> unlimited ball game

From the author of Guardian Unlimited's The SpinFew sports, with the possible exception of tae kwon do, have a vocabulary as rich and as apparently grounded in freemasonry as cricket. If batsmen are not being bamboozled by doosras, they are pulling through midwicket or reverse-sweeping to third man. Bowlers seem to be forever peppering their maidens with googlies, or fiddling mischievously with the seam. Grown men just can't stop shouting funny things at other slightly older grown men. Everyone, everywhere, it seems, is doing something that is incapable of being expressed in plain English. So what, exactly, is cricket?Lawrence Booth, author of the Guardian Unlimited's acclaimed weekly column The Spin, makes the perfect guide to this often inhospitable terrain. Exploding pomposity, misty-eyed cliches and old gits' cynicism along the way, he explains the history and institutions of the game through its language, and nothing - from W.G. Grace and the Golden Age to the (brief) advent of aluminium bats and Kerry P