A Fan’s Guide to World Cricket | book review

2 minute read

A Fan’s Guide to World Cricket is basically a book with which you’ll idly plan holidays. It’s full colour, looks amazing and makes you wish you were overseas even more than you already do.

It covers 55 cities, all of which feature an international cricket ground. You’ll basically leaf through the book, see a picture of somewhere amazing and then think about when you might visit. Unlike other travel books, you’ll also know that you’ll be able to watch cricket on this holiday, so that saves a bit of time.

For each city, there are facts about the ground, a bit of info about the place, average weather conditions and three suggestions of non-cricket things to do. It’s not a wealth of information, but it’s a book you browse, rather than one you use for in-depth planning.

It seems well researched. We checked what we knew and sized up the Manchester page. The caption “Manchester has a rich music history and attracts top bands such as Coldplay” worried us immensely, but the main text namechecks The Buzzcocks and Joy Division among other bands, which is pretty good for a book like this.

Irrelevant Joy Division fact: We were feeding a friend’s cat in Macclesfield the other day when a tourist asked us if we knew where Ian Curtis’s street was. We did, because we’d just been feeding a cat there. “Probably going there for the same reason, eh?” he guessed. Being as we’d been feeding a cat and he’d come to ghoulishly gawp at a house where a man killed himself, you’d have to say he couldn’t have got that more wrong.

Anyway, A Fan’s Guide to World Cricket is a book you’d be happy owning, although we’re not quite sure who’d be moved to go out and buy it.

It might be a good present though. You can buy it from Amazon if you’ve someone it’ll suit.