Keith Booth (scorer)
Keith Rodney Booth (born 30 September 1942, Barnsley, Yorkshire, England) is a cricket writer and former scorer.
He was the principal scorer for Surrey County Cricket Club and international matches played at The Oval between 1995 and 2017.
Like Geoffrey Boycott, Dickie Bird and Michael Parkinson, he comes from Barnsley, and like them he inherited a love of cricket. He has previously scored for Middlesex and MCC and was scorer for Test Match Special in the West Indies in 1994 and for Pakistan in the 1999 Cricket World Cup. His wife Jennifer, now also retired, was Surrey's reserve scorer.
Booth has written a history of cricket scoring, biographies of the cricketers Michael Atherton, Ted Pooley, George Lohmann, Ernie Hayes, Walter Read, Tom Richardson and Jack Crawford, as well as a biography of the pioneering cricket and football administrator C. W. Alcock. He has also written a four-person, three-generation biography of the Hayward family, comprising Daniel Hayward, his two sons Daniel and Thomas, and grandson Tom Hayward. His book about Lohmann won The Cricket Society's Book of the Year award for 2007.[1]
Until 2017, he played for Sutton Cricket Club.
Publications
- Atherton's progress: From Kensington Oval to Kennington Oval (1996)
- Knowing the Score: the Past, Present and Future of Cricket Scoring (1999)
- His Own Enemy: The Rise and Fall of Edward Pooley (2000)
- The Father of Modern Sport: The Life and Times of Charles W. Alcock (2002, republished 2015)
- George Lohmann: Pioneer Professional (2007)
- Ernest Hayes: Brass in the Golden Age (2008)
- Walter Read: A Class Act (2011)
- Tom Richardson: A Bowler Pure and Simple (2012)
- Rebel With A Cause: The Life and Times of Jack Crawford (2016) co-authored with Jennifer Booth
- The Haywards: The Biography of a Cricket Dynasty (2018) co-authored with Jennifer Booth
Ghostwriting
- Lahore to London (2016) co-authored with Younis Ahmed
Notes
- Book of the Year. Retrieved 11 January 2018