Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 50 i Wisden Cricket Monthly

“Root’s last memory of the Ashes four years ago was falling asleep, wrecked with acute dehydration, in the SCG dressing room as the postseries celebrations kicked in outside. It’s fair to say that he has unfinished business Just because it’s bad punditry to get carried away by one player’s return shouldn’t mean we don’t do it anyway. After all, it’s Ashes time, where reason goes to die. If we can’t get one-eyed and overblown about this one, we may as well pack up and find something else to lose ourselves in. This is the sweet spot. Before reality exposes all the concerns and reservations we’ve done our best to suppress. The anything-is-possible bit, when it’s all up for grabs, no one’s pulled up lame, The Gabba hasn’t swallowed them whole…

ANDREW MILLER Wisden Cricket Monthly columnist, UK editor of ESPNcricinfo and former editor of The Cricketer @miller_cricket It’s a wonder, really, that cricket failed to take root in America, for the same puritanical values that fuelled the Salem witch trials have forever held sway in the sport. Cricket’s framework may be laid out by ‘Laws’ (not rules, obviously, those are there to be broken), but the sport’s true arbiters are its phalanx of moral guardians – be they Australians jealously guarding ‘the line’, or MCC getting sanctimonious about the ‘Spirit of Cricket’, or the entire sport dropping its bundle, time and again, over the tedious notion of ball-tampering: an art-form, lest we forget, that gifted us the glories of reverse swing, but is now tainted by association with sandpaper-gate, precisely…

SURESH MENON Wisden Cricket Monthly India correspondent @SurMenon Cricketers from India and Pakistan are fond of saying that politics and sport ought not to mix. What they mean is that jingoism should have no role in sport. Yet why do fans cling to what George Orwell called the “lunatic habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige”? They do, and are encouraged to do so by the politicians. Both countries feel the need to blame their own shortcomings and failures on the ‘other’. Cricket therefore becomes both a catalyst and a showpiece. It isn’t the politicians alone. Television lives off jingoism too because it attracts eyeballs. There are many in India who honestly believe that in sport winning or losing is not…

ISSUE 50 December 2021 The world of Pakistani cricket talk shows is weird and unending, and it has come into its own during the T20 World Cup. As soon as one viral clip gets old, another pops up to take its place, each stranger than the last, like a psychedelic cycle of fever dreams that even Freud couldn’t crack. “In the one last night, Shoaib Akhtar was resigning mid-show from a panel featuring Sana Mir, Viv Richards, David Gower, and, for some reason, five others,” I confess as I recline on a leather couch. “Gower disappointedly muttered ‘No, no, no, no, no’ as the show’s host told Shoaib, ‘If you are being over-smart, you can go,’ before carrying on as if nothing’s happened while the fastest bowler to have ever…

Glamorgan Glamorgan have pulled off a major coup with the signing of Sam Northeast on a three-year deal. The 31-year-old parted ways with Hampshire in July and had brief loan spells with Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire last season before deciding his future lay in Cardiff. “I still have a lot of ambition in the game and I believe Glamorgan share that with me,” said Northeast, who is regarded as one of the most talented batters in the county game not to have represented England. “Speaking to Mark Wallace [Glamorgan’s director of cricket] and Matt Maynard [head coach], I knew this was the right place for me to commit my future to.” “Signing Sam is fantastic news for everyone associated the club,” added Wallace, “and to attract a player of his quality…

An alternative prize will be provided if the winner is aged under 18, or if requested Hawke’s 13 James Buttler, a fellow lifelong Yorkshire supporter, contends that the white rose adapted by Lord Hawke as the emblem to be worn by the county’s capped players is made of 11 white petals [The County Files, WCM49]. In fact there are 13 petals, as a quick count on the emblem pictured in the article will indicate. Malcolm Watson Pakistan left out in the cold Giles Clarke was an influential yet maligned ECB figure when the game sold its TV rights to Sky and for the Stanford fiasco. However, Clarke was a force for good. He should also be remembered as the person who did much to keep Pakistan in Test cricket more…

