The King of Spain and I

Surviving cricket, depression and the greatest-ever Ashes

Each week we spotlight a fascinating title from the vast collection catalogued in the Cricket Bibliography project, drawing on insightful (but not necessarily positive!) reviews from the archives of our journal. Today we bring you The King of Spain and I: Surviving cricket, depression and the greatest-ever Ashes (2025) by Ashley Giles, reviewed for us by Charles Barr.

It is worth taking good care of the dustjacket, when you buy this book (as you should), a more robust jacket than the old paper covers used to form. Without it you get, on the spine, the bare six-word title plus author’s name; inside on the title page, the eight-word subtitle too, but without the stern head-on close up of the author himself. The full cover is packed with meaning, visual and verbal, foregrounding the topic of depression, taboo till quite recently, below the jokey title King of Spain – how widely known, now, is that designer’s misreading of the King of Spin slogan on some of the testimonial year mugs? But decades from now ‘the greatest ever Ashes’ will still surely mean only one thing, the home series of 2005, whatever heroic deeds may have been done in the meantime. Ashley Giles was one of the close-knit team of ten who played all five games, only Simon Jones’s injury ruling him out of the final one.

I have been moved to look back at the 2006 Wisden, to recapture the bitter-sweet feeling of just how special that series was. The euphoria of editor Matthew Engel and his reporters is already offset by the awareness that it can never happen again with this intensity: it is the last summer of free-to-air broadcasting in England, just one instance of the mismanagement that will lead on to the Hundred and so much else, eating away at the tightness of the focus on the first-class game. There is no space here, and no need, to go over this all-too-familiar ground – only to pay tribute to a remarkable new contribution to the literature.

Much was written in the years following 2005 in the way of record and reminiscence. But this book, to quote Giles’s introduction, ‘has been a work in progress for nearly 20 years… Over the past decade, I have revisited these words many times, editing and refining as I went.’ He thanks George Dobell for encouragement along the way and others for advice at the end, but no ghost or co-author is mentioned, and it does feel like being absolutely Giles’s personal work, both in structure and in words.

His vivid account of that 2005 series, and of its wild celebration by players and public alike, takes up a bare quarter of the text, sixty pages, in a block towards the end. For me this works remarkably well, placing the big highlight in the context of a turbulent, often anxious career on and off the pitch within a fast-changing cricket world. His narrative starts in early 2022, with dismissal from his role as England manager after another Ashes tour, to Australia in the nightmare time of Covid restrictions; then the long flashback to happy childhood and the struggle to get established in the county game, at that time such a different, hierarchical game, taking in, for him, the conversion from quick left-arm to slow, a kind of reverse Maurice Tate move, rejected by Surrey, accepted by Warwickshire. After the thrills of 2005, injury, and soon retirement, follow. All this is movingly interspersed by accounts of life with siblings and parents, wife and children; the sacrifices that a cricket life involves; his wife’s near-fatal illness, happily overcome. This adds up to something more balanced and more human than the run of cricket-star memoirs: one with a historic series as its climax, and with the hint of a sequel to come. It is worth waiting for if so; it would be sure not to be a rushed one.