Description

---

On 23rd September 2016, the last day of the County Championship, three teams were in contention to win it. Somerset, having thrashed Nottinghamshire, would win if Middlesex and Yorkshire could wrestle themselves to a draw at Lord's. They almost did, until 28 balls from the very end of the fourth day of the final game of a cricket season that had begun six months earlier, Middlesex grasped the winning prize. 'The tale of two terriers and the Somerset cat' starts in Taunton in early August 2016, and follows the championship for the next two months right up to that dramatic 23rd September. This is no straight line but goes by twists and turns, including a deviation to Ferrara in Italy. The text captures the exquisite intricacies of the story, and is built around the day-by-day accounts of Somerset v Durham in early August, and of the Somerset v Nottinghamshire and Middlesex v Yorkshire matches in late September. The whole is enriched by some sixty of Tim Cawkwell's own photographs. Underpinning this story is a debate about long-form cricket versus blast cricket. Just at the moment when the long form of the game is at risk of being pushed to the margins as old-fashioned and unprofitable, it produced one of the most extraordinary spectacles in its long history, proving that its arm-wrestling and subtleties are as exciting a form of sport as ever, one that endures in the memory, and one that this book captures in all its epic quality. Martin Chandler on The Cricket Web wrote as follows: "He begins with a splendid homage to the County game . . . moves on to a detailed description of the game between Durham and Somerset . . . then explains how the story developed between then and the last round of matches. The fact that he was in Italy for the final round of matches] is his masterstroke - he gives a brilliant description of how the cricket mad among us do our level best to keep in touch with the game we love and the talking points it throws up in a way in which almost all his readers will identify with.

About the Author

---

AUTHOR'S PAGE Tim Cawkwell was born in 1948 and lives in Norwich in the United Kingdom. He is the author of several books on film, travel and cricket: -The World Encyclopaedia of Film (co-editor, 1972) -Film Past Film Future (2011) -Temenos 2012, a diary about the Temenos film festival in Greece in 2012 -From Neuralgistan to the Elated kingdom: a personal journey inside Sicily (2013) -Between Wee Free and Wi Fi: Scotland and the UK belong surely? (2013) -The New Filmgoer's Guide to God (2014) -A Tivoli Companion (2015) -Cricket's Pure Pleasure: the story of an extraordinary match - Middlesex v. Yorkshire, September 2015 (2016) In 2008 he launched his own website for writing about the cinema, www.timcawkwell.co.uk, which he has regularly maintained ever since, later adding to it a Wordpress blog, www.cawkwell200.com. In 2013 he set up his own imprint, Sforzinda Books, as an outlet for his publishing. The tale of two terriers and the Somerset cat is his second cricket book after Cricket's Pure Pleasure.