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLAND IN AUSTRALIA 1946/47 England forget to appeal! A decade on from their last tour of Australia, England returned for their first post-war Test match on foreign shores. Don Bradman was also back, 38 by then and supposedly in decline after eight years away in which he’d played little cricket. Bradman had averaged 97.94 up to and including Australia’s last pre-war Test match, but after years of ill-health prior to being released from the army because, extraordinarily, of poor eyesight, his place in the side had come under scrutiny. In the first Test at Brisbane, Bradman was in early and had scratched his way to 28 when he edged a full delivery from Bill Voce to second slip. Jack Ikin took the catch and Voce had…

Tales & treasures from cricket’s glorious past My golden summer? A tough assignment for a player in the twilight of a cricket career which never really had a dawn. But I will name the English summer of 1963. There was some wonderful cricket to watch, and I made the two all-important discoveries about the game which gave me a career at all. It was a pivotal season in England’s cricket history – the first after the abolition of the amateur status which had become increasingly unreal. Scorecards gave all players their initials in front of their name. Imitating football, the counties started to play a one-day knockout competition, the Gillette Cup. Each innings was 65 overs – so a full day of 130 overs was very good value for a…

VALE, IGGY Alan Igglesden, the former Kent and England bowler, has died aged 57. A hugely popular figure in the game, Iggy received international recognition in August 1989 against Australia at The Oval, playing three Tests in all. In 1999, a year after retiring from the pro game, Iggy suffered an epileptic fit while playing for Berkshire. Routine checks by doctors revealed an inoperable brain tumour. He later met his wife, Liz, and the couple had a daughter together, Beth. He raised over £300,000 for the Brain Tumour Charity, and in April this year was the front man for the Professional Cricketers’ Trust, raising over £25,000 through the charity’s 5k May campaign. One of the truly good guys. HOSEIN’S RETIREMENT Brutally tough news from Derbyshire where Harvey Hosein, the club’s…

LAWRENCE BOOTH Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack editor and Daily Mail writer @the_topspin Press conferences can be pantomime affairs. Journalists send down half-volleys, cricketers treat them like grenades; back pages are no sooner generated than forgotten. But occasionally the subject matter confers a mutual gravitas. And when South Africa’s T20 captain Temba Bavuma spoke to reporters after his side’s World Cup win against West Indies in Dubai, everyone on the Zoom call knew they had heard something special. Bavuma had been handed the media equivalent of a hospital pass. Quinton de Kock had refused to take a knee that afternoon, in defiance of Cricket South Africa’s last-minute diktat, and it was up to the captain to strike a near-impossible balance between the demands of global politics, national history and dressing-room dynamics. And…

1 Alan Davidson, the great Australian all-rounder, has died at the age of 92. A prolific left-arm seamer and dangerous lower-order batter, Davidson took 186 wickets in 44 Tests at an average of 20.53 and played a starring role in the 1960 Tied Test. “One of the best of all-time to wear the Baggy Green and an even better person,” said former Australia captain Steve Waugh. 2 The postponed fifth Test between England and India has been rescheduled for July 1, 2022. Originally due to be played at Old Trafford, the match will now be played at Edgbaston because of “complexities in the schedule”. Old Trafford will instead host the second Test against South Africa, which was previously due to take place at Edgbaston. India lead the series 2-1. 3…

ISA GUHA Presenter, commentator and former England international @isaguha Katherine Brunt has been England’s spearhead for 18 years. To watch her today, still bustling in, fighting tooth and nail for her team, is to see a spirit unconfined, a cricketer of such desire and skill that it seems she may go on forever. Bursting onto the scene as a 19-year-old in 2004, Brunt was hailed as England’s new saviour, and what a journey it’s been: navigating two prolapsed discs and a series of reinventions to secure four Ashes, two 50-over World Cups, one T20 World Cup winners medal and more GDI wickets than all but three women in history. It all forms part of a glittering legacy which she is hoping to extend ahead of England’s biggest year yet: the…

On a Saturday afternoon last month, a fortnight after the end of the cricket season, I met up with an aunt and a cousin of mine whom I hadn’t seen in many years. We went to a fish shack, drank deep and talked the day away, playing more shots as the nerves fell away and the old rhythms returned. Watching Haseeb Hameed bat for England last summer (now there’s a fun line to write) was like the first half hour of that lunch. It began, as these things do, in a mood of jittery sunniness. He was back, wiser and craggier than first time around, but still: right there in the game. There was so much to catch up on, so much time to make up; we all so wanted…

