Innehållsförteckning för Issue 59 från Wisden Cricket Monthly

To think that fourday cricket should be foregrounded for the summer holidays is fanciful. Kids won’t be flooding through the gates. Nor, in truth, will sufficient numbers of adults to tip the whole enterprise into the black. It exists as a beautiful anomaly I love the County Championship. It’s honestly my favourite competition in sport. Not sure if that makes me a fusty old nostalgist or a hipster-romantic who knows where the real quality lies. Most likely I’m somewhere in between, outside the bounds of each extreme, among the hidden hordes that appreciate its strange majesty for its own sake. We do a podcast these days – Imay have mentioned this before. The bits on the Championship are always (in my head at least) the most fun. The stories, variously…

Do you know someone deserving of a place in the Wisden Club Cricket Hall of Fame? Email editorial@wisden.com As Top Trumps powers go, having the fourth-most wickets in the history of your league is chunky. Also having the third-most runs in that league? Goodnight, game over. In a 31-year Bolton League (BCL) career taking in five clubs – there were also three seasons in neighbouring leagues – David ‘Chalky’ White amassed 18,160 runs and snared 1,304 wickets with his lively swing bowling, becoming a fixture in the BCL representative XI and the most productive locally-sourced all-round cricketer in the league’s history. It was a career bookended by stints at his hometown club, Horwich RMI, where he was “dragged kicking and screaming” as a 10-year-old, being mentored by Brian Krikken, father…

It seems almost poignant to say it, but after starring in England’s World Cup final win over New Zealand at Lord’s in 2019, Ben Stokes played only 10 more one-day internationals before announcing his retirement from the format last month. Chances are you won’t recall many of those last few matches (though he did hit 10 sixes in a 52-ball 99 against India at Pune in March 2021). And that, perhaps, is the point. Why play a form of the game that, if you’re lucky, gets remembered only once every four years, and has long been overtaken by its racier progeny? On one level, Stokes’ decision was a no-brainer. If he is to succeed in his ambition of following Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad to 150 Test caps and beyond,…

Derbyshire NEXT MATCHES: Hants, RL (H), Aug 12; Worcs, RL (A), Aug 14; Kent, RL (H), Aug 17; Yorks, RL (H), Aug 21; Northants, RL (A), Aug 23; Durham, CC (H), Sep 5-8 Wood returns after doping ban ordeal Derbyshire coach Mickey Arthur has said Tom Wood is still part of his plans this summer after the 28-year-old batter was cleared to return to cricket following a backdated six-month ban for failing to declare the use of an asthma inhaler. Wood, who signed for the club in 2020, tested positive for terbutaline – acontrolled substance found in asthma inhalers – in September 2021. The ECB accepted that Wood had “no intention to breach the ECB anti-doping rules” but the National Anti-Doping Panel banned him for six months, a suspension which…

Marcus Trescothick would later recall a “discernible feeling of change in the air” as the England squad gathered at Edgbaston for the opening match of their gripping 2003 Test series against South Africa. The sense that the sands were shifting hadn’t escaped Nasser Hussain. Under Michael Vaughan’s spunky leadership, a newlook England ODI side had just seen off Pakistan and then triumphed in a triangular series against South Africa and Zimbabwe, helping to dampen memories of the chastening World Cup campaign a few months earlier which had ended in a group-stage exit and Hussain’s resignation as 50-over skipper. Vaughan, still basking in the personal glory of a landmark Ashes series which had propelled him to the top of the Test batting rankings, felt fresh and new, full of ideas and…

THE NIGHTWATCHMAN THE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Solomzi Nqweni, or Solo as he prefers to be called, is one of very few South Africans who can look back on an English sporting triumph and smile. “I wouldn’t be here today if they didn’t [win the 2019 World Cup]. And when you think about how many things happened in that game, how many times England came back into it, it’s hard not to think that God had something to do with it. And I can tell you now, I’d be dead if New Zealand won. I wouldn’t be here to tell this story.” Solo’s story begins in the middle-class suburb of Lorraine, about 14 kilometres west of Port Elizabeth. Surrounded by wide streets and parks, he had room to cultivate an interest…

At the heart of club cricket Since the inception of the National Club Championship in 1969, no county has provided more different finalists than Middlesex’s eight. By that metric, its club system is among the strongest in the country. Teddington and Ealing have four appearances apiece, and theirs has been the county’s dominant recent rivalry, albeit very much a phenomenon of the Premier League era. The Middlesex County League was only formed in 1972, and in its 27 pre-Premier League seasons Finchley ran out winners nine times. Teddington were next best with four titles – along with national knockout success in 1989 and 1991 – while Ealing claimed just one. The latter weren’t even in the first edition of the Premier League (MCPL), finishing bottom half in the 1998 everyoneplays-everyone…

BY HARRY PEARSON Simon & Schuster, £20 It takes a particular worldview, and glorious skill, to set up and write a biography in the way that Harry Pearson writes this one. To understand his reasons for the punning title, you have to know that two of the book’s three subjects, the mighty Yorkshire all-rounders of the early last century George Herbert Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes, were born in the village of Kirkheaton, near Huddersfield. It’s a 15-minute drive from Kirkheaton to Holmfirth, the location of the long-running and beloved sitcom Last Of The Summer Wine. “If you squint a little,” Pearson writes, “you might picture Hirst and Rhodes, joined by their cheery pal from a few miles down the road in Berry Brow, Schofield Haigh, wandering around the moorlands like…

