Five years ago, Australia's cricket team led the world, holding the World Cup, the Ashes, and the Border–Gavaskar and Sir Frank Worrell trophies. Today, it languishes in mid-table and cricket itself is regarded as in crisis.

How did we go so wrong?

Gideon Haigh has had a front row seat on that decline and Uncertain Corridors collects the best of his despatches, narrating the collapse of cricket's traditional structures and the uneasy and troubled evolution of its new order, through the stories of Michael Clarke, Ricky Ponting, Mike Hussey, Shane Warne and others. As cricket worldwide grows richer and crazier, thanks to the financial might of the Board of Control for Cricket in India and the unstoppable spread of T20, this is the essential guide – sports journalism at its most informed, passionate and uncompromisingly independent.