Wisden Cricketers’Almanack 2016 – a Review

It is counterintuitive for a title published in April to be so august. But entrenched as it is in the national psyche, the real mystery is Wisden‘s omission as a fixture on Desert Island Discs. As Queen Victoria might have said, “Next to the bible, Wisden is my comfort.” Lawrence Booth is part of a literary lineage that goes back to Archbishop Bancroft, Heminges and Condell.

Parts of Shakespeare’s First Folio were still being proofread and corrected while at the printers. It was the kind of skin-of-the-teeth, chest-bursting, deadline-driven process that is likely all too familiar to Wisden‘s small editorial team as it pored over tiny, seven-point type and a half-million words in their temporary enclave in Bungay. It seems little has changed in 400 years. That’s tradition for you.

Beaujolais Nouveau apart, amongst the niche classes, little rivals the excitement or sense of expectation felt by those waiting on the delivery of the yellow-liveried tome, stout as a yeoman, venerable as Bede. The postman’s knock and the sunny glow of its daffodil gold announces spring is at the door. Wisden c’est arrivé.

The Almanack is largely a review of cricket the previous year. The Notes by the editor, on the other hand, help define the discussion points that affect the future of cricket and, at their best, help shape it. The white light may concentrate on the English game, but the editorial prism refracts across the global landscape.

I like Lawrence Booth’s prose style. It’s relaxed yet carries an unassuming authority. He engages his readers with a confection of everyman vernacular spotted with highbrow reference points so seamlessly dovetailed to the narrative that Ed Smith would discount the cleverness for being too unobrusive. There is plenty of sub-text for those who seek it and enough positive affirmation for those who do not.

Booth the elder had a tough act to follow after Booth the younger’s audacious 2015 assault on cricket’s money grubbers and out-of-touchers. Last year’s launch dinner had Giles Clarke choking on his amuse bouche and insanely finger jabbing at every mention of greed and myopic self-interest. This term, Booth has been more circumspect in his notes. Less shock and awe and more winning hearts and minds. There was no cleaning of gratin dauphinois off the Long Room walls this year.

The lead piece fixes on the transformation of team England, which Booth describes as “the most uplifting story in international cricket.” Steady on Lawrence. The bar was set so low that turning up in the right kit would have been a positive transformation of sorts. England’s ignominious exit from the ODI world cup was a nadir of such depth-plumbing awfulness that tube worms and black-smoker bottom feeders got to see cricket for the first time and decided it wasn’t for them. George Dobell in an on-camera piece for ESPNCricinfo called the debacle the “worst England performance in their ODI history. As bad as anything in international cricket in my lifetime.” When George Dobell discovers an inner Rottweiler, you know there is a big problem.

Last year, Michael Atherton gave England mixed reviews. This year, Dobell in his Review of England in 2015, frustrated by the team’s consistent inconsistency, called it the best of times and the worst of times. In Tests, a return of six wins and six losses, and just a single series won in four contested, suggested a story of stasis rather than transformation. Booth is alive to this in his second piece, Captain Cook changes tack, ostensibly focused on the happy discovery of competence by Cook as skipper, but drifting towards the all-too-familiar faultlines in England’s Test ambitions. I preferred Dobell’s more sober assessment – “From the depths of the world cup … this was a year of improvement.”

Incidently, Dobell’s review contains perhaps the best gag in this year’s Almanack, describing Paul Downton as the “George Lazenby of sporting administrators.” The Daily Mirror’s film critic, on the release of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, said of Lazenby,  “he looks uncomfortable in the part like a size four foot in a size ten gumboot.” Rumours that Barbara Broccoli is in talks with Downton about a remake are unnecessarily cruel. Said George Lazenby.

At first sight, the white-ball performances look little better. England lost more ODIs than they won, lost two series from four and, (sotto voce), Polly don’t mention the ODI world cup. I mentioned it once but I think England got away with it, largely thanks to unexpected progress in the T20 world cup. I guess borrowing from 2016 to shore up 2015 results is cricket’s nod to quantitative easing.

There is little doubt that, in white-ball cricket at least, England’s modus has changed. Strauss has been hailed as architect of the shift, Bayliss has his name on the door, and Farbrace may be the guy in the back office missing out on deserved plaudits. England, we are told, now play without fear. They are undeniably exciting to watch. They are now attempting to play the kind of short-form cricket embraced and finessed by the rest of the world these past several years, which is a million miles away from the attritional dirge blueprinted by Andy Flower, whose dead hand poor old Peter Moores never quite escaped.

