The Cricket Statistician No 195

44 on account of their performances in First Grade (rather than through the state age-group or second eleven structures). But perhaps, given that Australia has only recently acquired a digest of first-class cricket (and that there is nothing similar in English cricket, so far as I am aware), perhaps I should not be surprised. Be that as it may, this is an excellent and inexpensive production, and I hope the strength of its reception will be such that the author fulfils his intention to continue production for future seasons. Members may be interested to know that the author’s website, from which electronic copies of the book can be ordered, also offers other electronic books compiled by the author including a history of cricket in the Australian Capital Territory for A$25 (about £13) and statistical surveys of the 2018-19 and 2019-20 Grade seasons in NSW for A$10 each (about £5.70). Richard Lawrence Evita burned down our pavilion By Timothy Abraham and James Coyne, Constable, pp438, £20, ISBN 9781472132529, ebook £8.99 The first report of cricket in Latin America is from 1806 when soldiers from the ill-fated invasion force of Brigadier-General William Beresford played whilst held in captivity in Argentina. By 1827 cricket was being played in Mexico by Cornish miners in the Sierra Madre Oriental and by merchants and diplomats in Mexico City. In 1865, the first women’s cricket club in the world was formed in Argentina when a group of ladies in Belgrano challenged their counterparts in downtown Buenos Aires. In 1868 matches between Buenos Aires and Montevideo began, leading to a series which lasted until 1902. In 1947, Evita did arrange for the pavilion of Buenos Aires Cricket Club to be burned down after the club’s refusal to donate to her Social Aid Foundation. These are just a few of the facts obtained by Timothy Abraham and James Coyne on their odyssey through Latin America which took them some four years, shorter than the one of Odysseus, but then they do not seem to have been lured from their quest by a nymph. Or if they were, they are not admitting it. Nevertheless, they visited eighteen countries and an overseas department of France, tracing the history of cricket in each one. Their travels took them to the main cities, where they visited clubs and players and spent time searching archives in museums and libraries. They also journeyed up rivers and took long-distance buses along unsurfaced, often barely passable tracks into sparsely populated areas where cricket is no longer played. Here they met the descendants of those who had once settled there and formed clubs. Mostly cricket was in the hands of British merchants and bankers, plantation owners, ranchers and the all-important engineers who helped build the railways to connect the interior to the main ports. There were a few Australians involved and, in parts of Central America, the less fortunate migrants from the Caribbean who worked on the fruit farms and in the sugar cane plantations. The result is a tome of 438 pages, comprising a mixture of social history, oral history and travelogue, all presented in a highly readable fashion. A geographical approach is adopted,