The Big Ship

Warwick Armstrong was the W.G. Grace of the Antipodes. A twenty-one-stone mountain of a man, he dominated Australian cricket early in the twentieth century, leading the 1920-21 Test team to the only 5-0 victory in an Ashes series; a historic feat not even Steve Waugh has managed to repeat. A defiant, often curmudgeonly character, he was also arguably the first cricketer of the modern age, demanding his full financial worth, playing the game to the edge of the Laws and sometimes beyond, and even anticipating the phenomenon of match-fixing. When people called him the Big Ship, they meant that he was unsinkable. Now Gideon Haigh, author of Mystery Spinner, has written the definitive biography of Warwick Armstrong, a literally giant figure in the history of modern cricket.