Past winner Chris Waters challenges Kevin Pietersen for Cricket Society-MCC Book of the Year award

Given that it is seemingly impossible to keep him out of the news, it probably comes as no surprise that the shortlist for the 2015 Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year Award contains two books about Kevin Pietersen.

His own, highly controversial autobiography KP is one. The other is journalist Simon Wilde’s excellent and rather more balanced portrait, simply entitled: On Pietersen.
Challenging those two titles for the £3,000 first prize will be Chris Waters, who is seeking to win the award for a second time with 10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat.  The Yorkshire Post cricket writer won in 2012 with Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography.

Were 10 for 10 to emerge as the judges' choice there would be echoes of the 1986 success enjoyed by Alan Hill with Hedley Verity: A Portrait of a Cricketer.

Also on the shortlist are Christopher Sandford's poignant work The Final Over: The Cricketers of Summer 1914, which looks at the impact of the First World War on the game as a whole and for the individual players who went to fight.

From a longlist of 16, Dan Waddell makes the cut with Field of Shadows: The English Cricket Tour of Nazi Germany 1937, as does Peter Oborne's splendid Wounded Tiger: A History of Cricket in Pakistan.

Chair of judges Vic Marks said: “There are some good books here and my panel of wise judges will have much to discuss at our final meeting. It will be a lot closer than England’s matches at the recent World Cup. I am sure we will settle on a worthy winner."

The competition, run by the Cricket Society since 1970 and in partnership with MCC since 2009, is for books nominated by MCC and Cricket Society Members, and is highly regarded by writers and publishers. Last year’s winner was debutant cricket author and political editor of The Economist, James Astill, for his book about Indian cricket in a wider national context - The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India. Australian Gideon Haigh won in 2013 for On Warne, his book about Shane Warne.

The £3,000 prize for the winner, and certificates for all the shortlisted books, will be presented at an awards evening in the Long Room at Lord’s on Tuesday May 12.

The six books on the shortlist (alphabetically by author):

• Peter Oborne's Wounded Tiger: A History of Cricket in Pakistan (Simon and Schuster)
• Kevin Pietersen’s KP: The Autobiography (Little, Brown)
• Christopher Sandford's The Final Over: The Cricketers of Summer 1914, (The History Press)
• Dan Waddell’s Field of Shadows: The English Cricket Tour of Nazi Germany 1937 (Transworld Publishers)
• Chris Waters's 10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat (Bloomsbury)
• Simon Wilde’s On Pietersen (Simon and Schuster)

The other ten books considered (alphabetically by author) were:
Hubert Doggart's Cricket's Bounty (Phillimore)
Bill Francis’s Cricket’s Mystery Man, The Story of Sydney Gordon Smith (via Ronald Cardwell)
David Frith's Frith's Encounters (Von Krumm Publishing)
Pete Langman’s The Country House Cricketer (Marvelhouse Words; all profits to Parkinson’s research)
Antony Littlewood’s W.E. Astill (ACS)
Andrew Murtagh's Touched by Greatness: the story of Tom Graveney (Pitch Publishing)
Roger Packham, Nicholas Sharp, Phil Barnes and Jon Filby’s A Pictorial History of Sussex County Cricket Club (Sussex CCC)
Scott Reeves’s The Champion Band: The First English Cricket Tour (Chequered Flag Publishing)
Andrew Renshaw’s Wisden on the Great War: The Lives of cricket’s fallen 1914-1918 (Bloomsbury)
James Wilson’s Court and Bowled: Tales of Cricket and the Law (Wildy and Sons Ltd)

In addition to Vic Marks, the other judges are David Kynaston and Stephen Fay for the MCC,  John Symons and Chris Lowe for the Cricket Society.

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"10 for 10" named Book of the Year by the Cricket Writers' Club as Waters wins another award

Chris Waters, whose biography of Fred Trueman won three prestigious awards, has scored another hit with his excellent work on another Yorkshire cricketer, Hedley Verity.

10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket’s Greatest Bowling Feat was named Book of the Year by the Cricket Writers’ Club at their annual members’ lunch at the Plaisterers’ Hall in London.

