A wonderful appreciation of the quintessential English summer game
Summer's Crown: The Story of Cricket's County Championship, by Stephen Chalke (Fairfield Books) £20.00 Available from Amazon , Waterstones and other retailers Academic and cricket lover Stephen Chalke, the man behind F airfield Books, has written some 16 books on his favourite subject. Most - if not all of them - have won critical acclaim; four have won awards. Summer's Crown might be his best yet. Chalke's latest work is a history of the County Championship, the competition conceived in 1890 to serve the interests of eight founder members and, 125 years later, somehow still going, repeatedly defying the odds against its survival. It is a weighty volume, some 352 pages long. As such, it might have been a pretty dull affair, a catalogue of facts and figures and turgid chronology. But not in the hands of Stephen Chalke. Beautifully written, as you might expect, it is also superbly well organised. After an introductory chapter, there are a cou