SPIN Christmas Annual out now

Order the SPIN Annual here

Yep – a 100-page bumper book of cricket-themed infotainment direct from SPIN magazine. It’s the ideal Christmas pressie for any cricket fan, of ten minutes or 50 years’ standing.

The SPIN Cricket Annual 2010 is published by New Holland Publishers and is in book shops today. Waterstone. Smiths. And others.

There’s full coverage of the ICC World Twenty20 and England’s Ashes win as well as a breathless mix of cricket fun (ish) to keep you entertained until at least 5.30 on Christmas Day*. (*Not if you buy the book in October. That might be pushing it.)

Want to know how to bowl faster? Fast bowling guru Ian Pont, coach to Dale Steyn and Darren Gough, tells you how.

Want to read SPIN’s interviews with Shane Warne, Stuart Broad and Sachin Tendulkar? They’re all here.

Want to take on the Third Umpire’s impossible Christmas quiz? Or suffer his two-page tribute to Sky’s best commentator Bob Willis? Or see, via Hawkeye, exactly what makes Warne, McGrath, Flintoff and Strauss giants of the modern game?

You’ve come to the right shop.

Plus why your birthday could stop you playing for England. No kidding.

The SPIN Annual 2010 is the ONLY cricket annual of its type in the shops, an entertaining nod to old-school annuals celebrating the best of the modern game. A cricket book that doesn’t feel like a trip to the headmaster’s study.

It really is a suitable gift for cricket fans aged 8 to 88 but most of all, possibly, for middle-aged men who still wear trainers.

Buy your copy today!

Hooray for medium pace

Outside Edge

DVD Box Set. 570 minutes, £39.99
A full decade before Ashes Fever, cricket was pulling in ten million viewers on prime time ITV. Well, ish: Outside Edge is about cricket in the same way that Fawlty Towers is about hotels, the on-field activities of Brent Park village cricket club a back-drop for closely observed off-field intrigues. It’s as much about relationships, affairs and potential divorce resulting from untoward events on away trips to Dorking, as it is about getting 11 together for the deadly annual rivalry with Cromer.

Most long-runningTV series have had their cricket episode, but Outside Edge is possibly the longest work of fiction set around the game (go on – write in). Winner of the 1994 British Comedy Awards best comedy-drama, this box set brings together the 21 episodes from the three mid-90s series plus a stretched-too-thin Christmas Special – in which the team go to Corfu – and the original one-off TV version of Richard Harris’ play from 1982, with Paul Eddington, Maureen Lipman and Prunella Scales in the lead roles.

The Brent Park team are a disparate bunch, brought together by cricket, who would have no reason to be friends or even to know each other in the Real World: the ageing lech, the ageing lothario, the ambitious yuppie – and the none-more-relaxed Kevin (Timothy Spall) and his brassy/nympho wife (Josie Lawrence).

At the heart of it all is Roger Dervish (Robert Dawes, just on the cusp on overdoing it): captain, treasurer, match secretary, president, Godfrey Evans obsessive, idiot. A pompous ass, somewhere on the comic grotesque line between Captain Mainwaring and David Brent, he’s at once ridiculous and pitiable: he responds to an attempted dressing-room coup by taking to his bed and pretending to have some kind of terminal illnesss, in a last-ditch bid to win back support for his captaincy.

Needless to say, Dervish is a hopeless player as well as a buffoon; but if he wasn’t captain, then his mousey and put-upon wife Mim (Brenda Blethyn) wouldn’t do the teas. And then what? With no laughter track, Outside Edge is a slow burner, based on bittersweet character comedy rather than belly-laughs. Like Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, set in the Home Counties, with the cast of a Mike Leigh film, it’s slightly dated only by the glut of edgier comedy-drama that has followed in the decade since it was aired.

Those for whom amateur cricket denotes Premier Leagues, gym sessions and youth policies will not find their views reflected here. But Outside Edge is/was a great, deadpan slice of Middle England: you need to give it time but anyone who’s ever played for a ramshackle mixed-age village or club side, run by someone who sees themselves as a cross between Mike Brearley and Winston Churchill, will recognise and quietly enjoy plenty of the shenanigans here.
In a nutshell
Box-set of long-running cricket sitcom
Any sauce?

Perpetual pursuit of Timothy Spall round cricket pavilions by nympho-maniacal Josie Lawrence in a fur coat. You be the judge.
Verdict ••••