The judges were impressed with the skill with which Waters was able recreate the atmosphere around cricket in Verity’s era, the 1930s, and in particular the match against Nottinghamshire at Headingley in July 1932 in which he took all 10 wickets to fall in the visitors’ second innings at a cost of only 10 runs, a world record analysis in first-class cricket that remains unsurpassed.

While that great feat of bowling is the book’s centrepiece, Waters revisits Verity's past and takes the story on, beyond the outbreak of war that ended his career to his death in Italy in 1943 from wounds sustained in battle.  It is a story told with warmth and affection and highlights the author's talent as a writer.

In his day job, Waters is the cricket correspondent of the Yorkshire Post, the position notably occupied for more than four decades by the great cricket writer J M "Jim" Kilburn, who was appointed to the job during Verity's time and kept it until his retirement in 1976.  It remains the most prestigious position in provincial cricket journalism.

The award for Waters completed a Yorkshire hat-trick.  Members of the CWC named the county's opening batsmen, Adam Lyth and Alex Lees, as County Championship Cricketer of the Year and Young Cricketer of the Year respectively.

Buy 10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

Buy Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

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After his Trueman triumph, Chris Waters tells the story of history's most famous bowling analysis

When cricket writer Chris Waters delivered the manuscript for Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography to his publisher three years ago, he told friends his first book would also be his last, echoing the words of countless writers before him. The journey from first thoughts to final page can be long and arduous, so grueling sometimes that many vow never to go there again.

A modest man, not inclined to blow his own trumpet, Waters wasn't sure whether he had done a good job or otherwise.  The reviews, however, were highly complimentary. Indeed, Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography won a hat-trick of awards: Wisden Book of the Year, MCC/Cricket Society Book of the Year and British Sports Book Awards Cricket Book of the Year.

The thousands of readers who shared the enthusiasm of the award judges will be delighted to learn that Trueman was not his last book.  The second is due out next month.

10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat is probably the book that would have marked his literary debut had he not been commissioned to do Trueman first.

He can trace the idea for it back to an assignment handed to him in his day job as a cricket journalist some 14 years ago.

"It was while I was working on the Nottingham Evening Post back in 2000," he told The Sports Bookshelf. "A chap called Frank Shipston, a former Nottinghamshire player, had just become the oldest surviving county cricketer at the age of 94 and I was asked to go along to interview him.

"It was while I was researching his career -- and he only played 49 games -- that I found that one of the matches he played for Notts was the one in which Hedley Verity, the Yorkshire spin bowler, had taken all 10 wickets for 10 runs at Headingley in 1932.

"I had always been taken with the 10 for 10, which I had seen in Wisden, in the records section, as a child, and it had stuck with me.   There were other bowlers who had taken all 10 wickets in an innings -- in fact, it wasn't the only time Verity did it -- but to me there was something magical, almost perfect about 10 for 10. Perhaps it was the symmetry of the numbers; it seemed like the ultimate bowling analysis.

Verity was one of Yorkshire and England's greatest cricketers. In a career that ran from 1930 to 1939, he took 1,956 wickets at an average of 14.90. He was chiefly responsible for England's only Ashes victory at Lord's in the 20th century, when his 15 wickets helped to win the 1934 Test -- 14 of them captured in a single day.  No one dismissed the legendary Australian batsman Don Bradman more times in Test cricket than Verity, who claimed his wicket on eight occasions.

"I interviewed Frank Shipston, wrote a piece for the paper and that was that," Waters continued. "But it came to mind again five years later, by which time I was working for the Yorkshire Post, when there was a Hedley Verity exhibition on at Headingley to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.

"His son, Douglas, brought over a number of items of memorabilia from his home in North Wales, including the 10 for 10 ball.  I saw the ball and introduced myself to Douglas and when I said I had been thinking about writing at length about his father's feat he only encouraged me in thinking it was a good idea.

"I began researching, at the Yorkshire Post, looking at the old papers, the reports from 1932, which added some wonderful colour to the story and I just thought 'yes - there is a book in that.'

"After I'd written a piece for the paper about the exhibition, a guy wrote to me and said he had seen the 10 for 10 and I drove over to see him at his home on the Lancashire border.

