Cricket's Cherished Tome

This year’s ‘Wisden' will be cherished in uncertain times.
Mike Atherton.

The Times.

Thursday, 9 April 2020.

PTG 3078-15245.

Twenty years ago, the Wisden Almanack breached the 1,500-page mark for the first time, a reflection on international cricket’s growing ubiquity. Without any dilution of the schedule, it has been breached most years since and so you need to be mindful of standing near the letter box on its arrival for fear of a broken toe putting paid to the start of the season.

Not this season, of course: there is no cricket and the Almanack, while printed, has not yet landed. My pre-publication reading of it has migrated online, as everything else has right now, and if the pleasure is, as a result, slightly diluted, that has little to do with the contents — rather the absence of uplift that the yellow book normally brings as the herald of the season in England and Wales.

There is added regret today, as Wednesday night should have witnessed the 41st annual Wisden dinner, which launches the Almanack, held in the Long Room at Lord’s. The identity of the speaker, who this morning would have been either basking in a job well done or reeling from the terror, remains unknown except to the organisers, who have mothballed the name for next year, when, fingers crossed, normality will have returned.

By common consent, the best of the recent speeches was given in 2013 by the Travelling Python, Michael Palin, who celebrated the 150th edition of the Almanack in fine style. In this month’s Nightwatchman magazine, Tanya Aldred has written a lovely piece about those who have bravely accepted the invitation to speak, following in Mike Brearley’s footsteps as the first.

Last year’s speaker, the broadcaster and novelist Mark Lawson, recounted his visit to the gents just before the ordeal, where he was confronted by a former England cricketer who wanted to know how long the speech would last. Thirteen minutes, was the reply. “F***ing legend”, said the unnamed cricketer, “last time I was here, the f***er went on for an hour”. Brevity is usually a good thing.

It’s a black-tie affair, but not always decorous. A slightly different format in 2011 produced much drunken heckling, following an uncertain start when the editor, Scyld Berry, announced he had been stood down. Four years later, Ehsan Mani chose the occasion to criticise England, India and Australia for attempting to hijack the finances of the world game, which went down badly with one of the guests, then England and Wales Cricket Board chairman, Giles Clarke, who ended the evening in what is commonly called “robust” debate with Berry’s successor, Lawrence Booth.

This is Booth’s ninth outing since his appointment as the Almanack’syoungest editor. Mindful that the publication should not be, in the words of one of his predecessors, Tim de Lisle, “an anachronism but an almanack and should reflect the year, not the mindset 40 years before”. Booth’s reflects the times: there is a section on overseas franchised Twenty20 competitions, an essay on global warming, another on transgender cricketers and Eoin Morgan reflects on his England team’s “new multiculturalism” — although, really, there is nothing new about that.

The Almanack is a book of three parts; of comment, of record and of delightful minutiae, of which the last always brings the most cheer. The record is reassuring in these febrile times but also means there are large swathes of it that bear little rereading, the World Cup and the Ashes having been given the once over better and with more immediacy elsewhere. The outlandish events of 2019, though, which in a work of fiction might have been said to have stretched incredulity, will be grateful for Wisden’s imprimatur.

The accolades reflect mainly on the momentous events of the World Cup and Ashes, Jofra Archer, Marnus Labuschagne and Pat Cummins being worthy recipients of the once-a-career-only Wisden cricketer of the year award. Simon Harmer, who propelled Essex to the Championship, is a reminder that the Almanack retains a focus on the English game while Ellyse Perry stands as towering monument to the rise of the women’s. Ben Stokes rightly takes the title of the leading men’s cricketer of the year after his stunning summer.

The editor’s notes come imbued with an odd sense of importance, given that were Booth to write them in his other outlet, the Daily Mail, they would scarcely raise a stir. Such is the power of the brand. One of the most interesting features in the comment section is the recognition of an all-format Champion County, incorporating all competitions since the start of one-day cricket proper in this country in 1963. The winners, of course, are Lancashire.

And so to the minutiae, scouring for which usually keeps readers busy deep into the winter months — and this year, sadly, the summer as well, no doubt. Read of the Papua New Guinea Under-19 team who missed out on their decisive World Cup-qualifying fixture against Japan because they had all been imprisoned the night before for shop-lifting (PTG 2818-14038, 14 June 2019). Or of Wellington, who gave up home advantage in their play-off battle for New Zealand’s domestic one-day competition — for a craft beer festival.

Did you know that, six years after retirement, Sachin Tendulkar has had his personal security downgraded by the Indian government, and now is only allowed a bodyguard when he leaves his house? Or that in December there was an erratum in the Jerusalem Post, which had got its Twitter handles gloriously confused, noting the International Cricket Council rather than the International Criminal Court had accused the Israelis of war crimes?

It’s all there, including the uplifting and timely tale of Billy Cookson, an amateur cricketer from Wiltshire, who took the field again 12 months after a car crash in Melbourne that required 18 operations to various parts of his body.

At 1,536 pages, this year’s edition is another whopper. Next year’s will be the thinnest for a long, long time — and, for all the wrong reasons, a collector’s item.