The Big Ship: Warwick Armstrong and the Making of Modern Cricket

Gideon Haigh

Aurum, 2003 - Sports & Recreation - 440 pages

Warwick Armstrong was the W.G. Grace of the antipodes. A 21 stone mountain of a man, he dominated Australian cricket in the early decades of the 20th century as its outstanding all-rounder, and in 1920-21 led the Australian Test team to the only 5-0 victory in an Ashes series - a historic feat not even Steve Waugh's remarkable 2001 side managed to repeat. Irascible and curmudgeonly, he was also arguably the first cricketer of the modern age. He demanded his full financial worth, played the game to the edge of the laws and sometimes beyond, and even anticipated the phenomenon of match-fixing. When people called him the Big Ship, they meant he was unsinkable. This is a biography of the spiritual forefather of Steve Waugh and his present-day all-conquering Australians, and a literally giant figure in the history of modern cricket.

About the author

Gideon Haigh is an Australian journalist and writer, born in 1965. He was educated at Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. He has contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines in his thirty years as a journalist. He has written thirty books and edited seven others. His book, On Warne, won the British Sports Book Awards Best Cricket Book of the Year Award, the Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year Award, the Jack Pollard Trophy, and the Waverley Library Nib Award. The Office won the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction. Other recent titles include Uncertain Corridors: Writings on Modern Cricket, End of the Road?, and The Deserted Newsroom. He was the winner of the 2016 Ned Kelly Awards best true crime award for Certain Admissions.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Big Ship: Warwick Armstrong and the Making of Modern Cricket
• Author: Gideon Haigh
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Aurum, 2003
• ISBN: 1854108921, 9781854108920
• Length: 440 pages
• Subjects: Sports & Recreation / Cricket