Summer, or rather the hint or promise of it, only arrives with the publication of Wisden. The cricketers’ almanack – the venerable almanack – celebrates its 150th anniversary this season. It has been quite an innings. John Wisden (pictured above) created an institution that, happily, shows no sign of flagging. This year’s almanack clocks in at a chunky 1584 pages and is a fine edition that pays proper tribute to the Yellow Brick’s past.
This second edition stewarded by Lawrence Booth confirms the impression fostered last season that his editorship is a considerable upgrade upon his predecessor’s. His prejudices are sound. Quite correctly, Booth is a conservative but not a reactionary. If the editor of Wisden cannot be counted upon to uphold the greater, immemorial interests of the game who can?
Wisden has moved with the times but is not imprisoned by passing fads. There is much more to read than there used to be. This is sensible and necessary, not least since online databases now offer every cricketing statistic you could need and many you do not. Wisden’s statistics – the compilation of records, careers and last year’s matches – remain an important part of the almanack, of course, but it bears repeating that this is a book to be read not merely a bible to be consulted.
Booth’s Editor’s Notes are good, striking the right balance between punchy criticism and well-earned praise. In what has been an annual gesture for at least twenty years there is a plea to finally organise the county schedule properly. Doubtless it will be repeated next year.
Booth, however, is not one of those ghastly modernists who think English cricket would be better served if there were fewer first-class counties. This is not just because he is a Northamptonshire man and Wantage Road might be top of the list of venues to be culled. It is, however, a worry that Northants’ ground is no longer the spinners’ friend it used to be. Since the county produced Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar one wonder what English spin-bowling – always a fragile flower in desperate need of nurturing – would be like without Northants and their burners.
Nevertheless, it seems clear Northants could do more to help themselves. They have struggled for years but, even allowing for a state of resigned hopelessness, attracting a mere 4,173 spectators to their county championship fixtures last season is a pathetic return.
Not that Northants are alone in not making much of an effort to persuade members or other spectators to actually come and watch championship cricket. Derbyshire, Glamorgan and Leicestershire attracted fewer than 13,000 spectators. Only Yorkshire, Somerset and Warwickshire lured more than 35,000 through the gates.
Even so, the total attendance for county championship matches was 435,723. If my calculations are correct, that amounts to an average of 2,689 a match or 672 a day (actually a little more than that, since these calculations do not account for days lost to the weather). This is a figure that seems depressingly low yet also surprisingly high. Nevertheless, if just a fraction of the attention paid to marketing limited overs cricket was directed to promoting the ancient championship one imagines that attendance could be boosted by at least 20%. Still, when those following online and on the wireless are included, it is clear there is more interest in the old dame than is sometimes suggested.
There are plenty of plums to be harvested from this year’s alamanack. Duncan Hamilton on Yorkshire; Patrick Collins on Kevin Pietersen; Mike Atherton on the “art and graft” of batsmanship; Gideon Haigh on Ricky Ponting; Rahul Bhattacharya on VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid and so on. Not forgetting a splendid section on Wisden’s own history.
Above all, however, Wisden is a tribute to the spirit of the sport, not as some intellectual or theoretical concept but rather as cricket is played in flesh and blood. The alamanack is no dusty or reverent compilation of mere detail; rather it teems with life. Consider, for instance, how the schoolboy who recorded bowling figures of 1-1-0-6 must have felt to be taken off after just that single, devastating, over? That snippet is one of hundreds of delightful moments catalogued in these pages.
It bursts with life even when it is listing those who have died. Wisden always revels in the game’s dafter flights of fancy. The present edition’s obituary of Sir Patrick Moore (who “cheerfully acknowledged his hopelessness with the bat in Sussex club cricket”) notes that in one of his final books, Can you play cricket on Mars?, the great stargazer concluded that “the contest would be heavily weighted in favour of batsmen, able to hit the ball enormous distances in the thin Martian atmosphere; bowlers would be unable to find any swing, always assuming they could cope with a bulky space suit.”
The obituary pages are a reliable source of entertainment. This year, for instance, we are sad to learn of the death of Ganesh Thakuri, judged by those that might know, “the best Nepali wicketkeeper I have seen”. A sentiment that makes one wonder what the second-best Nepali wicketkeeper thinks of this.
It is disappointing, therefore, that in recent years pressure for space has reduced the obituaries of some of those who only briefly appeared in Big Cricket to a single line. To wit: Hayden Everton Ryan, who died last year aged 60, was a “Monserrat left-hander who played two first-class matches; bagged a pair against 1980-81 England tourists”. Naturally, one wants to know how Mr Ryan fared in his other first-class appearance. Cricket Archive reveals that he made 6 and 13* for the Leeward Islands against the Windward Islands. This is oddly cheering. Moreover, Wisden might have noted that Paul Downton, the England wicketkeeper, was Ryan’s only first-class wicket.
I know that these concerns do not even rise to the level of trivia. They are, in the Australian vernacular, pretty tragic. But these flights of fancy and voyages of discovery are a vital part of the almanacks charm. For that reason too, I always turn to the Errata (page 1555 this year). Here we learn that, at last, an error in the 1974 edition has been corrected. You see, Peter Sainsbury attended Bitterne Park Secondary Modern School and not whatever establishment was credited with his education all those years ago. We also discover that last year’s almanack has had to be corrected to acknowledge that Reman Services, not Roman, won the Shropshire League. How disappointing.
Wisden will get there in the end. Consider the case of Archibald Fargas, a clergyman who represented Cambridge University and Gloucestershire in 28 first-class matches from 1900-1901. He was mistakenly obituarised in the 1915 edition, it being believed that he had gone down with his ship, the Monmouth. This unhappy mistake was corrected in the famous 1916 edition (containing the obituaries of WG Grace and Victor Trumper) but Wisden, having buried Reverend Fargas prematurely, compounded the error by failing to note his actual death in 1963. This mistake was not corrected until 1994 at which point the Reverend Fargas’s account was at last in balance.
Cricket Round the World is another perennial highlight. There is something immensely cheering about these reports of missionary work in unlikely corners of the globe. This year we discover that “a vast fundraising campaign on St Helena came up with the $24,000 needed to cover the costs of sending the island’s cricketers to their maiden international tournament, ICC Africa Division Three in Johannesburg”. It was, “impossible to know how they would get on” but on “an emotional opening morning” Cameroon were dismissed for just 36. Alas and “heartbreakingly” St Helena were subsequently beaten by Seychelles and Rwanda.
Elsewhere, we discover that “Guatemala, cradle of the Mayan civilisation, but new to the game of cricket, won the regional Easter Cup by whitewashing El Salvador home and away” and that the “pioneering force of Bulgarian cricket” is Saif Rehman, a “soap star, semi-finalist in Bulgaria’s Got Talent – and now symbol of egalitarianism in his adopted country”.
There is romance aplenty here and what is cricket without romance? More, perhaps, than any other sport it is a game for romantics and eccentrics and it is part of Wisden’s charm to remind us of this fact.
It is reassuring to discover that sales of Wisden have in recent years hovered around the 50,000 mark. Impressive for a book retailing at £50. And lo, as I type this, the sun has come out to shine for the first time in weeks. There is a breath of summer in the air and the world seems a better place as a man’s fancy turns to cricket and the thought of runs and, who knows, maybe even wickets in the months ahead. Wisden has arrived again and everything is going to be just fine. Wives and weather permitting…
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