One Day at a Time

Martin Chandler | 8:55am BST 18 June 2023

Published: 2023
Pages: 334
Author: Tossell, David
Publisher: Fairfield Books
Rating: 4 stars

Back in 2007 David Tossell published his first cricket book, Grovel!, and immediately created a huge problem for himself. Grovel! is, as the title makes clear, a retrospective account of the West Indies tour of England in 1976. It is a marvellous book, brilliantly capturing the events of that long hot summer, and adding a wide tranche of insights to the memories of those of who were there.

Since then he has added four more books to his cricketing oeuvre, Following On, The Girls of Summer, Sex and Drugs and Rebel Tours and a biography of Tony Greig. They are all decent books but, with Grovel!, Tossell set the bar too high – how is he ever going to top that one has always been my question, which I thought might be the reason why we haven’t heard from him for a few years.

And then I learned he was working on something that might just match his debut. All that Grovel! lacked was a Dylan reference in the title. Blood on the Tracks has that, as well as a tale of thrilling pace bowling to tell, that of England’s trip to Australia in 1974/75 and the rebirth of Dennis Lillee and the discovery of Jeff Thomson.

But that is one for 2024, and I was therefore slightly surprised when I later learned this one would be appearing in the meantime. I knew it wouldn’t be a bad book, but I made the wrong assumption from the sub-title; The History of Limited Overs Cricket in 25 Matches. The conclusion I jumped to was that Tossell had chosen what he considered to be 25 interested matches, written 25 essays on them and left it at that.

Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that sort of book.As long as the author is a decent writer, and Tossell is undoubtedly that, then the outcome, whether the book deals with men, matches or an assortment of discrete cricketing topics is always an interesting read, if a long way from being a ground breaking one. 

In fact however One Day at a Time is not what I expected all. It is true that each of the 25 chapter heading suggests that what follows is an account of the match to which it refers, but the real purpose of the book is to provide a thoroughly researched and complete history of one day cricket.

A good example is the very first chapter, nominally dealing with the Gillette Cup Final in 1963. The story is a reasonably well known one, with a Sussex side led by the visionary Ted Dexter treating one day cricket as what it was, a different game from the First Class game, whereas most of the county captains treated the new format as nothing more than a variation on a theme. Necessarily the chapter also looks back, to what persuaded those charged with running the game in England to try something so radical.

The narrative then jumps eight years to the famous ‘lamp light match’ between Lancashire and Gloucestershire in the 1971 Gillette semi-final at Old Trafford. Naturally David Hughes assault on John Mortimore’s off spin in the gathering gloom takes centre stage, but the chapter as a whole is a review of events in the intervening eight years. Tossell then stays in Manchester for a look at the second ever ODI, and the first in England, against traditional rivals Australia in 1972. As a youngster I went to that game. I had a wonderful day and got to shake hands with Hughes and Peter Lever, but the cricket itself was relatively mundane, so again the bulk of the chapter deals with the lead up to ODIs becoming an accepted form of the game.

And so the book carries on. There is an atmospheric chapter dealing with the first World Cup, and there are regular stops after that at various points in the international calendar discussing historic fixtures, and recapping on recent history. A particularly interesting chapter centres on the notorious underarm delivery bowled by Trevor Chappell on the orders of brother Greg to New Zealander Brian McKechnie in 1981. It was a move it is impossible to justify and for which there can be no excuse. But there is of course an explanation, and that is something I had never bothered to think about before reading One Day at a Time.

But the book isn’t solely about the international game. There is a chapter based on finals day in the first domestic T20 completion in England, way back in 2003, and nor is Tossell concerned solely with men’s cricket. There is a review of the women’s game in the penultimate chapter, centred on England’s World Cup success in 2017. The final chapter, wholly unsurprisingly, looks at the remarkable events at Lord’s in 2019 when, at the twelfth attempt, England finally lifted the World Cup, and did so in such dramatic fashion.

And what of the, for most of Tossell’s likely audience, dreaded franchise game? I am pleased to be able to report that there are no chapters devoted to the Big Bash, the Caribbean Premier League, The Hundred or any of the other less celebrated leagues that have been cropping up worldwide and presenting such a threat to the game I love.

But there are a couple of chapters on the IPL, both centred on games I have to confess to having heard of. The first was the tournament’s bow in 2008 and Brendon McCullum’s stunning 158* for the Kolkata Knight Riders, and the second Chris Gayle’s monumental 175* for Royal Challengers Bangalore five years later.

If you are going to write a history of one day cricket in the third decade of the twenty first century I would have to concede that franchise cricket cannot be ignored. Like many purists I do try and avoid any contact with it, and with most I succeed. But even I have to accept that the IPL does have something and, perhaps because I started them with so little real knowledge of the subject, I did find myself enjoying the two IPL chapters as much as any in the book.

Which is my way of saying that all 25 chapters in One a Day at a Time are excellent and for anyone who has any interest in limited overs cricket, and there are very few cricket lovers who don’t, this one is highly recommended.