Cricket's 300 Men and One 400 Man

It is the ultimate in cricket – to score a Test innings of 300, and now, like Brian Lara, to push that on to 400. In the long history of the game only 18 batsmen have become triple centurions, starting with Surrey’s Andrew Sandham in the West Indies in 1930 and reaching to Chris Gayle’s 317 at Antigua in 2005. The story of these epic innings has never been gathered into a book before and some of the innings are barely known. It makes them even more fascinating because each innings became immortal as well as rare. Christopher Hilton, who has been a cricket lover all his life, worked as a sports journalist on the Daily Express and is now a successful author. He recreates each innings in great depth, setting them into their context and letting all the intrinsic drama unfold using original source material, much of which has lain unseen for decades. Here, striding to the crease again are the great ones: Wally Hammond, Don Bradman – along with Lara the only man to score 300 twice – through Len Hutton and Garfield Sobers all the way to Matthew Hayden and Virender Sehwag in our own time. The book has a full scorecard of each innings and is beautifully illustrated.