Peter Hayter looks back at a book borne out of frustration that has anticipated many of the game’s developments

For those who loved bad news about England cricket, the ten-year cycle whose start was marked by the Ashes victory of Mike Gatting’s team on the 1986-87 tour Down Under was the gift that kept on giving.
It began badly with successive Test series defeats against Pakistan home and away, the second made notorious by the skipper’s finger-wagging spat with home umpire Shakoor Rana in Faisalabad.
It got spectacularly worse a year later when, in 1988...