"So I had it in mind to do this book before the Trueman one was offered to me."

Although this great feat of bowling, better than anything that had gone before and not remotely threatened since, is the book's centrepiece, Waters sets the scene and describes the aftermath, tracking Verity's early life and the years that followed, from his upbringing in Leeds, the son of a coal merchant, to his premature death in combat in Italy, as a captain in the Green Howards, the Yorkshire Regiment that was part of the Eighth Army invasion.  He also provides biographical background on the other participants in the match, and where their careers took them subsequently.

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"I started the book with my meeting with Frank Shipston, the personal connection I had with the story and why it has fascinated me," he said.  "So I write about Verity's life and career up to the date of the match, which is quite early on in his career. He had only been playing for two years.

"And then there is the match, with some chapters afterwards on the rest of his career and his death in the War, in Italy, to put it into context."

Verity had volunteered for the army, driven by a patriotic instinct and a staunch conviction that the war was a just one, that Hitler had to be stopped. "He believed the war had to be fought," Waters said. "On the 1933-34 tour of India, he had met Colonel Arnold Shaw of the Green Howards in Madras at a post-Test party, and when he saw him again at Headingley in 1938 he said he really wanted to get involved.

"Colonel Shaw said to get in touch with him again when war was declared and in the meantime gave him a lot of military handbooks, from which Verity started studying assiduously how to prepare for war.

"He died in 1943.  The story endures in many ways because of his tragic death, even 70 years on.  I actually found that writing about it was very moving.  It was such a sad end and he was a great guy by all accounts."

But Waters does not let Verity's tragic demise dominate the story, which is, after all, about a moment of spectacular brilliance on the cricket field.

"It is a fascinating story," he says.  "Although he did it in the days of uncovered pitches, no one else has come anyway near the record.  No one has ever even threatened it.  It is one of the most phenomenal things, to my mind, in the history of the game, one of the most romantic and remarkable records.

"It was a match between the second and third placed teams, massive rivals in county cricket, a bit of a title decider.  Harold Larwood and Bill Voce led the Nottinghamshire attack, in the summer before the Bodyline tour.

"Notts batted first, batted all day for 234 runs in 130 overs.  The irony was that it was a really dull start and all the writers complained that Notts were killing the game, that they always did this against Yorkshire.  It was a really soporific start to this incredible game.

"Yorkshire replied with 163-9 and then there was a massive storm. Brian Sellers declared 71 runs behind.  Notts batted again and were 44-0. Then the sun came out, Verity took 10 for 10 and they were all out for 67.  Percy Holmes and Herbert Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire openers, then knocked off the 139 runs needed to win with ease.  It was just incredible.

Hedley Verity

"Frank Shipston opened the batting and joint top-scored in the innings.  He was the second victim.  He remembered that Verity wasn't spinning the ball much but just enough to take the edge."

Waters does not claim to have written a definitive biography, not in the way that his Trueman book cut through the many myths surrounding the legendary fast bowler to present a much more credible assessment of his real character, but makes worthwhile additions to what is already known and recorded about Verity's life.

"It is a long time since anything was written about him so I wanted to bring his life up to date," Waters said.  "A lot has happened since the last book, there have been exhibitions and things, adding a little more to the story.  I got to know his son very well and he helped me illuminate a bit of the man.

"He was a man who was spotless, really, quite dull from a biographical point of view.  But to me the real joy of the book is the fascination of the colour around the match.  Cricket writers at the time covered the games in huge detail, so there was a lot of colourful stuff written. You almost get a ball-by-ball account."

There are numerous photographs that enhance the written description, including one that shows that the game was played against a backdrop not exactly fitting for such a momentous day in cricket history.   The end from which Verity was bowling when he took the 10 wickets was out of public use following a fire a few months earlier, which had resulted in the double-fronted Rugby Stand, the predecessor of the current structure standing between the cricket field and the Leeds Rhinos rugby stadium, being demolished.

"The new Rugby Stand was actually being built at the time," Waters said. "It was a chaotic scene with rubble everywhere. There was a cement mixer close to the boundary's edge.  Essentially, this great moment in cricket history, this bowling feat never surpassed, was performed to the backdrop of a building site."