In Root, Buttler and possibly Roy and Hales, England have batting stars who are light years ahead of their predecessors. They would be school-kid heroes if kids weren’t locked out by Sky. But for all the heightened engagement and edge-of-seat denouement, England remain as consistently inconsistent as ever. They are still losing more often than they win, but they are going about it with such heady abandon the losses just don’t seem so bad.

Whether England’s work in progress is a more uplifting international story than, say, the journey of Afghan cricket or the re-emergence of the West Indies is one for saloon-bar debate. Booth is right to identify an overdue transformation, at least in terms of attitude and approach. I accept, also, that it is a positive shift for England supporters. They are used to clawing about in the dark, flicking the dodgy spark wheel of service-station lighters in a hopeless quest for some kind of dim-lit success. Finding reasons to engage and cheer after a year or so of rancour and dystopian despair is, well, kind of uplifting.

In Out of the darkness, Booth has continued to rattle the ICC cage and rail against the Big Three power grab, albeit with a more gentle shake. He refers to the covetous triumvirate with nostrils pinched (to steal one of his own phrases). He rightly centres the piece on the seminal documentary Death of a Gentleman, and rightly lambasts the cricket media for largely failing to rattle along, too. Booth hints at lazy journalism and toady self-preservation, but this may just be me squinting at the psychic paper.

The gradual falling away of the Big Three leadership group that schemed and structured the great bat-and-ball swindle, together with recent decisions in the Indian supreme court have given Booth reasons to be cautiously sanguine about, at the very least, a return to the status quo ante. However, as he admits, this may be no more than a return to the fire from the frying pan.

Even so, it feels as though some of the oomph has gone from the editorial campaigning. The push for Olympic participation, in spite of early comments from Graves and Harrison, seems to have been kicked into the long grass. Shashank Manohar may have made some encouraging noises on his appointment, but earlier this month the Indian supreme court vented its frustration at the BCCI’s refusal to accept key Lohda Panel proposals, casting doubt on Manohar’s credentials as a serious reformer.  The creepy role and influence of Giles Clarke remains clouded and adds uncertainty over ECB governance and accountability. The drive for some form of FTA coverage and a more sophisticated packaging of rights appropriate for digital platforms is briefly touched on. Similarly, the debate over T20 franchises. Both are at critical points in the discussion cycle and I would have liked Wisden to have taken a bigger lead in shaping the narrative.

I can understand the need to avoid editorial repetitiveness, banging on rather than banging the drum. But intelligent follow up is possible as modelled by Andrew Miller’s essay on the British-Asian Question, which picks up on and develops last year’s Your country needs you editorial note. I also understand that many issues flagged up last term are possibly in a state of flux and a more circumspect, let’s wait and see approach might be a valid editorial position. Let’s wait and see.

The note that jarred the most was Fleshing out the problem. Not the important point it makes about the treatment of women in the blokish, bottom-pinching, don’t-blush-baby world of cricket and the awkward “evade” and “deflect” manoeuvres women have to make even in the press box. It’s just that if Wisden is going to campaign on this without being accused of tokenism, it would do well to take a closer glance at its list of contributors. Of the 123 named just three are women. Melinda Farrell and Raf Nicholson got to write short pieces in the 21-page chapter devoted to Women’s cricket. Firdose Moonda provided a 200-word match report for The World Cup in 2014-15. Of the 14 writers providing 47 world cup reports, Moonda was the only one whose services were used just the once. Wisden must make more space available within its 1552 pages for, say, Elizabeth Ammon, Emma John, Ali Mitchell, or Sharda Ugra. It may be, you know, reasons, but it is not a good look, and too easily fits the template of exclusion abandoned even by MCC since 1998.

