The Tale of Two Terriers and the Somerset Cat

On 23rd September 2016, the last day of the County Championship, three teams were in contention to win it. Somerset, having thrashed Nottinghamshire, would win if Middlesex and Yorkshire could wrestle themselves to a draw at Lord's. They almost did, until 28 balls from the very end of the fourth day of the final game of a cricket season that had begun six months earlier, Middlesex grasped the winning prize. 'The tale of two terriers and the Somerset cat' starts in Taunton in early August 2016, and follows the championship for the next two months right up to that dramatic 23rd September. This is no straight line but goes by twists and turns, including a deviation to Ferrara in Italy. The text captures the exquisite intricacies of the story, and is built around the day-by-day accounts of Somerset v Durham in early August, and of the Somerset v Nottinghamshire and Middlesex v Yorkshire matches in late September. The whole is enriched by some sixty of Tim Cawkwell's own photographs. Underpinning this story is a debate about long-form cricket versus blast cricket. Just at the moment when the long form of the game is at risk of being pushed to the margins as old-fashioned and unprofitable, it produced one of the most extraordinary spectacles in its long history, proving that its arm-wrestling and subtleties are as exciting a form of sport as ever, one that endures in the memory, and one that this book captures in all its epic quality. Martin Chandler on The Cricket Web wrote as follows: "He begins with a splendid homage to the County game . . . moves on to a detailed description of the game between Durham and Somerset . . . then explains how the story developed between then and the last round of matches. The fact that he was in Italy for the final round of matches] is his masterstroke - he gives a brilliant description of how the cricket mad among us do our level best to keep in touch with the game we love and the talking points it throws up in a way in which almost all his readers will identify with."