Buy 10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat from WH Smith. Also available via this site from Amazon and Waterstones by clicking on the link.

Also by Chris Waters: Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography (available from Amazon, Waterstones and WHSmith)

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New book from award-winning Trueman biographer Chris Waters among cricket highlights for the year ahead

CRICKET BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2014

The highlights of 2014's new crop of cricket books will surely include the second contribution to the chronicles of the game to be offered up by Chris Waters, whose debut work on Fred Trueman won numerous awards.

The Yorkshire Post journalist, whose authorised biography of Fred Trueman won both the MCC/Cricket Society and Wisden book of the year prizes, as well as best cricket book at the British Sports Book Awards, has turned his attention this time to Hedley Verity, another outstanding figure in Yorkshire's heritage of great bowlers.

10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat builds a life story of the Yorkshire and England left-arm spinner, who died in 1943 from wounds sustained on the battlefield in Sicily, around the extraordinary world record bowling analysis he achieved against Nottinghamshire at Yorkshire's home ground, Headingley, in July, 1932.  It will be published by Wisden in June.

Continuing the Yorkshire theme, Geoffrey Boycott is due to add more chapters to his own life story in September, when Simon & Schuster publish Corridor of Certainty, which is not his first work of autobiography but after a gap of 17 years includes much new material.

In that time Boycott received a suspended prison sentence for assault against a former girlfriend handed down by a French court and developed throat cancer, for which he was treated successfully.  As well as those topics, Boycott discusses his many interests beyond cricket and some of the friendships he forged, one of which led him to write a moving chapter on the late Brian Clough, his fellow Yorkshireman.

Of course, he has much to say about cricket, and there are forthright opinions on Kevin Pietersen and the England captain, Alastair Cook, among others.

Marking the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of war in 1914, The History Press catalogue includes The Final Over: The Cricketers of 1914, by Christopher Sandford, due out in August, while Wisden on The Great War: The lives of Cricket's Fallen, 1914-1918, by Andrew Renshaw, has a May publication date.

Also with a wartime flavour, Dan Waddell's Field of Shadows: The English Cricket Tour of Nazi Germany 1937 (Bantam, May) tells the story of how Felix Menzel, a cricket fanatic in a country where the game was regarded in some quarters as s symbol of decadence and privilege, assembled a team and somehow obtained permission from the repressive Nazi regime to invite an English team, the Gentlemen of Worcestershire, to play them on German soil.

Chris Arnot, who delivered a fine piece of cricket nostalgia in 2011 with Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, follows up with Britain's Lost Cricket Festivals (Aurum, May), in which he explores a non-corporate cricketing age in which the county circuit was illuminated by a series of festival weeks at traditional club grounds around the country, where spectators could enjoy the idyllic experience of watching some of the world's best players in some of the most picturesque and homely surroundings.

An intriguing title due to appear in July is Court and Bowled: Tales of Cricket and The Law (Wildy, Simmons and Hill), in which James Wilson explores instances where cricket or cricketers has been central to a legal action, building on the fact that the first recorded reference to a game called cricket (or 'creckett', as it was written) came in a court case in 1598, brought over a land ownership dispute in Guildford, Surrey.

No year of note in cricket literature would be complete without something from the elegantly astute Gideon Haigh, the Australian journalist widely regarded as the finest writer on the game currently plying his trade.  His observations on the the just-completed back-to-back series between England and Australia, entitled Ashes to Ashes (Simon & Schuster), is due in the shops this week.

Already out is 150 Years of Lancashire Cricket: 1864-2014, the official celebration of Lancashire cricket club's 150th anniversary written by the Rev Malcolm Lorimer, Graham Hardcastle, Paul Edwards and Andrew Searle (Max Books)

Also coming in 2014:

Playfair Cricket Annual 2014 (Headline) and Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2014 (John Wisden & Co), (both April 10), Lord's First Bicentenary, by Philip Barker (Amberley Publishing, May), A Majestic Innings: Writings on Cricket by C L R James (reissue; Aurum, June) and Batting for Berlin, by Andre Leslie (Finch Publishing, August).

For more information or to pre-order any of the titles, visit Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

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