Nicholas Cricket and the other members of the Bug-a-Wug Cricket Band lead all the forest creatures in a musical celebration of the night.

Mark Nicholas, anchor for Channel 9's Test commentary team in Australia and Channel 5's Cricket on Five show in the UK, has a unique knowledge and perspective on the world game of cricket. As both a former player and now a professional observer and commentator on the game he knows all the key figures in the sport and has witnessed first-hand some of cricket's greatest moments ... His book is a personal account of the game as he's seen and experienced it. Focusing on England and Australia, the two countries he's intimately familiar with, Mark takes us through the modern game, illuminating the arts of batting, bowling and captaincy, and giving us a wealth of detail about the world's greatest players, as well as epic Ashes battles ... Informed by Mark's own experiences and observations, and filled with wonderful anecdotes, larger than life characters, and an extraordinary breadth of cricket knowledge, A Beautiful Game shows why Mark is so passionate about the sport, and exactly why cricket really is the world's beautiful game.

Cricket has perhaps held more writers in its thrall than any other sport: many excellent books have been written about it, and many great authors have played it. The Authors Cricket Club used to play regularly against teams made up of Publishers and Actors. They last played in 1912, and include among their alumni such greats as PG Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle and JM Barrie. A hundred years on from their last match, a team of modern-day authors has been assembled to continue this fine literary and sporting tradition in a nationwide tour in search of the perfect day's cricket. The Authors XI is the story of their season. Over the course of a summer they played over a dozen matches, each one carefully chosen for capturing an aspect of cricket, in some of England's most spectacular and historic grounds, against a wide range of opponents. Each player contributes a chapter about one of their fixtures, using a match report as a starting point for an essay on cricket and its appeal, both historically and today. From Matthew Parker on cricket and empire, and Kamila Shamsie on the women's game, to Tom Holland on cricket and ageing, and Thomas Penn on cricket and history, this is an engaging look at cricket's enduring appeal. Further chapters from other team members examine issues such as class, empire, and sport and the stage.

From Sathasivam to Sangakkara, Murali to Malinga, Sri Lanka can lay claim to some of the world's most remarkable cricketers - larger-than-life characters who thumbed convention and played the game their own way. More so than anywhere else in the world, Sri Lankan cricket has an identity. This is the land of pint-sized swashbuckling batsman, on-the-fly innovators and contorted, cryptic spinners. On the field of play, Victorian ideals of the past collide with madcap tropical hedonism to create something dizzying. Cricket is Sri Lanka, and Sri Lanka is cricket. We all know the story of the '96 World Cup: how a team of unfancied amateurs rose from obscurity to the top the world, doing so with such swagger that they changed the way the game was played. Yet the lore of Sri Lankan cricket stretches back much further. In the early days, matches between colonists and locals imbued cricket with a nationalistic drive. Ashes-bound ships stopping over in Colombo brought the world's biggest stars, from Bligh and Bradman to Grace and Grimmet. More recently, Sri Lanka has had to face the triumphs and tragedies that come when cash flows freely into the gentleman's game. An Island's Eleven tells this story for the first time, focusing on the characters and moments that have shaped the game forever.

Develop music appreciation among your students with folk songs, rhythmic poems, stories with musical themes, and picture books with strong musical links. Designed for teaching flexibility, these lessons can be adapted according to a teacher's level of musical proficiency and time limitations. Sections cover rhythm, melody, form, instruments, music history, and dance forms, with lively activities that involve singing, playing instruments, chanting, and movement. These are perfect for the nonmusician who is teaching music as well as the seasoned music specialist.

I have been handed the new ball and asked to bowl the opening spell in this book of Cricket Commentary and Commentators. It was always my ambition to play Test cricket for India, but I was allergic to grass. A pity because I would have been the silliest mid-on to have played Test cricket. My long leg would have been a sensation. There have never been swingers to match mine. I used to be such an agile fielder that a piece of music ‘Third Man Theme’ was composed as a tribute On the serious side, as a commentator, I was always fascinated by how cricket commentary began. While the journey of cricket commentary is fairly well-recorded in Australia and England, the information on the subject in other eight Test playing countries is scanty. This book – Cricket Commentary & Commentators – is a humble attempt to weave together threads scattered in different areas and diverse directions. The scope of the book has been enlarged to include not just commentators but even anchors, presenters, scorers and statisticians while making it a compendium on commentary. With these opening remarks, I urge you, the reader, to move forward.