Inevitably, the Five Cricketers of the Year tend to generate the most noise and heat. The name that seems to have most raised the volume and temperature is Ben Stokes. Dropped for the ODI world cup, his international season did not start till April 2015 and his stats for the following eight months were, well, a bit meh. But there were enough attention-grabbing moments along the way, together with a bit more credit borrowed from 2016, to plot an argument in his favour, and Stokes is never far away from an argument. Stokes may be one of those cricketers who is so much better in the imagination of the cricket press than he actually is in his spikes. He is very much the sort of person they want an England all rounder to be. Whether Stokes is the real deal or a media construct, time will tell. Jos Buttler may consider himself unlucky, after accumulating three of the fastest hundreds in England’s ODI history. So too James Hildreth, who topped the first-class scores list in 2015 with 1758 runs at an average of 56.70. He must be the best uncapped English cricketer on the circuit and a leather-bound copy of Wisden would not look out of place in his elegant hands. Buttler will have other opportunities. Hildreth less so. But the point is, these choices are in the gift of the Wisden editor. They are personal, and, like cricket itself, can be idiosyncratic and charming. Booth sweeps away objections in his England player‘s profile, with a Wellingtonesque dismissal, “Numbers be damned. It was Stoke’s ability to grab a game … that lingered.” And who is to say that he is wrong?

With so many essays available, I decided the best plan, in homage to my other faithful companion, was to dip in to the Collins.

In Five Days at the Ashes, Patrick Collins, an old Wisden hand, took his brief from the two elderly Surrey members he overheard as they shuffled towards the Oval tube station:  “Not a vintage series. Not like ’05 or ’53. Two pretty ordinary teams, I’d say.” I am guessing Collins thought so too and, eschewing the tedium of the cricket, focused instead on the buzz, hum, din and raucous weirdness of the crowd. While each of the five grounds evoked an atmosphere redolent of one or other of the great festive occasions in the English sporting calendar, there was an entertaining element that unified them all. If cricket featured in the grand unified theory of particle physics, these strong interactions would be called Gareth, after the bloke who dressed as a banana and went to the cricket with a bunch of other fruitcakes.

Collins proceeds to paint a portrait of the five Tests, making use of a palette that’s both colourful and comic. His deft outlines and a few broad brushstrokes reveal the slightly barmy character of the English cricket fan, and maybe something of the national character, too. Featuring spivvy touts, boozy queues, drunken cross-dressers, boisterous singing, overpriced beer and abundant Johnson-bating, it’s a louche canvas instantly recognisable by anyone who has attended a Test match.

It is possible Collins saw the 1953 Ashes. He may have seen Richie Benaud play at the very start of his career. Benaud’s much-lauded dictum, don’t speak unless you can add to the picture, is captured in the title of Gideon Haigh’s celebration of Benaud, The sound of silence. For a misty-eyed generation, Benaud and Arlott were the apotheosis of cricket commentary. Arlott created pictures and Benaud added to them. Marvellous.

Philip Collins is new to Wisden. His political column hides behind The Times paywall, but the shrewd observations and easy writing style evident in his review of Cricket in the media will ensure it’s not his last contribution. His undisguised delight on Twitter at being published in the Almanack was rather charming.  Collins is none too impressed with some of the white noise that passes for broadcast commentary these days. Channel 10’s coverage of the Big Bash is given a taste of what Geoff Lemon handed out to Channel 9 in that article in the Guardian last year. Sky is in palpable need of a refresh and a gentle warning shot is fired over the bows of TMS at the tomfoolery forced on us by Graeme Swann and Phil Tufnell. Collins avoids fixing Danny Morrison in his cross-hairs, but then again he may just have excised the experience from his mind in a subliminal act of mental self-preservation. Even Michael Vaughan’s “struggles with Test cricket’s rhythmic ebbs and flows” are a restorative after an aural assault by the hysterical Morrison.

Print journalists were taken to task for being complacent about cricket politics and failing to scrutinise the issues raised in Death of a Gentleman.  With Lawrence Booth raising the same point in his editorial notes, the concern is what else are print journalists complacent about? The flip side, Collins observes, was the absurd overhyping of the Ashes series – “The journalistic pack seemed to take the Ashes at the estimation of the marketing people.” Quite. Cricket journalism does seem to be at something of a tipping point at the moment. For all the splendid writing identified by Collins, the nature of the content itself or the lack thereof continues to stretch the trust of the readers.

As for the rest, that’s a pleasure to savour over the course of the season. The scorecards and statistics can wait till the summer proper. I will look at the data later!

@Tregaskis1

Wisden Cricketers’ Amanack 2016 was published on 13 April and retails at £50 – see http://www.wisden.com/2016