Innehållsförteckning för Issue 64 från Wisden Cricket Monthly

“The interesting thing is what England are going to do with the Ashes, because it seems to me that they need to have really good batting conditions to play that way Ricky Ponting leans forward, gazing intently through the large windows of the Bradman Noble Stand at the SCG, and admits his optimism about the future of Test cricket has taken a hit. The reason is the scene unfolding before him: Australian batters racking up a seemingly endless stream of runs and blasting out South Africa’s top-order for fun. The Australian Test summer has been glorious for those who enjoy watching the home side obliterate visitors but a little disappointing if you prefer competitive red-ball contests. After home victories over West Indies by 164 runs and 419 runs there was…

“Cricket is f***ing useless,” says Dr David Goldblatt. “It’s been so hopeless at getting on top of this. The ICC are short-term, myopic, ignorant fools. What the f*** are they thinking? Cricket is obviously going to be one of the most threatened sports in the world by climate change. I’m appalled by their attitude.” Two years ago, Goldblatt, a sportswriter and academic, authored a report on the impact of the climate crisis on the future of global sport. His findings in ‘Playing against the clock: Global sport, the climate emergency and the case for rapid change’ read as pages of unremitting grimness. Intense heat will drive fans out of stands and force players to take refuge from the sun. Hurricanes and floods will decimate stadiums. Wildfires will fill them with…

Richie Benaud lived just long enough to see the start of Ben Stokes’ England career but sadly not long enough to witness his shapeshifting Test captaincy. The great man would have approved. Long before Benaud, who died in 2015, became the voice of summer on two continents, he was an intuitive, bold captain of Australia who helped rouse Test cricket from the late-1950s torpor into which it had sunk. Mike Brearley, who knows a thing or two about imaginative leadership, described him as “the spectators’ best friend… alert to inject excitement into the game”, while still playing to win. After England’s frenetic run chase at Trent Bridge to seal the series against New Zealand last June, Stokes echoed that philosophy when he said his players should “try and think that…

After a year in which Ben Stokes’ England began their mission to redraw the parameters of Test cricket, our team of 2022 has a different feel to it. There are only three survivors from our 2021 selection, with more than half the votes from our 31-strong voting panel of writers and broadcasters going to cricketers from England or Australia. Indian players dominated in 2021, accounting for almost a third of the total votes, but with one honourable exception, they were almost entirely ignored this time around. It’s a remarkable statistic that no specialist batter from India received a single vote from our panel, reflecting an uneven year for the game’s financial superpower in which they lost a series in South Africa and were Bairstowed in Birmingham. Three England players make…

Many years ago, the England football team was managed by a chap called Glenn Hoddle. The story goes that one day he decided to do a session with the squad’s free-kick takers. Man-management was never really Glenn’s strongest suit, but boy could he hit a dead ball, and so, after wincing through a cluster of shanks and pea rollers from the lads, Glenn thought he’d show them how to do it, stepping up to curl a few beauties into top bins. Glenn was thrilled. He still had it. But the lads? The lads weren’t having it. They chuntered and muttered. Becks wasn’t happy, the story got out, and thus the delicate equilibrium between coach and player was further weakened. That England team wasn’t as happy as today’s cricketing equivalent. Not…

No.1  David Warner marks his 100th Test by reaching three figures on day two of the Boxing Day Test against South Africa at the MCG. The 36-year-old opener, who had gone nearly three years without a Test hundred, kicks on to make it a double in 37-degree heat, but is forced to retire hurt after injuring himself while celebrating the landmark and is carried from the field to a standing ovation. In a one-sided series, the hosts go on to complete a crushing innings victory, with Warner named Player of the Match after becoming the first Australian to make a double-century in their 100th Test. 1st Test, Brisbane December 17-18 South Africa 152 (Verreynne 64; Lyon 3-14, Starc 3-41) & 99 (Zondo 36*; Cummins 5-42) v Australia 218 (Head 92;…

