Innehållsförteckning för Issue 73 från Wisden Cricket Monthly

I went to a do at The Oval last month, in the plush 175 Suite of the Galadari Stand. Billed as a Champions’ Dinner, it felt every inch like one. After back-to-back Championship titles there was much talk of a ‘three-peat’, and some stirring words from the Crown Prince of Kennington, who reminded the heaving throng that if anyone ever gets bored of winning, the door ’s just over there. If a whiff of triumphalism drifted in at times, then why shouldn’t it? The club has 19,500 members – around a third of county cricket’s combined membership – a turnover of £60m, a multi-purpose stadium, the annual guarantee of international cricket and a playing staff oozing with homegrown stars and canny recruits. They’ve just signed the best player from their most…

Wisden staff writer @KatyaWitney Amid the hyperbole and toxic language in the debate over trans women playing women’s sport, the scale of the issue has been lost. There has been one trans woman – Canada international Danielle McGahey – on the record playing women’s international cricket in its history. It is hard to match up one woman, who’s played six T20I matches, with the threat to “the integrity of the international women’s game”, as it has been framed by the ICC. In the list of priorities upon which the new policy is based, ‘safety’ is listed as second. It doesn’t specify whose safety that relates to, but it’s probably safe to assume that it doesn’t mean protecting trans women from forms of violent transphobia often directed towards them when they…

They were warned. For seven weeks, the World Cup’s slogan – ‘It Takes One Day’ – was plastered across stadium concourses, dugouts, bus stands and airports, with a mysterious sense of foreboding. Maybe it was an alarmingly frank assessment borne of a moment of lucidity from someone in the ICC’s marketing team, who had finally realised that 50-over cricket is no longer a short format in a world that has run out of time. Maybe it was just a tortured attempt at wordplay. But maybe it was something else altogether: an ominous reminder to a country swept up by the national team’s dominance, their unstoppable victory procession around nine different cities, that a world title is not something preordained or predetermined. After six-and-a-half heady weeks sweeping all-comers aside, it took…

An early education It was pretty easy to settle in at Somerset but the thing I learned is that you’ve got to grow up quickly – you don’t really have any choice when you’re spending lots of time with people who are a lot older than you. Every step up is exactly that – and you feel like you’ve got to earn your place and make sure you’re there on merit. An unexpected call-up When I got my call-up to the England senior team, I was not expecting it at all. I’d been at the Academy and at the time there was a competition called Super Fours which involved the 48 best women in the country playing against each other. I had played in that for a couple of years,…

Bill Athey was very much old school, but with a soft touch. He was a parent figure for me in England I remember seeing my first ever game at Kensington Oval – it was West Indies v England. Seeing the likes of Brian Lara, Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose made it clear to me that I wanted to be a ‘famous cricketer’ – I later changed this to wanting to become a professional cricketer! When I was 15, Bill Athey [the former England batter] came over to see me play. He was master in charge of cricket at Dulwich College in London and they ran a cricket scholarship programme that included academic study. The year before, Ruel Brathwaite was the first to get the opportunity and it worked really well.…

1. Travis Head Australia Head’s World Cup looked like it was over before it had even begun when he fractured his left hand in the preceding series against South Africa. But he returned to the side in stunning fashion for Australia’s sixth match of the campaign, blitzing a 59-ball ton against the Kiwis, the fastest World Cup century by an opener. He was immense in the knockout rounds, picking up two crucial wickets and scoring a quickfire 62 to be named Player of the Match in the semi-final win over the Proteas and scooping the same award in the final after dismantling India’s previously impenetrable attack with a magnificent 137 from 120 deliveries. 2. Ibrahim Zadran Afghanistan The ice to his opening partner Rahmanullah Gurbaz’s fire, Ibrahim became the first…

“Cricket should dream bigger. Twenty teams, four groups of five, then quarter-finals, a semi-final and a final. That would make for a World Cup worthy of the name BEN GARDNER Wisden.com managing editor Returning to a 14-nation World Cup, more than a decade after the tournament dropped down from that number, doesn’t count as progress. Instead, cricket should dream bigger. Twenty teams, four groups of five, then quarter-finals, a semi-final and a final. That would make for a World Cup worthy of the name, provide a balance between upsets carrying weight and big teams being able to navigate a slip up, and would still be shorter than the 10-team monstrosity or any two groups of seven format. The World Cup Qualifiers regularly show that the depth is there for the…

Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine editor @Jo_Wisden For Jim Laker, the great English offspinner, his idea of paradise was simple enough: “Lord’s bathed in sunshine, with Ray Lindwall bowling from one end, and Bishan Bedi from the other.” For all Bedi’s achievements across his decorated career, the tributes that flowed in following his death in late October generally revolved around the style and grace with which he delivered a cricket ball. The left-arm spinner took 1,560 first-class wickets between 1962 and 1981 – including 266 in Tests, an Indian record at the time of his retirement – but the real magic lay in how he ensnared those victims: beguiling them with subtle variations of pace and flight, sowing seeds of doubt in the minds of batters, delivering the slowest of deaths.…

