Fatty Batter: How Cricket Saved My Life (then Ruined It)

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.

Accolades

Shortlisted for Costa Biography Award 2007.
Shortlisted for British Sports Book Awards: Best Cricket Book 2008.

Author Biography

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.