1. BRIAN LUCKHURST (BRISBANE & PERTH, 1974/75) Luckhurst was a fine Kent opening bat but on the wane by the mid-Seventies. Aged 35, he was ill-equipped to deal with the ferocity of Lillee and Thomson and averaged 13.50 across the first two matches, never playing Test cricket again. 2. ARTHUR MCINTYRE (BRISBANE, 1950/51) Regarded as one the best keepers on the circuit, England utilised McIntyre as a specialist batter at No.7 in the opening Test, with Godfrey Evans taking the gloves. After managing a solitary run in the first innings, McIntyre’s opportunity was somewhat impeded by Evans, who called for a ridiculous fourth run in the second dig, leaving his partner stranded having only scored 7. McIntyre played no further part in the series. 3. WAYNE LARKINS (BRISBANE, MELBOURNE, SYDNEY.…

PHIL WALKER Wisden Cricket Monthly editorin-chief @Phil_Wisden Cricketers on tour Queensland, Australia December 1928 PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN A day at the beach for players and partners midway through the Ashes of 1928/29, featuring members of both teams. Wally Hammond (third left), Patsy Hendren (centre), and George Geary (fourth right) formed the core of England’s successful retention of the urn that Australian summer. Hammond’s 905 runs in the series was a momentous tally. He was generally considered at that point to be the greatest batsman not just of his time, but of all those who preceded him. The mark, from nine innings, should have stood forever. It stands today comfortably beyond the reach of all-but-one challenger, and yet the record lasted less than two years. Don Bradman, pictured second right, managed a…

At the heart of club cricket ADAM HOPKINS Freelance sports and lifestyle writer and once the best left-arm wrist-spinner in China The subcontinent may be cricket’s Asian epicentre, but what does the game look like further east? You may remember Hong Kong’s showing during the early stages of the 2014 and 2016 Men’s T20 World Cups, and who can forget Thailand’s women’s team at the 2020 Women’s World Twenty20? And there are numerous other outposts across East Asia and South-East Asia with their own cricket cultures, featuring teams of expats alongside sprinklings of cricket-loving locals, all competing in various leagues. Shanghai, China League cricket in this Chinese mega-city is governed by Shanghai Cricket Club (SCC) and is a three-division competition made up of seven member clubs and associate teams. The…

“We’ve chummed up.” With its slightly alarming connotation, it was not a phrase which I had heard before the first of my 11 tours of Australia in 1978/79. The man who said it, however, fulfilled exactly my expectations of what an Australian cricketer – or a typical Australian bloke – should look like: shortish, stocky, powerful of forearm, blotched a bit by skin cancer, and friendly. His name was Neil Dansie, and he learnt so much from batting once with Sir Donald Bradman that he opened for South Australia long enough to become one of the state’s top 10 first-class run-scorers. It was the eve of my first state game in Australia, at Adelaide Oval, but already a – if not the – fundamental difference between Australian and English cricket…

Australia v England, World T20 final Kensington Oval, Barbados May 16, 2010 Left to right: Stuart Broad (obscured), Luke Wright, Eoin Morgan, Graeme Swann, Paul Collingwood, Kevin Pietersen, Michael Clarke The Backstory What took us so long? On a sun-kissed Barbados afternoon, England ended 35 years of hurt by beating Australia to win the World T20 – the nation’s first men’s global trophy. After so much heartache down the decades, this was a triumph delivered with a swagger and barely a trace of big-match nerves. Paul Collingwood’s team eased past Australia’s 147 with seven wickets and three overs in hand. “HOWZAT” shouted the back-page headline in The Sun, before wondering if this was a portent for Fabio Capello’s England footballers in their forthcoming World Cup in South Africa. How did…

ADAM COLLINS Wisden Cricket Monthly Australia correspondent @collinsadam My first memory of James Pattinson is as a boy of about 10 years old, running around my club in the outer south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne with his sun-drenched blonde hair. He was a joyful kid, making all the runs and taking all the wickets in representative cricket that summer. I was half a dozen years his senior and could tell just from looking at him that he was going places. Following his retirement from international cricket, aged 31 and with just 21 Test caps to show from an injury-ravaged career, it’s only natural to wonder what might have been if it weren’t for his crack-prone back. While it’s not unusual for quicks of Pattinson’s velocity to collect a stress fracture or…

