A great cricket book, first published in 1963, at the end of this Ashes series, about 3 years before I got interested in cricket.
Ross writes beautifully and in detail about the test series (ball by ball at times) and with great literary verve, a dull Australian batsman going about his job ‘with a mortician’s lofty detachment from the irksome job in hand’.
As well as the cricket, it is a great travelogue of an English guy going round Australia (with quite a lot of distaste for the architecture, if that is what it is/was), in the early 1960’s. You could read this and think that Ross is an over privileged, no doubt upper or upper middle class, educated Englishman, but despite my ½ Irish antagonism to the English I identify quite closely with his narrative. And the chronicles of each Test match are brilliant.
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