Yakking Around the World: A Cricketer's Quest for Love and Utopia - Softcover

Hughes, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671773828 ISBN 13: 9780671773823

Publisher: Pocket Books, 2001

Synopsis

This is a wry, acerbic and very funny trip around the world offering real insights into national and cricketing cultures while exploring male attitudes to sex, love and marriage and ultimately revealing what constitutes Englishness. Simon Hughes, a professional cricketer (Middlesex and Durham), played a season in every other major Test match playing country during his 10 1/2 year cricket-playing career - from Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies, to India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Zimbabwe. There are fascinating insights into cricket as well as witty observations and hilarious experiences of life abroad, women, bad food, worse accommodation. There are the encounters with the great cricketers from overseas - Richards, Warne, Azharuddin and Ambrose - as well as an evening on the beach with a Sri Lankan homosexual, the fatal attraction of a New Zealand divorcee, managing a double identity in Australia, as best man at an arranged marriage in India and many more strange and funny encounters.

About this title

Product Description:

Used book

Review:

As a cricketer Simon Hughes enjoyed not immoderate success as a bowler with a championship-winning Middlesex side. As a writer, his previous effort A Lot of Hard Yakka, a tale of the life of an English county cricketer, won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in 1997.

Nowadays, Hughes can be found filling the role of "The Analyst" on Channel 4's test match coverage. Clearly a man of more than one talent, Hughes has now chronicled his travels around the cricketing globe as player and journalist. And as a success, Yakking Around The World stands comfortably amongst his other achievements. Having visited every test-cricket-playing nation, Hughes narrates his odyssey in whites with much aplomb. From London to Lahore via the Leewards, and many other exotic locations, he spices his recollections with memories of the local people and hospitality, with most specific and humorous reference to varying degrees of success with the native womenfolk. Cricket has often been twinned with travel writing, but rarely can it have been married with stories of red-blooded sexual desire! Hughes shakes all three into a splendidly funny cocktail and comes up with a winner. --Trevor Crowe

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0671773828
• ISBN 13: 9780671773823
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256