The Ashes

The Ashes Synopsis

In The Ashes:150 years of cricket's never-ending story, Duncan Hamilton brilliantly brings alive what he regards as 'Cricket's Greatest Soap Opera' and 'sporting perpetual motion.'
For Hamilton, the Ashes 'endures because it is genuinely a never-ending story - told in thousands- upon-thousands of episodes.'
Hamilton offers a series of seminal and interlinked short-stories that not only bring alive again its 'long history' but also captures anew those who shaped it; the characters who 'come and go again - appearing, disappearing, reappearing - but are 'always there' because in every Ashes Test 'you find something that relates to another era - or even, on occasions, a different century.'
Hamilton writes about Ted Peate and the consequences of his rash shot that led to England's defeat at The Oval in 1882.
He discusses the photograph that ties the incipient days of The Ashes to the era of Donald Bradman.
He explains how one man's obsession with W G Grace changed cricket writing.
He examines why Douglas Jardine loathed Australia and Australians.
He discusses the complexities of Len Hutton and highlights what 'fame' meant in pre-and-post-war England.
He identifies the Monday morning on which Richie Benaud's career changed.
He focuses on the series in Australia during which the English game was dragged, albeit reluctantly, into the soon-to-be effervescent 1960s.
He highlights the plight of a respected English bowler who, ten years before Kerry Packer changed the game forever, proved why players deserved to be better paid.
He sweeps his gaze across the summer of 1985, revealing it as the 'season when the Ashes was played twice.'
He remembers an afternoon at Lord's when Shane Warne - though long retired - made a crowd swoon again with his leg-spin.
And he relives Headingley in 2019 wholly through the eyes of an unlikely hero who turned near-certain defeat into the miracle of victory.
The Ashes is the result of Hamilton's life-long obsession with the contest and also with Australia, the country where so many of his relatives made their homes as Ten Pound Poms.