Stephen Chalke MICKY STEWART AND THE CHANGING FACE OF CRICKET First Edition Double Signed
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Stephen Chalke MICKY STEWART AND THE CHANGING FACE OF CRICKET First Edition Double Signed
First edition, first print hardback of MICKY STEWART AND THE CHANGING FACE OF CRICKET by Stephen Chalke. Published by Fairfield Books, Bath, in 2012. Signed by Micky Stewart and Stephen Chalke on the half title page.The book is in near fine condition (Clean green cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine), with the very lightest shelf wear to the pictorial dust jacket which is not price clipped. Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no other inscriptions.
Stephen Chalke took up writing about cricket in 1997. His first book, Runs in the Memory, a portrait of county cricket in the 1950s, was Frank Keatings Sports Book of the Year in the Guardian, and he has followed this with several further books about crickets past.
At the Heart of English Cricket based on the life and memories of the former administrator Geoffrey Howard was The Cricket Society Book of the Year while his collaborations with Bob Appleyard and Tom Cartwright were both the Wisden Book of the Year, making him the first author to win the award twice.
For ten years he was a regular contributor to Wisden Cricket Monthly and the Wisden Cricketer magazine, and he has also written for The Times and the Independent. A collection of his articles, The Way It Was, won the National Sporting Clubs Cricket Book of the Year award.
Now 65 years old, he continues to play cricket each summer for the wandering club he set up in the 1980s, The Journeymen, and for the third eleven of Winsley Cricket Club. He wrote about his own cricket in his 2010 book Now I'm 62 The Diary of Ageing Cricketer and more recently in Telephone Cricket in the June 2013 issue of All Out Cricket, an article chosen in the Cricket Society Journal as the best to appear that month in any of the cricket magazines.
"There are few men alive who have been as involved in English cricket as extensively and for as long as Micky Stewart. Now at last, in this book, he shares his reflections on his time in the game and on the changes he has lived through.
He is one of the last survivors of the Surrey side who won the championship in seven successive summers in the 1950s. He was a fine opening batsman and a brilliant close catcher, who fielded on uncovered pitches to the best bowling attack in the history of the county game.
He played football for England at amateur level, then for Charlton Athletic in the old Division One. In 1956 he was selected to represent Great Britain in the Melbourne Olympics but, alas, fell foul of the hypocrisy of the time.
His brief career as an England cricketer included one of the great Test matches of all time and a bizarre tour of India beset by illness and injury.
He was Surrey captain through most of the 1960s when so much began to change in the English game: the beginning of limited-over cricket, the abolition of amateurs and professionals, and the introduction of overseas players.
As England manager, after enjoying Ashes success in Australia, he endured two years of hell from a major row over umpiring in Pakistan to a summer in which England got through four captains before combining with Graham Gooch to set England on a course of greater teamwork and fitness which continues to this day.
His son Alec made his debut for both Surrey and England when Micky was manager, going on to become Englands most capped Test cricketer.
Through it all, Micky has remained true to the values that his father, a professional gambler, drilled into him: enjoy what you do in life, always aim to be the best and, above all, be honest.
As he approaches his eightieth birthday, Micky is still young at heart, still looking to the future, still passionate about the game of cricket. He is not nostalgic for his past, which allows him to share his memories in a way that will appeal to young and old alike."
'A fierce patriotic pride runs through Stewart (father and son), as lettering through Blackpool rock, something made clear in Stephen Chalke's excellent biography. Like all good books about sport, it is also about the changing face of society, and reading this account of Stewart's life illustrates the many changes of the past half-century and more.' - Mike Atherton, The Times
'A fascinating book on Englands first cricket moderniser. It is certainly worth reading.' - Steve James, Daily Telegraph
'A great read about a man who saw the future at exactly the right time, realising that the game had to change but maintaining the important traditional qualities we all respect.' - Graham Benson, All Out Cricket magazine
'300 pages filled with intriguing recollections, vividly and unfussily told. The book is full of forward thinking and fond reflection. In particular Chalke avoids nostalgia, which pickles the past in emotional aspic, and instead allows the cricketers to emerge in all their red-blooded, fallible glory. There may well be other books on post-war English cricket, but they will all draw to some extent on the many interviews with Stewart and others that fill these pages. Chalke has done something even rarer too: he has written a good book about a good man.' - Paul Edwards, Cricinfo
'The insights into the strongest county team of all time, the county championship of the '50s and '60s and the start of the English coaching system make this a truly valuable book on three counts.' - Scyld Berry, Sunday Telegraph
320 pages. Illustrated with 75 black & white photographs.
ISBN: 978 0 9568511 2 3
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Stephen Chalke MICKY STEWART AND THE CHANGING FACE OF CRICKET First Edition Double Signed