Publisher's Synopsis
The Ultimate Test of your Cricketing KnowledgeThere is something about the mixture of craftsmanship and power that makes cricket suitable for every audience. If you have great patience and like the classic variant, Test Matches are for you. If you have been a fan for a decade or so, you probably like One Day Internationals. If you're a new fan, you might have discovered the sport through Twenty20 matches, probably through the Indian Premier League or another league similar to the IPL.From Don Bradman to Sachin Tendulkar, and from Dennis Lillee to Muttiah Muralitharan, great batsmen and bowlers have taken the sport of cricket to new heights over the decades. With the game expanding to dozens of new countries, and with women's cricket going from strength to strength, it is surely only a matter of time before the world's Commonwealth Game makes its appearance in the Olympics.This book contains a large number of trivia puzzles and clues that will lead you to the names of some of the best cricket batsmen, bowlers, and fielders of all time. I have tried to include as many different players as possible - from those who played mostly Tests to those who only played ODIs, from obscure players to household names, and from all-rounders to specialists in their field. There are famous names, controversial names, popular names - a great mix of people who will help you relive the glory days of cricket in your mind.The book can be read in many different ways. If you want, you can go through the questions and puzzles by yourself, and test your skill against the clock - the answers are all provided, and multiple hints to the identity of each player are given. In addition, you can also play with one or more friends - the structure of the book is ideally suited to cooperative attempts. Just like in the sport of cricket itself, teamwork makes everything better and easier! You can also use it as the basis for a cricket based trivia competition, since a contest makes everything a little more interesting.The knowledge contained in this book will make sure that your brain is enriched after even a casual reading. It will challenge your memory and your trivia store, and test those to the limits - only the very best can help for a century score. At the same time, it will also give your mind a thorough workout, as you solve the clues to the name of each player in isolation, your pattern recognition skills can help compensate for the lack of knowledge of a particular player.The scoring for the puzzle games in this cricket book can be done in many different ways. You can give yourself two runs for every Format 1 question you get right without the hints, and a boundary for every Format 2 (scramble) question that you get correct without the aid of hints. If you need to use the hints on the nationality and debut year of the cricketer in question, your points reduce by half. At the end of each set of six chapters, you can total your score and see if you were able to get to a half century or a century. The number of points up for grabs increases dramatically in the last few chapters: legendary trivia cricket players might even be able to score a double or a triple century towards the end. Are you one of them?There is something about nail biting last over finishes to an ODI or T20 World Cup match or a sublime triple century composed over multiple innings of a crucial Test Match that cannot be replicated easily in any other sport. This book is a celebration of the players who toiled for decades so that they could bring us those moments of joy, and elevate our viewing experience to something unforgettable. Thank you, cricketers!I am sure that you will have a great time with this book. All the very best!
