The Tour: The Story of the England Cricket Team Overseas 1877-2022 Hardcover – 30 Mar. 2023

Bought for my husband and it’s everything he wanted from a cricket book

Big cricket fan and regular reader of cricket books. Enjoyed this but found it a bit dry at times, could do with a few more interesting yarns from previous tours than lots of match reports.

Nice book, good quality at fair price. Interesting story of England cricket team on tour

As a regular non-fiction reader I feel like a good measure of a book is how many other books it leaves you wanting to read, and with this one it's a lot. Thoroughly researched and sourced (almost to a fault at points with the amount of footnotes, endnotes and end of chapter segments), this is a really in depth look at all things touring life for English cricket since the middle of the 19th century. Each chapter covers a different aspect, from selection, to travelling, to the endless tour games, the losses (and occasional win) and the return home. It jumps around a lot - again, occasionally to a fault, but there's some really fun stories here and an even spread of focus from the modern day stuff compared to the tours done pre-air travel.Like I say, I ended the book and wanted to read another ten - good job!

I was expecting a review of each tour in turn, however the book took a different approach by looking at the issues of touring and then going through how it effected touring for the last 160 years.The analysis was good and showed the issues especially in the times of sailing to Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean or the sub continent. Despite this I felt the 21st century tours got a bit more of their fair share of analysis and the period from the First World War to the 90s less than their fair share.Although a cricket fan, it didn’t engage me as much as I thought it would leading to the longer reading time.

I read this on holiday. Enjoyed it a lot. Good decision to organise thematically rather than choronologically!

Loved the author's ability to tell the story through different lens. Extraordinary amount of research involved. Lively story telling.