Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 62 i Wisden Cricket Monthly

4 Rossouw’s 52-ball century against Bangladesh was the fourth-fastest in the history of the men’s T20 World Cup 3.33 Team selected on performances from October 1 to October 31 44.94 Glenn Phillips’ batting average at No.4 in T20Is, with a strike rate of 163 13.3 Josh Little’s T20 strike rate in 2022. Only Obed McCoy has taken more wickets at a lower strike rate 1. Rilee Rossouw South Africa The burly South African became only the second player to score consecutive T20I centuries (after France’s Gustav McKeon), making 100* from 48 balls against India at the start of the month as the Proteas geared up for the T20 World Cup and then pummelling 109 from 56 deliveries versus Bangladesh at the SCG when the show got going. Rossouw was recalled…

‘To inspire the next generation, that’s the point of us.’ AGE: 30 ROLE: Left-hand opening bat; occasional medium pace COUNTY: Lancashire CAREER RECORD: 17 Tests, 781 runs at 25.19, SR 42, 2 centuries, 1 fifty 159 first-class matches, 9,311 runs at 36.65, SR 46, 25 centuries, 33 fifties 82 List-A matches, 2,794 runs at 42.33, SR 83, 5 centuries, 19 fifties 84 T20s, 1,577 runs at 32.85, SR 125, 1 century, 7 fifties Last November at Lord’s, the Chance to Shine charity staged an awards night to honour some of the greats from the game’s grassroots. One of the tiny cohort of current players to make the effort to turn up was Keaton Jennings. We sat next to each other at the dinner and he was in fine fettle, enjoying…

‘Nowadays my for ward defence is my sweep’  AGE: 28 ROLE: Left-hand top/middle-order bat, occasional wicketkeeper COUNTY: Nottinghamshire CAREER RECORD: 4 Tests, 110 runs at 15.71, SR 58, 1 fifty 3 ODIs, 123 runs at 41, SR 81, 2 fifties 8 T20Is, 242 runs at 40.33, SR 158, 1 fifty 118 first-class matches, 7,857 runs at 41.57, SR 72, 22 centuries, 35 fifties 74 List-A matches, 2,385 runs at 38.46, SR 100, 3 centuries, 16 fifties 174 T20s, 4,268 runs at 30.48, SR 138, 27 fifties It’s six years since Ben Duckett, aged 22 and riding high after a vintage summer for Northants, was brought back down to earth with a bump by Ravichandran Ashwin on the dust bowls of India. Having hit a run-a-ball half-century from the top of…

Ascrawny young man holds a white cricket ball between his thumb and his middle finger, wearing a red Nike t-shirt with a metal chain hanging loose outside of it. Next to him, a number that will change his life forever is displayed on the digital screen of a handheld radar speed gun: 92.3. Haris Rauf was a 23-year-old who had never bowled with a hard ball before when his friends convinced him to travel 130 miles from Rawalpindi to Gujranwala and take part in an open trial. “It was just an outing and a bit of fun for us,” Rauf recalled to ESPNcricinfo’s Umar Farooq Kalson, “until we started competing with each other on who could generate more pace.” An IT student who sold mobile phones by day and played…

Mark Butcher, 18 years of age and making his debut as a professional cricketer, needs to hit the final ball of Surrey’s Sunday League fixture against Glamorgan for six to seal a smashand-grab win at The Oval and begin his career with a bang. Standing at mid-off, pondering how he can prevent this from happening, is his dad. Alan Butcher hadn’t expected to play in the game. With his career in its twilight by the summer of 1991, Glamorgan’s 37-year-old skipper tended to sit out the one-day matches and give his dodgy knee a rest. But when Ian Greig, Surrey’s captain, informed him over a pint at The Tavern that his eldest son would be making his debut the following day, he decided it was too good an opportunity to…