Remarkably, a paper as committed to sports coverage as the "Telegraph" has neve collected all its best cricket writing over the years into one volume. Now, Nck Hoult, who covers cricket for the paper's sports desk, has filled that gap.here is a wealth of material. The early coverage from the start of the twentith century, is evocative reportage, ranging from the deaths of W.G. Grace andictor Trumper and the exploits of C.B. Fry, through Douglas Jardine's own selfpenned column on the Bodyline series, to "Jim" Swanton's magisterial distillatons of Don Bradman's Ashes performances. From the seventies, however, sports jurnalism evolved into features, profiles and analysis, with for the "Telegraph the superb writing of Tony Lewis on, for example, Clive Lloyd's all-conquerin West Indians and the first World Cup. Then, into the nineties the more whimsial and personal cricket writing from the likes of Martin Johnson, Mark Nichola and Simon Hughes, covering both keenly fought Tests and the most bucolic couny match at Bournemouth, with Barry Richards hammering a hundred before lunch.

In C. L. R. James's classic Beyond a Boundary, the sport is cricket and the scene is the colonial West Indies. Always eloquent and provocative, James--the "black Plato," (as coined by the London Times)--shows us how, in the rituals of performance and conflict on the field, we are watching not just prowess but politics and psychology at play. Part memoir of a boyhood in a black colony (by one of the founding fathers of African nationalism), part passionate celebration of an unusual and unexpected game, Beyond a Boundary raises, in a warm and witty voice, serious questions about race, class, politics, and the facts of colonial oppression. Originally published in England in 1963 and in the United States twenty years later (Pantheon, 1983), this second American edition brings back into print this prophetic statement on race and sport in society.

In his important contribution to the growing field of sports literature, Anthony Bateman traces the relationship between literary representations of cricket and Anglo-British national identity from 1850 to the mid 1980s. Examining newspaper accounts, instructional books, fiction, poetry, and the work of editors, anthologists, and historians, Bateman elaborates the ways in which a long tradition of literary discourse produced cricket's cultural status and meaning. His critique of writing about cricket leads to the rediscovery of little-known texts and the reinterpretation of well-known works by authors as diverse as Neville Cardus, James Joyce, the Great War poets, and C.L.R. James. Beginning with mid-eighteenth century accounts of cricket that provide essential background, Bateman examines the literary evolution of cricket writing against the backdrop of key historical moments such as the Great War, the 1926 General Strike, and the rise of Communism. Several case studies show that cricket simultaneously asserted English ideals and created anxiety about imperialism, while cricket's distinctively colonial aesthetic is highlighted through Bateman's examination of the discourse surrounding colonial cricket tours and cricketers like Prince Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji of India and Sir Learie Constantine of Trinidad. Featuring an extensive bibliography, Bateman's book shows that, while the discourse surrounding cricket was key to its status as a symbol of nation and empire, the embodied practice of the sport served to destabilise its established cultural meaning in the colonial and postcolonial contexts.

On a Bangalore night in April 2008, cricket and India changed forever. It was the first night of the Indian Premier League – cricket, but not as we knew it. It involved big money, glitz, prancing girls and Bollywood stars. It was not so much sport as tamasha: a great entertainment. The Great Tamasha examines how a game and a country, both regarded as synonymous with infinite patience, managed to produce such an event. James Astill explains how India's economic surge and cricketing obsession made it the dominant power in world cricket, off the field if rarely on it. He tells how cricket has become the central focus of the world's second-biggest nation: the place where power and money and celebrity and corruption all meet, to the rapt attention of a billion eyeballs. Astill crosses the subcontinent and, over endless cups of tea, meets the people who make up modern India – from faded princes to back-street bookmakers, slum kids to squillionaires – and sees how cricket shapes their lives and that of their country. Finally, in London he meets Indian cricket's fallen star, Lalit Modi, whose driving energy helped build this new form of cricket before he was dismissed in disgrace: a story that says much about modern India. The Great Tamasha is a fascinating examination of the most important development in cricket today. A brilliant evocation of an endlessly beguiling country, it is also essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the workings of modern India.