| A Lot of Hard Yakka | |
| Author: | Simon Hughes |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
| Publisher: | Headline Book Publishing |
| Pub Date: | 1997 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Isbn: | 978-0747255161 |
| Preceded By: | From Minor to Major (1992) |
| Followed By: | Yakking Around the World: A Cricketer's Quest for Love and Utopia (2001) |
A Lot of Hard Yakka, subtitled "Triumph and torment: a county cricketer's life," is the first volume of autobiography by the cricketer-journalist Simon Hughes, and the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 1997,[1] making it the first volume on cricket thus to be feted. Its success, as surmised by Leslie Thomas in a review for Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, "came more than a little to the author's surprise":
I mentioned to Hughes that I had enjoyed his tale of a cricketer's beginnings, his life in and out of the game, and his eventual departure from it, but that I thought it was a terrible title. Amiable chap that he is, he agreed. Yakka is an Australianism, meaning work, endeavour, experience (I think) [.... ] it makes a breezy and irreverent read.[2]
Written in a droll and self-deprecating and often colloquial style, the book is now widely esteemed a genre classic, having earned kudos from such critics as Michael Parkinson and Ian Wooldridge, and served to promote Hughes's now-established career in sports journalism. It has a sequel entitled Yakking Around the World.