When padding up to write this column, consecutive tweets jumped out from my timeline. One was from the new South African T20 competition, the mini-IPL, expressing excitement about its opening day – hashtagging a betting shop, of course. The next was a piece from The Age newspaper in Australia quoting ICC chair Greg Barclay with his low-key concession that “not everybody is going to be able to play Test cricket” in the future. The link here should be obvious to anyone who was paying attention through 2022, as IPL owners set about seizing pretty much any asset going – a pattern we can expect to continue, for instance, when the ECB eventually sells The Hundred to the highest bidder. These transactions put the form of the game that soaks up…

“Our system is set up to reward the apprentice, not the protégé. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Runs and wickets on the circuit, and your time will come. Other countries have traditionally been less shy about pushing youth forward, especially in Asia Nothing says the passing of time quite like the arrival of a young cricketer. When England selected the Leicestershire leg-spinner Rehan Ahmed (aged 18 years 126 days) for the third Test against Pakistan at Karachi shortly before Christmas, it was quickly noted that he had not even been born when James Anderson made his own Test debut, back in 2003. Youth ages us. It can also be illuminating. English cricket has tended to treat youngsters with a suspicion usually reserved for, well, leg-spinners. On the 104-strong list of…

Yorkshire Lord Patel will step down as Yorkshire chair at the club’s AGM in March after a turbulent tenure at Headingley. Having taken on the role in November 2021 in the wake of the racism crisis which engulfed the club, he has overseen significant change but also faced fierce opposition, most notably for the decision to dismiss 16 members of backroom staff in response to Azeem Rafiq’s allegations. “I would like to thank those members who have been hugely supportive of the changes that the board have introduced at Headingley,” said Patel. “I would also like to thank the staff and board members who have all worked tirelessly during what has been a transformational period in Yorkshire’s history. There is still much for the club to do, but I have…

Since 1877, when James Lillywhite’s XI contested what would become the first official Test match in Melbourne, England have played 129 series of two or more Tests and won 46. The table below shows that away form is a decent barometer of the England team’s standing – post war, the high watermarks are in the 1950s, when England were the best side in the world, and the 1960s, a decade that includes the momentous Ashes win of 1970/71. Only four overseas series wins out of 23 from 1981 to 2000 is indicative of a dark stretch for English cricket that was illuminated by the arrival of Duncan Fletcher as coach, and an overseas win percentage of almost 40 that followed under his leadership.…

DINESH CHANDIMAL SRI LANKA 206* (326 balls, 545 minutes, 16 fours, 5 sixes) Sri Lanka v Australia | Second Test, Galle | July 2022 In early July, with the country at boiling point, Sri Lanka’s cricketers folded in less than 23 overs at Galle to hand Australia a huge win in the first Test. Never before had they lost a home match in fewer deliveries. The ground was barren at the end, its iconic fort hauntingly unpopulated. It would transpire that any spectators had been dispersed, lest the state-controlled TV cameras accidentally captured any inconvenient placards or banners. The second Test, also at Galle, would go ahead against a backdrop of deepening antigovernment fervour. While Australia built slowly on day one, two hours up the road at Colombo, waves of…

’ 1. SMRITI MANDHANA INDIA 15 ODIs, 696 runs at 49.71, 1 hundred, 6 fifties | 23 T20Is, 594 runs at 33, 5 fifties The silky-smooth southpaw retains her place after another stellar 12 months in which she finished as the leading T20I run-scorer from a Full Member nation and passed 50 in seven of her 15 ODI knocks. Mandhana’s last notable score of the year – asumptuous 49-ball 79 in a nailbiting T20I at Mumbai – inflicted defeat on Australia for the first and only time in 2022 and provided further evidence that when in full flow, not even the best can shackle her. 2. ALYSSA HEALY (WK) AUSTRALIA 1 Test, 0 runs at 0; 3 catches | 12 ODIs, 600 runs at 50, 2 hundreds, 2 fifties; 8…

