Cotton; Cricket and Football
Billy Cook, the Life of a Lancashire League Legend
Author: Paul Kaye and Jimmy Anderson
Cotton, Cricket and Football is the story of Billy Cook, one of Lancashire’s most colourful sportsmen of the pre-war era. Billy played to win but most of all he played for money, when everyone earned it the hard way. A hard-tackling full-back, he made a bigger impact on the world-famous Lancashire League than any other player.
Hardcover
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Summary
Cotton, Cricket and Football is the story of Billy Cook, one of Lancashire’s most colourful sportsmen of the pre-war era. Billy played to win but most of all he played for money, when everyone earned it the hard way. A hard-tackling full-back, he made a bigger impact on the world-famous Lancashire League than any other player.
Description
Cotton, Cricket and Football: Billy Cook, the Life of a Lancashire League Legend is the colourful story of one of Lancashire’s greatest sportsmen of the pre-war era, told from the perspective of his daughter, a mill-worker in Burnley.
Billy Cook played cricket in the golden era of ‘Gentlemen and Players’ but he was no gentleman. He played to win and he played for money – the money generated by the cotton mills of Lancashire.
Billy played with and against some of the legends of the time, including Syd Barnes, Archie MacLaren and Learie Constantine. In the winter he was a hard-tackling full-back for Oldham Athletic, who achieved national notoriety for his win-at-all-costs approach to the game.
Billy’s sporting career was interrupted by his service on the Western Front, where he narrowly avoided death. He returned to the Lancashire League to set records that still stand today. Cook was the archetypal hard-nosed professional, who entertained the working men of Lancashire for more than 30 years.
Critic Reviews
"There are a number of strands to Cook’s life that contribute to the story that Kaye has to tell...outside the mainstream of cricket literature Cotton, Cricket and Football works on every one of the many levels of the lives of Billy Cook and his contemporaries that it explores, and it is highly recommended."
-- Martin Chandler CricketWeb.net"This is a very worthwhile book.. Besides Barnes, Cook played with other greats of the era, particularly Learie Constatine and Archie MacLaren, which encounters add considerably to the whole."
Association of Cricket Statisticians and HistoriansAbout the Author
Paul Kaye is the great-grandson of Billy Cook and grew up listening to his grandmother eulogising about the great sporting feats of her father. It's a story of a remarkable life that Paul is uniquely placed to tell. Paul has previously written one acclaimed non-fiction book based on his career in the food industry.
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