blue book

This book provides the first comprehensive and complete history of Western Province cricket and the Cape Cobras in the 121 years from 1890 to 2011. It goes beyond any similar sports history in South Africa to date, to reveal the rich history of cricket in a region with the longest tradition of playing in the country and the continent. Based on decades of painstaking research, it overturns old, exclusive 'official' accounts of the past and introduces us to a wealth of new material about players, clubs and matches that were previously ‘off field’. With its 20 000 cricketers, part-owned Cape Cobras franchise and the famous 123-year-old Sahara Park Newlands Stadium, the Western Province Cricket Association has inherited the oldest tradition of cricket in South Africa.

André Odendaal is Chief Executive of the Western Province CricketAssociation and Honorary Professor in History and Heritage Studies atthe University of the Western Cape.Krish Reddy has painstakingly recovered much of the lost statisticalrecords of black and non-racial cricket in Natal and South Africa. He isthe author of The Other Side: A miscellany of black cricket in Natal, andco-author of Blacks in Whites: A century of cricket struggles in KwaZulu-Natal. The UK-based Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historianschose him as their Statistician of the Year in 2007.Andrew Samson is a statistician with a particular interest in cricket. Hehas contributed to the Mutual & Federal SA Cricket Annual and WisdenCricketers’ Almanack since 1994. He was official statistician for the ICCWorld Cup in 2003, ICC World T20 2007, ICC World Cup Qualifier 2009and ICC Champions Trophy 2009.