Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG by Richard Tomlinson – review

This biography of a genial tyrant and cricket’s greatest hero shows that his celebrity came at a cost to other players

WG Grace’s achievements still boggle the mind. He scored nearly 55,000 runs in first-class matches and took more than 2,800 wickets. None of his contemporaries got anywhere near either total, and the runs have been exceeded by only four men in the game’s history, the wickets by only five. Less than two weeks after his 18th birthday in 1866, he scored 224 not out, the highest score in first-class cricket since 1820, playing for England at London’s Oval cricket ground against Surrey.

He once scored 839 runs, including two triple centuries (nobody had made even one before), in just eight days. He had 50 first-class centuries by the time he was 27, more than the next 12 most successful batsmen managed between them in the same decade. As Richard Tomlinson observes in this meticulous and absorbing biography, “He performed this feat at a time when pitches were so poor, and cricket gear so flimsy, that batsmen risked their lives whenever they took guard.” Indeed, after one Grace century at Lord’s, a batsman in the same match was hit on the head and killed.

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