Growing up in Durban on the east coast of South Africa, Nick Compton describes his grandfather Denis as a largely “unseen presence”, but memories from the occasions when they did meet are imprinted on his mind. One in particular stands out. Aged 12, visiting Denis at his home in Buckinghamshire while on a school cricket tour, Nick was patting balls back to his father in the back garden; high elbow, straight bat, exactly as he’d been taught. Watching on with growing frustration, Denis eventually intervened. “He stands up and says, ‘For god’s sake, just hit the bloody thing!’” recalls Nick. Those words would stay with him, so much so that he had them written on his whiteboard at home during his time with Somerset; a reminder to play with freedom…

Books of the Month BAZBALL BY NICK HOULT & LAWRENCE BOOTH Bloomsbury, £22 Bazball begins with the question, what is Bazball? And it is a question with multiple answers. Bazball is a horse that wins the 2.30 at Bath on July 19, 2023. Bazball is the sale of 10,000 blue bucket hats to fans attending the Ashes last summer. Bazball is “running towards the danger”. Bazball is the Bank of England being told to take “a Bazball approach” to interest rates. Bazball is the Nighthawk. Bazball is, at heart, an exercise in semantics. It has many meanings, but everyone understands what it is. It holds worlds within it. And across seven weeks last June and July, Bazball had its signature series. Bookended by Zak Crawley’s thundering cover drive and Stuart…

FEATURE TITLE Men’s World Cup final Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad November 19 India 240 (Rahul 66, Kohli 54, Sharma 47; Starc 3-55, Cummins 2-34, Hazlewood 2-60) v Australia 241-4 (Head 137, Labuschagne 58*; Bumrah 2-43) Australia won by 6 wickets (with 42 balls remaining) Pat Cummins stands alone in the 132,000 capacity Narendra Modi Stadium having captained Australia to victory over a shellshocked India in the World Cup final. After briefly shaking hands with India’s prime minister, Cummins is left awkwardly holding the trophy while his teammates celebrate out of shot, but the six-wicket win over the hosts caps a triumphant year for the Aussie skipper, who led his team to the World Test Championship title in June and defended the Ashes a month later.…

England captain @Heatherknight55 My overriding feeling when I first heard that Meg was retiring? Surprise, I guess, especially as I’d heard rumours of her coming back for their India tour. I saw the news the morning of her announcement, knowing I’d be playing against her the following day in the Big Bash. And sure enough, when we met up it felt like business as usual. She was a bit reluctant to have all the attention and media, I guess. That’s the impression I always got with Meg, that her passion was for the cricket; and all the other stuff was a distraction. I didn’t expect her to walk away at such a relatively young age. She is still just 31. Watching her in the press conference affected me. It felt…

ISSUE 73 West Indies might not have qualified for the World Cup, but they are still up there with the best there is when it comes to column inches generated. This month, you had Darren Bravo – 34 years old, ODI average of 30 – disconsolate at his continued exclusion from the West Indies team, and rallying every franchise hopper he could find behind his cause. Half-brother Dwayne branded it as “mistreatment, disrespect and dishonesty”. Darren said he had decided to “step away [from cricket] just for a bit”, which, given him being not picked was what prompted this whole thing, carried a hint of, ‘You can’t fire me, I quit’. Still, that attempt at autonomy paled in comparison to Sunil Narine, who confirmed, more than four years after his…

Sussex Hampshire have snapped up Ali Orr, the highly thought of 22-yearold opener, from Sussex on a longterm deal, a move which prompted Ian Gould and Chris Adams to resign from their backroom roles at Hove. Orr ’s departure followed that of left-arm quick George Garton, another homegrown product, who signed for Warwickshire on a threeyear deal. A busy month on the south coast also saw the arrival of veteran keeper John Simpson from Middlesex and the signing of two overseas recruits: Aussie seamer Nathan McAndrew, returning after a productive 2023, and West Indian quick Jayden Seales. McAndrew will be with the club through June and July while Seales is set to be available from the start of the campaign until June 8. Leicestershire Alfonso Thomas has been appointed head…

Michael Atherton Lord’s, London, England v West Indies, July 1, 2000 Heavily did Michael Atherton bear the burdens of the flag. Straitjacketed as the last of the serious men, strong on the vanishing virtues of soft hands and English stoicism, his cricket stood alone as a cussed counterpoint to the casual dilettantism and routine underachievements of the era. He first played for England in 1989, just 21, recently up from Cambridge. Dropped into a riven dressing room for the last rites of an awful Ashes, he watched Australia make 301-0 on day one and made nought and a three-hour 47 in an innings defeat. The die was cast. On the subsequent Ashes tour of 1990/91, Atherton carved out the first of his monoliths. At Sydney, with England two-down and staring…

The Match England 208 (Knott 51, Lloyd 49) & 496 (Lloyd 151, Cowdrey 147*) v Australia 481 (R Edwards 115, Walters 103) & 170-7 (Arnold 5-40) Match Drawn The Cast David Lloyd Colin Cowdrey Dennis Amiss The England side that touched down in Australia in 1974 were full of confidence, fresh off a home summer where they whitewashed India and drew with a strong Pakistan. Little did they know they were going head first into one of Test cricket’s most brutal ambushes. DL: We’d heard Lillee was a bit crocked and coming back from injury. The rumour was he wasn’t back to his prowling best. DA: I told the chaps not to be so sure. I’d also received reports from a chum in Queensland about this new fast bowler, Jeff…