Freelance sportswriter and stalwart club cricketer @reverse_ sweeper Late May, and Rikki Clarke, 40 years old and eight months into his retirement from professional cricket, walks out to bat for Shrewton first XI against South Wilts thirds in their Hampshire County League Division Two clash, the sixth tier of the local structure. Fifteen years earlier, Clarke contributed a 28-ball 82 not out to Surrey’s world-record List-A score of 496. Which is to say, going pongo was very much in his locker. The carnage that followed was no foregone conclusion – Clarke had been dismissed for 14 in the first two league games – but it was no shock that he walked off having pummelled 22 sixes and 16 fours in a 109-ball 229. That night, Clarke posted a screenshot of…

1 The sweep is a really good option against slow bowling. The thing to consider is the pace on the delivery: against ultra-slow bowling, it’s better to go to the orthodox hard sweep and the slog sweep rather than the paddle sweep. The paddle is more of a touch shot and needs pace on the ball. 2 You don’t have to pre-meditate. You can play the sweep shot reactively based on the line of the ball – if the ball is well outside off stump, for instance, you can play a relatively risk-free shot. 3 If you are going to pre-meditate your sweep, you need a get-out shot – an alternative to the shot you originally had in mind. If the length is right – somewhere between a good…

Do you know someone deserving of a place in the Wisden Club Cricket Hall of Fame? Email editorial@wisden.com “Pearson’s seven-year peak from 1978 to ’84 saw him compile six of the county’s 11 highest season aggregates, and four of the top six” Mention the legendary batting exploits of KP in Northumbrian cricketing circles and thoughts will invariably turn to Ken Pearson, an opener whose 9,100 Minor Counties Championship runs for the county are almost 3,000 more than the next best. His seven-year peak from 1978 to ’84 saw him compile six of the county’s 11 highest season aggregates, and four of the top six. It is a mighty body of work, and his 956 runs in 1980 – a personal best and Northumberland record – were also the most in…

A RELEGATION SEASON IN NUMBERS 1 Number of wins 2 Number of bowlers who took 20 wickets and averaged below 30 (George Hill and Steve Patterson) 82.33 The combined average of Harry Brook, Dawid Malan and Joe Root in the 16 matches they played between them 1 Number of players besides Brook, Malan and Root to average 40-plus (Jonny Tattersall) Justa few hours after Liam Norwell’s stunning late salvo saved Warwickshire’s skin at Edgbaston, the Yorkshire players assembled for an end-of-season gathering that no one wanted to attend. Norwell’s nine-wicket haul against Hampshire had relegated the White Rose for the first time since 2011, capping a year of unprecedented turbulence at Headingley which left the club in existential crisis. “It wasn’t great timing,” admits Jordan Thompson, the homegrown all-rounder who…

In our August edition last year, produced shortly after England had been blown away by New Zealand at Edgbaston to surrender a two-Test series in miserable fashion, we ran a special investigation on what we called “the red-ball crisis” in English batting. We discussed the impact the proliferation of whiteball cricket was having on “malfunctioning techniques” and zeroed in on Jonny Bairstow in particular. “The results are irrefutable,” we wrote confidently. “Bairstow’s technical shifts have aided his one-day play, and all but ended his Test career.” On the cover we asked: ‘The red pill or the white pill: which would you choose?’ The implication being that as the formats move ever further apart, it is becoming increasingly difficult to do the lot. Well, you can forget all that. Under the…

AGE: 29 ROLE: Right-hand middle-order bat; right-arm spin COUNTY: Lancashire CAREER RECORD: 12 ODIs, 250 runs at 31.25, SR 123, 1 fifty; 6 wickets at 24.16; ER 5.8 26 T20Is, 418 runs at 23.22, SR 150, 1 century; 15 wickets at 23.46, ER 8.00 62 first-class matches, 3,069 runs at 38.36, SR 59, 7 centuries, 15 fifties; 43 wickets at 36.13, 1 five-wicket haul 67 List-A matches, 1,802 runs at 35.33, SR 102, 1 century, 11 fifties; 29 wickets at 44.10, ER 5.27 203 T20 matches, 5,017 runs at 29.00, SR 146, 2 centuries, 29 fifties; 86 wickets at 23.58, ER 8.09, 2 four-wicket hauls In fairness, he’s never deviated from the message. From the age of 12, watching the ’05 epic, he knew what he wanted out of life.…