“As much as Stokes’ return gives England a glimmer of hope, you don’t win Test series in Australia with a flaky top threeJO HARMAN ADAM COLLIN WCM Australia correspondent Score prediction: 2-2 going into the decider. More a wish than a prediction – there hasn’t been an Ashes series in Australia go the distance for four decades and we’re due. Given the batting deficiencies of both teams, it might just come true. Leading run-scorer: David Warner. Imagine the seething. Yes, please. Top wicket-taker: Pat Cummins. A dreamboat at his peak. All things being equal, he takes over the Test captaincy after the series. Breakthrough act: Matt Parkinson. Called up for the fourth Test at Sydney, it goes better than it did for the last two England leggies on debut there.…

THE NEXT BIG THING FACTFILE BORN: June 3, 1999, Subiaco, Western Australia ROLE: Right-hand middle-order bat; right-arm fast-medium CAREER: 4 Tests, 236 runs at 33.71, 1 fifty | 1 ODI, 21 runs at 21 | 32 first-class matches, 2,343 runs at 54.48, 8 centuries, 5 fifties; 37 wickets at 33.59, 2 five-wicket hauls | 18 List-A matches, 425 runs at 30.35, 1 century, 1 fifty; 9 wickets at 57.88 | 13 T20s, 106 runs at 15.14 The numbers had been building up for Cameron Green, the towering kid from Western Australia. In the 2019/20 Sheffield Shield season, he hit more centuries than any other batter, finishing with 699 runs at 63.54. When Australian domestic cricket returned after the onset of the pandemic last year, he didn’t let up: a then…

THE IMMORTALS The Test match knocks that will never be forgotten VVS LAXMAN 73* (79 balls, 8x4) INDIA v Australia, First Test, Mohali, 2010 On a rapidly deteriorating deck against the best team in the world, India were 76-5 chasing 216, with only a stricken VVS to work with the tail. Batting with a runner after suffering a back injury, Laxman manipulated his wrists and Australia’s fielders to inch India up to the target. With Ishant Sharma contributing a crucial 32, it was left to No.11 Pragyan Ojha to offer a final stand. Ojha survived a huge lbw shout against Mitchell Johnson before leg-glancing the winning runs to give India their narrowest Test victory. For VVS, it was another masterwork against the team he toyed with for a decade. TED…

A crazy match with the pink ball was dominated by a spinner of relentless accuracy and control 5–32 Axar Patel India v England, Third Test, Ahmedabad 2021 At its best, fast bowling makes a batter look scared. At spin bowling’s best, it makes them look stupid. And in February 2021, on a filthy minefield, Axar Patel made England look stupid. Stupidity was, in fact, the theme for the match. Completed in under two days, it was the shortest Test since 1935, with 28 of the 30 wickets to fall going to spin. The problem wasn’t just that the ball would spin massively, but that on seemingly random occasions it wouldn’t spin at all. It was a day-night Test, with the pink ball having a different coating to the normal red…

Ask a county cricket lover to name the most evocative ground on the circuit and if they don’t go for Cheltenham or Arundel the chances are they’ll say North Marine Road in sunny ‘Scarbados’. To grow up in a hotel peering over that famously irregular banked seating, as Tony Moor did, then come through the juniors, make 47 not out on first-team debut aged 17, and spend your entire cricketing life at Scarborough CC is therefore among the deepest of cricketing joys. The ground at which Moor cemented his legacy, however, is the most evocative on the international circuit. He and colleague Brian Rennard played in all five of Scarborough’s National Club Championship wins at Lord’s between 1972 and ‘82, making them the most decorated players in the competition’s history.…

Joe Root begins the Ashes having made 50 Test scores between 50 and 99 inclusive. However – and this cannot be stressed powerfully, repeatedly or intransigently enough – this does not mean that, if and/or when he reaches his first half-century of the series in Australia, it will be his ‘51st Test fifty’. Do not believe anyone who claims that it is, whether they are doing so on television, on radio, in print, in casual conversation on a delayed train, loudly while paragliding through a war zone, or on a date. Those people are liars. It will in fact be the 74th time that Root has reached 50 in Tests. To date, he has converted 23 out of 73 fifty-plus innings into centuries, leaving 50 further so-called ‘fifties’. Under the…