Talking Cricket: The Game's Greats in Conversation

Talking Cricket is about cricket conversations. This book brings together the best long-form interviews from Wisden Asia Cricket and Cricinfo magazines and the ESPNcricinfo website over the last decade. Featured are the great and good of the game from across eras – from Frank Tyson and Garry Sobers to Virender Sehwag and Mahela Jayawardene, and plenty more in between. Each interview is broadly focused on a theme: there’s Barry Richards on batting, Ian Chappell on the Australian way, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis on swing bowling, Allan Donald and Michael Holding on fast bowling, Simon Taufel on umpiring, and Anil Kumble on spin. Since cricket captaincy is among the more cerebral of the game’s arts, we have four interviews on the subject: Mark Taylor, Nasser Hussain, Mahela Jayawardene and MAK Pataudi. The 22 gathered here bring together wisdom, insights, anecdotes and humour from some of the finest practitioners of cricket’s many crafts, and provide the fan with a deeper appreciation of the game we all love. ESPNcricinfo has been the No. 1 cricket website in the world since it first went online in 1993. With a monthly average of over 20 million users worldwide, it is also among the largest single-sport websites in the world. The site pioneered live ball-by-ball updates and it continues to be the leader in the field, integrating into its live coverage various elements from its searchable data feed to give fans a truly rich live-match experience. This is backed up by text, audio- and video-based match analysis content, providing a comprehensive coverage menu. ESPNcricinfo maintains the game’s widest, most authoritative database, with details of about 65,000 international and domestic players, officials and administrators, over 40,000 matches, and more than 2500 grounds. It also runs its own global news operation, and its news and match coverage are supplemented by comments, features, interviews, blogs and multimedia content. The strength of its journalism has given ESPNcricinfo the status of cricket’s pre-eminent global voice – one that is followed by fans, players and administrators alike.