Trent Bridge, July 23-27, 1998 South Africa 374 (Cronje 126, Pollock 50; Fraser 5-60, Gough 4-116) & 208 (Cronje 67, Cullinan 56; Fraser 5-62 & Cork 4-60) v England 336 (Butcher 75, Ramprakash 67*, Atherton 58; Donald 5-109) & 247-2 (Atherton 98*, Hussain 58) England won by 8 wickets "I could see the look in AD’s eyes, his laser focus. In that moment, there was nothing else I’d always said that if I played one Test match for my country, I’d be happy. I’d been around the side for a while and not played because we had the likes of Donald, Pollock, Kallis and Klusener – all incredible players. It was a very special moment to make my debut. I was racked with nerves and full of excitement. When I…

By the end of July 2022, England’s men had played 27 ODIs since winning the World Cup in 2019 (in which time, scientists have discovered no fewer than 27 ways of determining the winner of a tied cricket match that are more sensible than Most Boundaries Scored). At the equivalent stage of the 2015-19 World Cup cycle, England had played 63 ODIs. The top nine teams in the ODI rankings at the time of writing (New Zealand, England, India, Pakistan, Australia, South Africa, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and West Indies) have between them played 238 ODIs since that win by the most non-existent of margins, a rounded-up average of 27 matches each, down from 55 each at the same point four years ago. In this refangled i by Covid and chom…

ATo be clear, none of these came directly from Brendon McCullum or Rob Key, although you sense they would have shared the sentiment had they known where to direct their ire. For despite overseeing England’s most captivating run of Test performances since the 2005 Ashes, neither head honcho seems particularly grateful for the catch-all phrase that has been adopted to describe their rebooted fortunes. flurry of messages came my way around the start of last month – all of them a variation on the same theme: “So it was you, you bastard …” “I don’t have any idea what ‘Bazball’ is… I don’t really like that silly term that people are throwing out there,” McCullum declared in an interview on SEN; to which Key later added on Sky Sports: “It’s…

Timed out Law 40.1.1 is one of cricket’s quirkiest. It concerns the time a new batter is allowed to make their way to the crease after the fall of a wicket. “The incoming batter must, unless Time has been called, be in position to take guard or for the other batter to be ready to receive the next ball within three minutes of the dismissal or retirement.” There are a handful of instances of batters being dismissed in this way in first-class cricket but as of yet none in Tests. Sourav Ganguly really pushed his luck during a 2007 Test against South Africa in Cape Town where a flurry of quick wickets saw him having to strip from his tracksuit and into his pads as next batter VVS Laxman was…

When Dean Elgar was made Proteas Test skipper in March 2021, eyebrows were raised. Not so much in doubt, more in exasperation. Since Graeme Smith called time on his illustrious tenure eight years ago, Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers, Faf du Plessis and Quinton de Kock have all tried to fill his sizeable shoes, and none of them were quite right. When they turned next to Elgar, the cranky battler approaching his mid-30s, with a reputation for speaking his mind and no great charm or charisma, South African supporters were left wondering: is this really the best the selectors can do? “I was captain of my age-group teams at school and captain of SA Schools but this was unknown territory,” Elgar tells WCM, speaking from his home close to the…

Snap happy Lord’s, London July 23, 2017 SHAUN BOTTERILL Katherine Brunt organises a team selfie in the moments after England have clinched an extraordinary World Cup final against India by nine runs. India at one point needed just 91 with eight wickets in hand, but an inspired spell from Brunt’s new-ball partner Anya Shrubsole sent the largely female sellout crowd into raptures. In the UK the game was the most watched fixture of the season in all cricket, while a worldwide audience in excess of 180 million tuned in. Vale Phillip Hughes Adelaide Oval, Adelaide December 9, 2014 SAEED KHAN In scenes repeated across Australia and around the world, bats and caps are laid out to commemorate the devastating loss of Phil Hughes, Australia’s much-loved opening bat, who died in…

Send in your answers via email (editorial@wisden.com) or via post (Time Warp, Wisden Cricket Monthly, Fourth Floor, Bedser Stand, Kia Oval, Kennington, London, SE11 5SS). Entries must be received by September 7, 2022 WIN! 1. 5 years ago… On September 15, 2017, Essex were confirmed winners of the County Championship for the first time since 1992. Which of their bowlers topped the competition’s wickettaking charts? 2. 10 years ago… On September 12, 2012, a left-arm spinner who is now the highest wickettaker of all time in English domestic T20 cricket made their T20I debut for England against South Africa at Edgbaston. Who is that bowler? 3. 15 years ago… On September 21, 2007, who scored their 2,000th run of the Championship campaign, making a century in each innings against Lancashire?…

The Match Notts 388-6dec (Bolus 140, Sobers 66) & 80 (Nash 8-44) Glamorgan 300 (Walker 104) & 169-9 (Wheatley 36*) Glamorgan won by 1 wicket The Cast Garry Sobers Malcolm Nash Ravi Shastri Stuart Broad Dom Sibley 1968. A momentous year in global history – the assassination of Martin Luther King taking place against a backdrop of war in Vietnam and revolutions in Europe. The space race rumbled on and the Beatles noodled about in India. Meanwhile, in a quiet corner of Wales, cricket was about to witness a seismic shift of its own. MN: We were excited to have the legendary Garry Sobers come to St Helen’s. Me and the boyos had it ringed in the calendar all summer. To play against the great man on the green, green…