THE ROAD TO 2025 2023 summer: The Ashes Australia – five Tests It is imperative that England start well. With their toughest assignment, away in India, following the Ashes, defeat could easily spiral into seven or eight losses from the first 10, a near-unrecoverable position. 2023/24: The India challenge India – five Tests England will likely need at least one win in this series, unless they thump Australia at home. A 3-2 win in the Ashes and then a 5-0 loss in India would leave them with very little room for error from then onwards. But if they pick up enough wins elsewhere, they may still be able to make the final even if they lose 3-1 or 4-1. 2024 summer: Project domination West Indies – three Tests Sri Lanka…

"If anyone had a cardiac arrest and there was no defibrillator and they died,” Robbie Book told these pages in summer 2020, “I can’t believe there’s any family in England who would hold the club responsible. However, it’s your moral responsibility as a club, your duty of care to your members, to have one. Not just for players, but also spectators. You’ve got a pavilion, you’ve got a bar, you’ve got insurance in case someone robs you or burns you down. Surely this is the next stage?” For Book, trustee of the Club Cricket Charity, an adjunct to the National Cricket Conference, campaigning for the widespread installation of defibrillators in cricket grounds has become an obsession. People have died on the cricket field whose lives could have been saved with…

There is an art to constructing an over. It’s all about setting a batter up – how do you force them to hit in a certain area that’s going to create opportunities? Or how do you get them to think you’re going to bowl something that you’re not? That’s the mystery behind it. The best challenge is working out a batter. What are they looking to do? Do they use their feet, or favour square of the wicket? Is it turning, are they looking to sweep or reverse sweep? Somebody like James Vince is quite smart in how he goes about it. He will almost stand on his stumps to make you feel like you’re bowling short, so you’ll go fuller to get him on the front foot, and then…

In a famous Newsnight interview in 1999, David Bowie predicted with uncanny accuracy the extent to which the internet was about to transform the modern world. “It’s just a tool isn’t it?” his interrogator Jeremy Paxman put it to him. “No,” came the reply. “It’s an alien lifeform!” Last month in London, a man who took this most existential of truths and applied it with rigorous genius to the world of cricket died at the tragically young age of 47. Most people in the sport will never have heard his name. Travis Basevi was not an on-field innovator such as WG Grace or Shane Warne, nor an administrative iconoclast in the mould of Kerry Packer or Lalit Modi, but in his own sphere, he was as game-changing as any of…

"I have a funny feeling that if things don’t go well immediately, then the pressure will load up on an already bruised home team PHIL WALKER WCM editor-in-chief The logical answer is that Pakistan will bat long and knacker England’s limited bowling attack before striking with Shaheen Afridi and their spinners in the shadows of day five. Also, that England’s gung-ho approach will ultimately be unsustainable across three Test matches on unresponsive pitches that reward graft more than flair. But since when did logic ever come into it with these two teams? So much flows from the imperious bat of Babar Azam and I fear that their disastrous World Cup campaign and Babar’s own travails will hang heavy on his head. Then there’s the issue of who bowls spin: with…

‘I’m playing carefree and in the moment ’ AGE: 23 ROLE: Right-hand middle-order bat COUNTY: Yorkshire CAREER RECORD: 1 Test, 12 runs at 12, SR 60 17 T20Is, 348 runs at 29, SR 144, 1 fifty 57 first-class matches, 3,079 runs at 35.80, SR 65, 7 centuries, 17 fifties 15 List-A matches, 343 runs at 31.18, SR 99, 1 century, 1 fifty 96 T20 matches, 2,408 runs at 34.40, SR 149, 1 century, 9 fifties "I think it’s pretty self-explanatory really,” says Harry Brook when asked how he goes about scooping 90mph deliveries into the stands. “All you’ve got to do is get front-on and put your bat in line in a frying pan position… and yeah.” Thanks for that, Harry. Just let me get my pads on and I’ll…

