The Slow Men is one of David Frith’s most distinctive and affectionate works—an elegiac celebration of cricket’s slow bowlers, a breed once central to the game’s rhythm and strategy but increasingly marginalised by the rise of pace, power and limited-overs urgency.
 
Rather than focusing on raw statistics, Frith approaches his subject as a historian and storyteller. He profiles an eclectic cast of off-spinners, leg-spinners and medium-pacers—players whose success depended on guile, patience and psychology rather than speed. Through anecdote, match recollection and quiet analysis, Frith restores dignity to cricketers who often laboured unnoticed while faster colleagues drew the headlines.
 
The book moves fluidly between eras and continents, touching on county cricket, Test matches and club grounds, and drawing on Frith’s deep personal archive and long friendships within the game. The prose is reflective and gently humorous, with an undercurrent of lament for a disappearing style of cricket that rewarded subtlety and endurance.
 
Illustrated with black-and-white photographs, The Slow Men stands as both a technical meditation on bowling craft and a cultural history of cricket before acceleration became an obsession. It is widely regarded as a classic of cricket literature and an essential volume for readers interested in the game’s lost arts.