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766 and All That: Over by Triumphant Over - How England Won the Ashes
WICKET! 1st Ponting c Swann b Anderson 0 (Australia 0-2) Ponting has gone first ball! I don't believe it! An unbelievable start for England! Ponting has gone for a golden duck in his 150th Test and England have gone wild. Stop the clocks! Shout it from the rooftops! Australia are in utter disarray!The Ashes 2010-11 saw the coming together of the old foes in Australia's backyard. Back in freezing, snowy England, untold numbers huddled around their TV sets to watch the struggle into the early hours of the morning. But for many the joy was only complete with the accompaniment of guardian.co.uk' s Over By Over.Around the globe they joined in from unlikely locations, offering stories of emotional drinking, marital predicament and witty observations as the series built to an astonishing climax. Could England really be about to crush Australia - in a manner not witnessed for a generation?There were Cook's runs - all 766 of them, Anderson's wickets, Prior's catching and the power of Pietersen. We saw established stars like Graeme Swann and Andrew Strauss, unpredicted stars like Tim Bresnan, spasmodic stars like Mitchell Johnson and fading stars like Paul Collingwood and Ricky Ponting.Now 766 and All That allows us to savour again the sweet taste of that absolute victory - exactly as it happened, Over by Over.
- GenresNonfictionSports
433 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2011
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40 people want to read
About the author
Paul Johnson
2 booksPaul Johnson worked for The Guardian for 40 years before retiring in 2020, latterly as Deputy Editor of Guardian News and Media. He was also Head of Sport for the newspaper.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 31, 2020
This is a very lazy publishing venture but is a joy to reread.
August 4, 2022
A slightly lazy way to write a book - capturing the over by over notes, but what a great result of which to remind myself !
October 13, 2015
It's disappointing to give such a low rating to a book that ticks plenty of the right boxes, but the fact is it's another case of good "live" journalism being turned into a lazy publishing venture.
guardian.co.uk's over-by-over (OBO - get used to the abbreviation, it occurs quite frequently) coverage of the 2010-11 Australia-England cricket series does what it says on the label and treats every over of that five-Test series, boring maiden or 20-run batting blitz, with equal gravitas.
This works fine when you're following the match live, but with the benefit of hindsight you just want to skip the dead-bats and go straight to the five-fors and the centuries. You might miss some decent writing if you do, as cricket commentators are notorious for being at their best in the game's duller moments.
Unlike most cricket books, it's not replete with scorecards and batting averages - a brave decision, but actually quite a wise one which helps it stick to the point. Dropped catches and bad umpiring decisions, which might otherwise have been forgotten, receive a heightened significance.
But this again brings it back to the original criticism: what works live doesn't necessarily work in retrospect. We know the end result, so any real surprise or shock is absent. Comments about players with very different subsequent fortunes - Steve Smith and the late Phil Hughes especially so - are interesting in their degrees of accuracy, but experts will always be fallible.
Where the book doesn't work at all is in its retention of contributions to the coverage from members of the public: the insomniacs and otherwise-engaged Brits bearing a winter's night in coalition Britain are bearable, but the yuppies on corporate leave in the former colonies are not. A lot of their comments are inaccurate, offensive or just plain pointless.
On the whole, a good internet concept that just doesn't suit book form. It's not alone.
guardian.co.uk's over-by-over (OBO - get used to the abbreviation, it occurs quite frequently) coverage of the 2010-11 Australia-England cricket series does what it says on the label and treats every over of that five-Test series, boring maiden or 20-run batting blitz, with equal gravitas.
This works fine when you're following the match live, but with the benefit of hindsight you just want to skip the dead-bats and go straight to the five-fors and the centuries. You might miss some decent writing if you do, as cricket commentators are notorious for being at their best in the game's duller moments.
Unlike most cricket books, it's not replete with scorecards and batting averages - a brave decision, but actually quite a wise one which helps it stick to the point. Dropped catches and bad umpiring decisions, which might otherwise have been forgotten, receive a heightened significance.
But this again brings it back to the original criticism: what works live doesn't necessarily work in retrospect. We know the end result, so any real surprise or shock is absent. Comments about players with very different subsequent fortunes - Steve Smith and the late Phil Hughes especially so - are interesting in their degrees of accuracy, but experts will always be fallible.
Where the book doesn't work at all is in its retention of contributions to the coverage from members of the public: the insomniacs and otherwise-engaged Brits bearing a winter's night in coalition Britain are bearable, but the yuppies on corporate leave in the former colonies are not. A lot of their comments are inaccurate, offensive or just plain pointless.
On the whole, a good internet concept that just doesn't suit book form. It's not alone.
January 25, 2015
It seems such a long time ago now. The Ashes series of 2010-11 where we routed the Aussies in their own back yard. This is a collection of the Guardian's Over by Over (OBO) coverage which, on the surface, might be seem a rather odd idea for a book, for cricket geeks (ok I'm a bit of a cricket geek) it's a great reminder of the series (which I mostly spent in bed listening to TMS with increasing incredulity at how easy it all seemed). Given the current state of the England Test team it's not a situation that is likely to be repeated soon...but oh, what memories...
December 31, 2011
After the great success of their 2005 book based on the Ashes in England, the Guardian have again published the online chat of all the excited and terrified fans during the AShes win in Australia. Again there is a lot of very funny stuff in here. A must for England cricket fans.
March 18, 2014
Fantastic way to relive the 2010/11 Ashes series if you're an English cricket fan. if you're an Australian, it's not so hot.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews