day, the long established County Championship provided days of absorbing cricket. For the two contenders for the title, Essex and Somerset, it came down to the last session of the last game of the long season.This book shows how England cricket teams draw on county performances in all formats, red ball and white ball. It contains a fascinating account of the World Cup's twists and turns involving all 10 finalists, and sheds light on cricket's global ambitions.Raging through it all was the debate on the merits of the ECB's re-boost of Blast cricket as The Hundred, inflaming passions and generating fierce argument. THIS BOOK TELLS IT ALL 216 pages, 76,000 words, 36 illustrations."2019 is a year no cricket fan will ever forget. . . Cricket on the Edge] is more than just a diary of that summer. Cawkwell] delves deeper, covering all of 2019 - including England's overseas tours - and the County Championship. . . It is a delightful, opinionated and well-written account; one which many of us would love to write. He] . . . cares deeply about its cricket's] future, which is perhaps why he, like many others, is fearful of The Hundred. Maybe Cawkwell has every right to be worried . . . As someone who wants to succeed for the good of the game, I am tired of reading this. Nevertheless Cawkwell has every right to voice it. . ." - Thomas Blow in The Cricketer August 2020"Like the other books on the 2019] season, this is an eye-witness account, although not always from personal visits to the matches, some accounts being compiled from watching on television or, in the case of county cricket, live-stream . . . It is also a very personal account, taking in not only the cricket but also memories of the author's father and the author's own experiences of an operation (including an anaesthetic-fuelled excursion into Proust), the recovery from which gave him the enforced leisure to enjoy the last two Tests of the series on television. . . Perhaps the key to the book comes towards the end where the author, in finding that he enjoys T20 cricket, experiences what is popularly called 'cognitive dissonance', and attempts to resolve it not by choosing between red-ball and white-ball cricket but by embracing 'both versions as meritorious in themselves' - while holding onto the belief that the red-ball game is better." - Richard Lawrence in The Cricket Statistician, August 2020"Last summer's cricket was a welcome distraction from another issue that dominated our lives, that being the total Horlicks that both sides of the Brexit imbroglio made of it . . . I mention the issue because of the very clever analysis of the situation in the prelude to Tim Cawkwell's splendid book. . . Hitherto Cawkwell's books have dealt with the County Championship, and indeed that is a large part of their appeal. Thus whilst I enjoyed Cawkwell's take on the World Cup and the Ashes the reminders of the domestic season, which crop up from time to time throughout the book, were my favourite passages." - Martin Chandler on Cricket Web, April 2020