AGE: 23 ROLE: Right-hand middle-order bat, off-spinner COUNTY: Surrey CAREER RECORD: 2 T20Is, 40 runs at 20, SR 160 41 first-class matches, 1,790 runs at 35.09, SR 57, 3 hundreds, 12 fifties; 21 wickets at 53.28, ER 3.18 22 List-A matches, 506 runs at 24.09, SR 96, 1 hundred, 2 fifties; 11 wickets at 38.45, ER 5.26 102 T20 matches, 2,532 runs at 29.10, SR 154, 1 hundred, 20 fifties; 23 wickets at 25.47, ER 7.19 A long way out from England’s Test squad for Pakistan being announced, the ‘new Moeen’ tag had already begun to stick on Will Jacks. Back in April, Surrey head coach Gareth Batty was proclaiming their parallel skillsets: “I don’t say this lightly. If we are saying that we want Will to emulate Moeen Ali,…

Rob Key has dedicated his life to cricket. The current MD of the men’s game in England played professionally for the best part of 20 years and scored almost 20,000 firstclass runs. He loved batting and was very good at it, yet he spent the overwhelming majority of his time as a cricketer doing something he loathed. Rob Key hated fielding. “The fear of letting people down is constant, as is knowing you can’t do anything about it,” he writes in his memoir Oi, Key – Tales of a Journeyman Cricketer. In a chapter entitled ‘The Grind’, Key describes how he never grew tired of the part of the game he truly loved – scoring runs – but says the “dread” of fielding was always with him. Post retirement he…

Interesting days, the early 1960s, both on and off the cricket field. On a technical note, the no-ball rule was rewritten, and there was a good deal of talk about ostracising the chuckers who seemed to be rife, both home and abroad. A widespread plea for “brighter cricket” found expression in the first English one-day competition, sponsored by Gillette, in 1963, while the age-old conventions of the domestic game were shaken to their core when the 17 first-class counties voted to end the distinction between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’. One way or another, these were heady times. Meanwhile, the upper ranks of England’s 1962/63 Ashes tour party resisted the winds of change blowing all around them. Reverend David Sheppard of Sussex, the future Bishop of Liverpool, was an early contender to…

THE WCM COACHING TEAM Alex Tudor Former England fast bowler; now head coach at Kimbolton School Tash Farrant England leftarm seamer; co-founder Girls Cricket Academy Lydia Greenway Former England batter turned coach and broadcaster Keaton Jennings Lancashire & England opening bat Matt Parkinson Lancashire & England legspinner Ollie Pope England’s Test No.3 Toby Radford Former West Indies batting coach Mark Ramprakash Former England batting coach John Simpson Middlesex wicketkeeper “I’m a seam bowler and in the last couple of years I’ve completely lost my awayswinger. I’ve always naturally got the ball to shape into the right-hander but now I struggle to get the ball to move away from them and very rarely get outside edges. What can I do to rediscover the ball that shapes away from the right-hander?” Alex…

Get 10% off all cricket products listed at ProDirectsport.com! Use the code WISDEN1022 at ProDirectsport.com to activate your discount One use per customer, offer expires February 16, 2023. Pro:Direct has the right to remove this promotion at any time. GM Diamond Original Adult prices from £126 Junior prices from £95 and £50 for Kashmir Willow A blockbuster of a cricket bat with a classical look and feel. As used by Ben Stokes, the Diamond possesses a relatively high middle which favours cross-bat shots, with a characteristically great pick-up. The top-end offerings carry all the notable Gunn & Moore stylings, with an extended swell to help with offmiddle hits, the best unbleached Grade 1 Willow, all fortified with a GM NOW! protective cover and ToeTek toe protector as standard. adidas XT…

The Match New Zealand 306 (Richardson 102; S Jones 4-71) & 340 (N Astle 157, C Martin 70* England 381 (Strauss 112, Oram 5-85) & 260 (Strauss 102*, C Martin 7-62) New Zealand won by 5 runs The Cast Chris Martin (bowler) Chris Martin (Coldplay) Nathan Astle Scott Styris New Zealand were deemed underdogs once again as they arrived on English soil to take on Michael Vaughan’s flourishing Test side. A match that became famous for a chance encounter between a ‘rabbit’ and a ‘rock star’. NA: It still blows my mind to think about it to be honest… I mean, Chrissy won’t mind me saying but he was just so bad with a bat in his hand. SS: Soooo bad. Terrible. Chrissy batted like a wonky wooden broom in…