Rehan Ahmed Pakistan v England, Third Test National Stadium, Karachi December 19, 2022 Last month Rehan Ahmed became England’s youngest Test cricketer, the youngest boy in history to take five wickets on his Test debut, only the second English leg-spinner to take a Test five-for since 1959, and the latest teenager to make his dad cry on national TV. The son of a jobbing quick from the Pakistani provinces, Ahmed was born in Nottingham on August 13, 2004. By 13 he was bowling at England players in the nets and getting them out; that same summer Shane Warne told him he’d be playing first-class cricket by 15. Warne was out by two years: in 2021, the same summer that he represented England under 19s, Ahmed made his senior debut for…

Do you know someone deserving of a place in the Wisden Club Cricket Hall of Fame? Email editorial@wisden.com “Warne bowled two overs at me and wasn’t best pleased when I reverseswept him. He said, ‘Learn how to f****ing play cricket before you play shots like that, mate’. We had a fag on the balcony later. The best day of my cricketing life Born two short years after organised league cricket first came to Kent in 1971, no player in KCL history has been quite as productive as John Bowden, whose impishly adventurous opening batting has clocked up over 12,000 first XI league runs, including 19 centuries, while his late-blooming left-arm spin has snared 299 top-flight victims “by firing it into the pads”. It has been a glorious 33-year romp around…

Despite a Bazball-inspired annus mirabilis that delivered nine Test wins in 10, and a T20 World Cup victory that seemed to float in on a tide of good vibes, the most significant moment of England’s seminal 2022 arguably came on the day after their on-field efforts had been concluded. Admittedly, the random enrichment of a select few athletes is of less widespread interest than Jonny Bairstow’s Trent Bridge blockbuster, or Ben Stokes’ masterful marshalling of a win for the ages in Rawalpindi. Or even the fact that England, traditional white-ball under-achievers, are now the first men’s team to hold both 50- and 20-over World Cups simultaneously. But as a means to hard-code the unfettered standards that England have suddenly set in motion, and to ensure that their conveyor belt of…

1 Alice Capsey has been named in England’s squad for the Women’s T20 World Cup in South Africa in February despite breaking her collarbone at the end of last year. Head coach Jon Lewis said he wanted to give the 18-year-old all-rounder “every possible chance” of taking part in the tournament. Freya Kemp, the 17-year-old seamer, misses out after suffering a stress fracture in her back. 2 Shane Burger has left his position as Scotland men’s head coach to take on a new role as assistant coach and lead batting coach at Somerset. The 40-yearold South African had been in the post since March 2019 and oversaw Scotland’s qualification for the Super 12s of the 2021 T20 World Cup. 3 New Zealand took a share of the…

An alternative prize will be provided if the winner is aged under 18, or if requested We reserve the right to edit letters for length and clarity LETTER OF THE MONTH The counties will be the death of county cricket First off, I want to say that I grew up on a diet of county cricket. The first thing I did when I got home from school was check Ceefax page 340. The first game of the County Championship is the start of summer, although now it feels more like the tail-end of winter. But the news of the ECB being offered £400m for a slice of The Hundred [through a reported bid from a private equity firm] caused a big conflict with me. My first thought was how is…

EBADOT HOSSAIN BANGLADESH 6-46 (21 overs) | New Zealand v Bangladesh First Test, Mount Maunganui | January 2021 Bangladesh’s knackered cricketers dragged themselves to New Zealand last January. Mentally shot after months on the road, bubbled up to their eyeballs, it was a fraught time for world cricket’s flying circus and for Bangladesh in particular. Within moments of their arrival, eight of the squad were forced into quarantine when a passenger on their plane was found to have Covid, and the rest followed when Rangana Herath, the team’s spinbowling coach, returned his own positive test. Ten days of quarantine left the squad with two days to prepare against the world Test champions. No one gave them a chance. Much of day one went to form, with Devon Conway easing to…

In July last year, Kate Cross and Issy Wong came together to spearhead England’s Test attack, taking nine of the 15 South African wickets to fall in a game that but for the weather would have built to a cracking climax. In many respects they’re natural partners, both bustling right-arm seamers who run in hard, strain for the cause and speak fulsomely about it afterwards. Neither lack for charisma nor presence. Both, too, are natural frontwomen for The Hundred, and by extension the women’s game as a whole. On the flipside, they are separated by 10 years and a world of experience. Cross, now 31, came through at a hinge point in the struggle for professionalisation. She recalls in the early days feeling grateful just for the chance to play.…

