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.

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.

This article about a biographical or autobiographical book on sportspeople is a stub.