SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 CRICKET SOCIETY & MCC BOOK AWARD
'Settling the Score reeks of real life memories matched by a totally believable atmosphere and colourful dramatis personae … stylishly written, strong plot and sub-plot, grabbing your interest from page one, with a satisfying closing of the paperback at the finale. It’s highly recommended…'
All Out Cricket, October 2012
‘Very well plotted and absolutely authentic both on and off the field of play.’
Christopher Martin-Jenkins
Settling the Score takes us behind the scenes of a County Championship match played in the late 1960s, during which the apparently mundane mid-table tussle turns into a tale of bitter personal rivalry and betrayal both on and off the field.
Anyone familiar with de Selincourt’s nostalgic story of The Cricket Match where villagers gather on a fine summer’s day to play the game, will find Settling the Score a revealing and sometimes humorous antidote. Indeed the contrast between amateur and professional cricket could not be more marked than in Gibbs’ account of a three-day match at the end of a decade that saw the demise of the ‘amateur’ first-class cricketer and the birth of the limited-over formats which are such a staple of today’s professional game.
As one former cricketer put it after reading the book, ‘if all the matches had been like this one, playing careers would have been considerably shorter.’
‘Terrific … Unputdownable… Has there ever, ever been a more vivid, knowing or believable novel about sport? Settling the Score is like a great batsman’s great innings – measured at first, methodical in its development and merciless in its later stages’
Frank Keating