“E verything was a battle royal,” says John Hollioake, recalling his two sons, Adam and Ben, going hell for leather at the family home in Melbourne. “They’d play every sport known to man. They used to fight like hell, even in the kitchen. They had the competitiveness I had in spades. I just wasn’t bloody good enough to make the most of it.” Windows were broken, ornaments smashed, some of which John and his wife Daria have kept to this day as mementos of a time when their gifted young children were exploring how far their talent could take them. By the summer of 1997 they would become the first pair of brothers to make their Test debuts together in the 20th century, representing England against the country of their…

HOTBEDS At the heart of club cricket By the time the suited gentlemen had shuffled out of the Queen’s Arms Hotel on Easy Row and into the cold Birmingham night of December 14, 1888, the world’s first cricket league had been established. 110 years later, the Birmingham & District Cricket League became, for better or for worse, the country’s first ECB Premier League, the canary down the mine. At times during its 134-year existence, it has been undeniably the strongest in the land, its representative XI enjoying regular success in the League Cricket Conference President’s Trophy, its clubs dominating the national knockout. There was a large local population to draw on, close relations with Warwickshire and Worcestershire – indeed, both counties have entered their second XIs into the competition –…

1 A lot of my stuff is based around the basics. Head-hands-feet. Jack Russell once said to me, make your basics world-class, and then you can do all the funky stuff. So, one of the drills I spend hours doing is simply with a bunch of tennis balls and a racquet, setting myself up behind the stumps and getting somebody to hit balls quickly, one after the other, hard into the surface. That way, any technical deficiencies can be ironed out. The beauty of the drill is that if your hands are hard, the ball will bounce out. It forces you to relax, and ‘give’ with the ball. You can also subsequently work on one-hand catches. It’s all about grooving your rhythm. 2 Standing back to the quicks, I used…

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 February 8, 2023. 1. 5 years ago… On February 3, 2018, India beat Australia by eight wickets in the men’s Under-19 World Cup final at Mount Maunganui. Who captained India to victory and made a century on Test debut later the same year? 2. 10 years ago… On February 26, 2013, India defeated Australia by eight wickets at Chennai in the first of a four-match Test series. Who made 224 in the hosts’ first innings, the sixth and final hundred of his Test career? 3. 15 years ago… On February 29, 2008, Graeme Smith shared an unbeaten opening partnership of…

The Match Kolkata Knight Riders 120-7 (D Hussey 43; P Kumar 3-33) Royal Challengers Bangalore 121-5 (R Dravid 48*) RCB won by 5 wickets (with 15 balls to spare) The Cast Brendon McCullum Sourav Ganguly Rahul Dravid Jacques Kallis The IPL arrived in April 2008 with its now-customary razzmatazz, the extravagant opening ceremony getting the capacity crowd and millions watching on TV in the mood for a box-office spectacle. But what followed was must-see viewing for unexpected reasons… SG: Wow. What a night that was. RD: Even the old-timers like me and Jacques, we’d never really experienced anything like the electric atmosphere that night. Right, JK? JK: Old-timers? Careful Mr Wall, I’ve never looked or felt better. Just because you’re getting a bit grey and crumbly… RD: True, true. You…

GARY PRATT The Match: Fourth Ashes Test, England v Australia, Trent Bridge The Date: August 27, 2005 “I would much rather have still been playing county cricket and that the run out didn’t happen at all, to be brutally honest I’d been around the England squad that Michael Vaughan was forging for a couple of years before 2005, so I’d had experience of being on the field for short periods at a time. Duncan Fletcher was into getting in some young blood and seeing how they handled themselves around the group. Before the Ponting run out, Vaughan sent me to field in the slips and I actually don’t think I’d ever fielded there before! Fred [Andrew Flintoff] was firing it down at high speed and I’m in the slips in…