Ball of the Century

Trade Paperback

. . . the ball drifted further and further and further and then dropped, hitting the pitch seven or eight inches outside leg stump before turning at a brutal, impossible angle . . .

Never, in all of cricket's rich and profound history, has one delivery had such a devastating impact. Rarely, if ever, has a player shot so instantaneously from obscurity to worldwide fame. The history of cricket can even be said to be split in two, either side of that moment. Pre- and post-Warne. After the Ball of the Century, everything had changed. That burst of superior magic would haunt English cricket for the rest of the decade, as well as transforming the nature of the game - resurrecting the art of leg spin, and plaguing batsmen's dreams.

In the early 90s, England's performances had already been patchy. Management and leadership were frail. Just before that ill-fated summer of '93, England had lost every single test in their tour of the subcontinent. And at the very moment that Warne removed Mike Gatting's off bail, a new shadow covered everything. It was an era-defining moment - a cricketing atom bomb from which it would take them a long time to recover.

Ball of the Century is the story of cricket in the final years of the twentieth century, either side of that fateful day. For all that has been written about Warne, one of the transcendent legends of world sport, there has never been a book written about that ball and its legacy. England would go on to lose every Ashes series that decade; by the summer of 1999, they had become officially the worst team in the world. It was only as a new century dawned that a brighter era began to surface, with the struggles and disappointments of one decade spawning the triumphs of the next.

Ball of the Century will explore how cricket's most iconic moment shook cricket to the core. In doing so, it will show how a single moment really can shape history.