Cricket

Building thoughtfully on the work of the late Mike Marqusee, this is an insightful and richly rewarding labour of love. Astutely structured and deftly researched, the book draws on the author's deep knowledge of geopolitical reality and how it manifests itself in post-Imperial cricket, enabling an ambitious brief to be admirably met. At times, indeed, you wonder how the game has survived the context in which it is played. If you want to know why cricket is the world's most racialized, politicised and fascinating ballgame, look no further. - Rob Steen, Senior Lecturer and award-winning sports journalist, University of Brighton, UK Cricket is one of a few sports where nation vs nation remained a primary contest well into the new millennium. Inexorably tied to a colonial past, cricket also reflected the aspiration of its new nations and nationhoods over the last five decades. In a masterful work of scholarship, Wagg gives us an engaging, comprehensive new history of modern cricket. From the relentless churn of events, achievements and controversies around the cricketing globe, he teases out the sport's engagements with the zeitgeist: the tussle between the old world and the new, the tumult of race and gender, the advent of professionalism , globalisation and the corporatisation of cricket. As much as the book is about modern cricket around the world, Wagg has also skilfully identified the world's footprints on modern cricket. - Sharda Ugra, Senior Editor, ESPNcricinfo and ESPN India The injunction to keep politics out of sport is age-old. Muddle-headed too, as Stephen Wagg's comprehensive comparative history of the politics in cricket demonstrates. This thorough and necessary book should become a standard reference. - Gideon Haigh, Australia's leading cricket writer