Arm-Ball to Zooter

by Lawrence Booth

Few sports, with the possible exception of tae kwon do, have a vocabulary as rich and as apparently grounded in freemasonry as cricket. Lawrence Booth presents this guide to the weird and wonderful language of cricket.

277 pages, Paperback

First published October 5, 2006

Reviews

[Nic]

I have thoroughly enjoyed strolling through this over the past few months.

[Pinaki]

Wittiest possible introduction to cricketing terminologies.
e.g. Leg Before Wicket: Lbw is to cricket what the off-side rule is to FOOTBALL: It is always the first thing people point to when they say they don't understand the game. There is no excuse for this. Put simply, if the ball hits a part of the batsman other than his bat (or the gloves as long as they are holding the bat), did not pitch outside the leg stump, and would in the opinion of the umpire have gone on to hit the wicket, then the batsman is out leg-before. Complications arise when you delve into the detail - and the history of the development of the lbw law is almost worth a book in itself- but we are not talking Fermat's Last Theorem here. If the batsman is hit outside the line of off-stump and is playing a shot, then he is not out. If he is playing no shot- this is usually obvious - then his fate is in the hands of umpires. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is that.

[Thomas]

an exhilarating cricket miscellany, taking both the cricket enthusiast and the novice on an enjoyable spin