Only twenty-five batsmen in the history of cricket have scored 100 hundreds.

The first was the great W.G. Grace, whose prodigious run-scoring on the unpredictable pitches of Victorian England raised batsmanship to a new level. The most prolific was Jack Hobbs of Surrey , The Master, who hit 197 hundreds, 98 of them after his 40th birthday. The greatest was the Australian Donald Bradman, who scored a hundred in more than one third of all his innings. And the most recent is Mark Ramprakash, who achieved greater national fame for his victory in BBC’s Celebrity Come Dancing.

THE CENTURIONS

 

FROM GRACE TO RAMPRAKASH

 

 

Patrick Murphy

 

 

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In this book Patrick Murphy writes about each one of them, setting them against the backdrop of their times and describing not only their batting techniques but their characters as men. For the first edition of this book in 1983 he was able to interview cricketers who recalled playing against the centurions of the 1920s and ’30s, and he has now brought the book up to date with a fresh round of interviews that have led to fascinating and thought-provoking portraits of the four most recent centurions: Viv Richards, Graham Gooch, Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash.

He has revised his original essays on some of the more complex subjects, such as Walter Hammond and Geoffrey Boycott, and he has written a fresh introduction in which he argues that the club of centurions is unlikely ever to grow beyond these 25.

On every page Patrick Murphy’s profound love of cricket shines through. He has talked to so many cricketers, he has such a deep sense of the game’s history, and he shares it all with the reader in a lively and engaging style.

From Grace to Ramprakash, he brings his subjects alive.