Field of Shadows, Dan Waddell's story of an English cricket tour of Nazi Germany, is Cricket Society-MCC Book of the Year for 2015
Novelist and genealogy expert pips strong field Favourite Wounded Tiger misses out Another 'snub' for Kevin Pietersen Journalist and historical novelist Dan Waddell has won the Cricket Society/MCC Book of the Year award for his book about an English cricket team's tour of Nazi Germany - Field of Shadows. Waddell traces the story of a three-match series played in Berlin in 1937 by a team called the Gentlemen of Worcestershire, a disparate collection of mavericks, minor nobility, ex-county cricketers, rich businessmen and schoolboys led former Worcestershire County Cricket Club skipper Major Maurice Jewell, who agreed to play in unofficial Test matches against Germany, whose Nazi sports minister, Hans von Tschammer und Osten, had hit upon the idea on a visit to Lords. According to one reviewer, Waddell "maintains a deft balance between amiable cricketing encounters and the encroaching horrors of Nazi Germany in a narrative that blends the amusing, touchin