"Barbados Test meandering to a draw" #cricket #bookreading #selfpublishing

"Cricket is a strangely beautiful game with it’s own lexicon, pace of life, teas and lunches, chirping and sledging, being in and out and sometimes back in again all whilst liberally coated in endless statistics, TV umpiring decisions, instant replays and, seemingly dependent upon your place of birth, beguiling or boring.

As you would expect from a day’s Test Match cricket, all of the above and more were present and correct today.

We had a perfect off spinning ball that finally defeated the West Indian Captain Kraigg Brathwaite and beautifully pinging back his “off peg” in the process. Chris Woakes finally received a reward for his mammoth amount of overs bowled as Kemar Roach played all around a “straight one” to be dismissed LBW or “Leg Before Wicket” for just 1 run from 17 balls. And there’s those damned statistics again: 1 run, 17 balls received and all the while coated with the game’s own language of being dismissed by the method of LBW as well as a “Night Watchman” “hanging around” for 19 runs from 75 deliveries and because of the role played in the game, this is seen as a roaring success, and rightly so.

A “Night Watchman” is primarily a bowler who bats at the tail end of a day to protect the better batsmen before him and thus allowing them to sleep peacefully before batting on a fresh new day.

Alzarri Joseph therefore carried out his team duty perfectly today as despite the statistics that swamp our beautiful game, it’s still very much a human game played by wonderfully gifted cricketing humans, and today’s human story belongs firmly and completely to the captain of the West Indies, Kraigg Brathwaite. Before being bowled by the very epitome of a cricketing “Jaffa” or unplayable delivery from Jack Leach, Brathwaite had batted for as near as dammit two days in the Test Match from a ridiculous 489 balls received, thus allowing the West Indian captain to craft 160 valuable runs".

The above is an extract from the chapter being read here and forms part of the West Indies leg of watching England through the night from Australia to New Zealand via the West Indies and Pakistan and is the book on Test Match cricket I've always wanted to write. Self published in May 2023, there is a link below for the book I'm incredibly proud of together with other ways and means of supporting me, if you are able, to thumb the eye of traditional publishers who refused to read my original manuscript!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C5Z3FVYC

https://www.patreon.com/TheBlackfordBookClub
https://www.paypal.me/TheBlackfordBookClub
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/steveblackford

Thanks for watching!

Please "like" and subscribe!

Thank you.