Skip to main content

The Plan, by Steve James: Story of how Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower transformed England cricket team wins Cricket Writers' Club award


Steve James has won the 2012 Cricket Writers' Club award for Cricket Book of the Year for his excellent dissection of England's rise to number one cricket team in the world, The Plan.

 Subtitled How Fletcher and Flower Transformed English Cricket, the book essentially charts the journey the England team embarked upon when they were officially the worst team in world cricket in 1999 to their coronation as the best, holding the No 1 Test ranking, in 2011, analysing how they were guided there by the two Zimbabwean coaches, Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower.

The Plan begins with the appointment of Fletcher as England's first overseas coach in 1999, alongside Nasser Hussain as captain, and takes the reader through the subsequent captaincies of Michael Vaughan, Andrew Flintoff and, briefly and turbulently, Kevin Pietersen, through Peter Moores's time as coach, and on to the era of Flower and Andrew Strauss.  James examines in depth how each event and decision along the way helped shape the renaissance of the England team.

It is a thorough and unbiased study, written from the perspective of a former player who knows both Fletcher and Flower well but who maintains a professional distance from both.  James, now cricket correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, played under Fletcher at Glamorgan and ghosted two books for him, Ashes Regained and his autobiography, Behind The Shades.  He has known the Flower family for more than two decades and enjoys a relationship of mutual respect with Andy Flower.

The era covered was one of great change in cricket across the world.  It would have been easy for James to over-complicate his narrative by being drawn into discussions of much wider issues and it is another plus that he manages to add his observations to a number of debates without straying outside the context of his central theme.  His descriptions of the Mumbai terror attacks, in which the England team were fortunate not to become directly involves, and his discussions of the moral dilemmas that surrounded playing cricket in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe make compelling reading.

James is a good writer who maintains an uncomplicated style that allows his observations to retain their clarity.  Based on many interviews, not with the two central characters in the book but with those in a position to contribute to a balanced assessment of their place in the history of the game, The Plan is a well presented and coherent document that is a deserving winner of the CWC award.

The Plan: How Fletcher and Flower Transformed English Cricket is published by Bantam Press. Click on the link to buy direct from amazon.co.uk

Browse more cricket books

Home

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Leave a comment or submit your own sports book review

Popular posts from this blog

2018 Cross Sports Book of the Year Awards: all the winners are named

Brave Paralympian Martine Wright scoops Autobiography prize Add caption The inspiring story of the GB Paralympic athlete Martine Wright has been named Sports Autobiography of the Year at the 16th Sports Book Awards and will be a strong contender for overall Sports Book of the Year for 2018, which will be decided by a public vote. Written in collaboration with journalist Sue Mott, Unbroken , published by Simon & Schuster, tells the remarkable story of Martine’s incredible fight back from the horrors of the July 7 atrocities in London in 2005, when she was sharing a carriage on a tube train on the Circle Line with a suicide bomber, who detonated his device just outside Aldgate station. Seven passengers around her were killed among 52 who lost their lives that day but she survived, albeit at the cost of both her legs. Martine, who took up wheelchair tennis and sitting volleyball as part of her rehabilitation, represented Great Britain in the latter at the 2012 Paralympics...
19 comments
Read more

Secrets of Mickelson the Master

No instruction manual could teach a golfer to play the extraordinary trees-to-green shot that Phil Mickelson produced at the 13th on the way to winning his third US Masters in Augusta. There is much a player can learn, nonetheless, from the winner of the 2010 green jacket and his phenomenal skills with wedge and putter in Mickelson's Secrets of the Short Game , which can now expect a spike in sales. Mickelson believes that even a golfer of only average ability can become a highly effective short-game player by paying proper attention to mechanics and set-up and combining that scientific approach with a willingness to be imaginative. Published last autumn, the 224-page manual passes on some of the wisdom Mickelson has acquired over 35 years, since his first steps in the game as a small boy. By holding off Britain's Lee Westwood, Mickelson joined the company of Nick Faldo, Sam Snead and Gary Player in having won three Masters titles.  But for the presence of four-times win...
Post a Comment
Read more

No Nonsense: Joey Barton's autobiography on the William Hill Sports Book of the Year longlist after just one day in the shops

Joey Barton Controversial footballer Joey Barton's autobiography No Nonsense has been included on the longlist for the 2016 William Hill Sports Book of the Year even though it was published only yesterday. Written in collaboration with Michael Calvin, the award-winning author and sports journalist, Barton's book promises to deliver a candid account of a life never far from the headlines on and off the field. Calvin is the third writer to work with the player, who began the project in 2014 with Times journalist Matthew Syed and made one attempt to write it himself, which he did not sustain beyond nine chapters. There is much detail, some of it quite harrowing, about his upbringing in hard-edged working class Liverpool, where many of his associates and even family members were involved in crime at one level or another.  His brother, Michael, and his cousin, Paul Taylor, are serving jail sentences for the murder of an innocent black teenager. The book has no short...
18 comments
Read more