Fatty Batter: How cricket saved my life (then ruined it)

Description

The hilarious tale of one podgy boy's dreams on the outside edge of a cricketing life from 'one of Britain's funniest writers' (Daily Mail) A fat boy with a passion for sweets and a loathing for games, the young Michael Simkins finds in cricket a sport where size doesn't necessarily matter and a full-blown obsession is born. Now in middle-age, he still harbours the somewhat deluded belief that the England middle-order might usefully benefit from his hard-earned skills. From impromptu Test series played with his dad in the family sweetshop through to his years running a team of dysfunctional inadequates, Fatty Batter is the bestselling and hilarious story of one man's life lived through cricket.

Michael Simkins was born in 1957 and spent his childhood in a sweetshop in Brighton. In 1966 he saw his first cricket match on the TV, and from that moment he was hooked. When he hasn't been playing, watching or dreaming about cricket, Michael has spent his time acting. He has appeared in countless plays and musicals in the west end, most recently as Billy Flynn in Chicago, and also features regularly on TV and the silver screen, usually playing unsuspecting husbands, police sergeants or experts. He lives with his wife, the actress Julia Deakin, in north-west London, and still plays cricket to a worryingly low standard all over the Southern Counties.

Once you've read this account of one man's love affair with cricket, you'll never want to read another ghosted autobiography by a Pietersen or a Vaughan again - incompetence and failure is far more fun -- Michael Atherton An instant classic -- Stephen Fry The childhood recollections, suffused with warmth and spangled with pain and humour, are the book's unique selling point. Lovely stuff * Daily Telegraph * Simmo may be a shockingly average amateur cricketer, but when it comes to self- deprecating wit and telling a good anecdote, he's as sprightly as Garry Sobers in his prime ... anecdotes and quirky characters hurtle down at us like yorkers bowled by a fast bowler that I'm not quite knowledgeable enough to name ... an entertaining read indeed * Sunday Times * Michael writes about disaster, humiliation, rejection and ridicule - the hilarious truth -- Nicholas Hytner