Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 51 i Wisden Cricket Monthly

“We set the club up for a reason, to stop kids getting into drugs, to get them off the street.” Except that Shahid’s intervention has messed with the programme, and some people don’t like it. “Last year I had my house bust, somebody came round at midnight, bricks through the window, trashing my car in the middle of the night.” It was no random hit You probably haven’t heard of Shahid Ali. He lives in Sheffield, in one of its roughest neighbourhoods. He’s a community man, part campaigner, part rabble rouser. It’s a 40 per cent ethnic minority area, he says, dominated by drugs, knife crime, poverty: the works. There’s a load of “county lines” stuff, drugs trafficked from the guts of the city out to hardscrabble towns, often via…

Wisden Cricket Monthly columnist, UK editor of ESPNcricinfo and former editor of The Cricketer @miller_cricket “It’s important not to make it all about Michael,” said Azeem Rafiq at the DCMS hearing last month. It probably wasn’t intended as a dig – quite the opposite in fact, given that the key message of Rafiq’s remarkable testimony was that he was out to challenge the systemic racism in English cricket, rather than the individuals who stand accused of partaking in it. It was nevertheless a razor-sharp remark, for rare is the media story involving Michael Vaughan that doesn’t have Michael Vaughan running straight through its middle like a stick of rock. And true to form, this story is proving no exception. Unlike so many others (Rafiq included) who have been implicated in…

Wisden Cricket Monthly South Africa correspondent @NeilManthorp On the morning of March 24, 2015, the biggest and most important tournament in the global game was briefly thrown into panicked chaos. The ICC received a warning phone call from Auckland’s Eden Park that the World Cup semi-final between hosts New Zealand and South Africa might not take place. It was just under two hours until the match was due to start. The South African captain, and his team, were threatening not to play. The captain was incredulous and incensed that the starting XI had been interfered with by the Cricket South Africa executive in the small hours of the morning. Kyle Abbott, the Proteas’ in-form fast bowler, was to be replaced by an equally proficient and skilled, but unfit, Vernon Philander.…

Are we absolutely certain that Alastair Cook is human? We know he doesn’t sweat, and judging by a surreal BT Sport advert teeing up their winter’s cricket coverage he doesn’t consume liquid either. The ad concludes with Cook taking a sip from a china cup, the sound of swallowing far, far too loud to possibly be real, and yet also a baffling thing to fake, unless… Anyway, England fans don’t mind what species Cook is; if he can get to Australia in time to open the batting for the second Test, all is forgiven. The conceit of the ad itself was fair enough – BT Sport does now show a comparable amount of cricket to Sky, the assumed home of televised bat on ball – even if Cook’s listing of…

Including news, interviews and stats, as well as the oddities which make county cricket what it is Sam Northeast’s curious, frustrating year has taken him in many different directions. It began at Hampshire, where he made scores of 63 and 118 in his second Championship match of the campaign, igniting the now-customary early-season debate about whether this would finally be the summer that this much-heralded talent got the nod for England. But by early July he was looking for a new club following reports of a fallout with Hampshire’s management. “We both agreed to just move on, is probably the safest thing to say,” Northeast tells WCM. The 32-year-old, who was in the last year of his contract at the Ageas Bowl having arrived from Kent in 2018, would play…

“Series results sting for a moment. But the building of true greatness takes years, and when it’s realised, it stays with us forever. Joe Root is virtually there nowPHIL WALKER BEN GARDNER Managing editor of Wisden.com Test cricket isn’t supposed to work this way. One side edging the first four days only to end up marmalised on the fifth? That’s not what happens. England came into the last day of the Lord’s Test with India effectively 154-6. Nip out the tail quickly. Knock off around 200. Home in time for dinner. That was the script. Instead, Mohammed Shami and Jasprit Bumrah came out swinging. Piqued by the latter’s bumper 10-ball over to James Anderson, England’s other quicks lost their heads, and a flurry of bouncers were dispatched. All of a…

THE TRAVAILS OF ENGLISH SPINNERS IN AUSTRALIA Wisden writer @Jimbo_Cricket Shane Warne tells a story about batting against Ashley Giles during the 2006 Adelaide Test. Now, Giles is a man of many achievements; currently the managing director of England men’s cricket, as a player he won the Ashes, was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year and took 143 Test wickets. Off the field, he’s scaled Mt Kilimanjaro and played cricket at the summit, and has even been awarded the honorary freedom of Droitwich Spa. Still. Warne didn’t rate him. Not as a spin bowler. “If he or she is not trying to spin the ball,” Warne writes in his book, No Spin, “then I give them another title: slow bowler.” Warne describes Giles archly as “a slow, accurate bowler”.…

Understanding and educating more 1. Adoption within three months of a standardised approach to reporting, investigating, and responding to complaints, allegations, and whistleblowing across the game. 2. Full promotion of the aims of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) through proactive engagement with its investigations and recommendations. 3. Ongoing EDI training for all those who work in cricket, including all staff, volunteers, recreational club officials, umpires, directors, and coaches. Addressing dressing-room culture 4. A full review of dressing-room culture in all men’s and women’s professional teams, both domestic and international. 5. Delivery of a redesigned programme of player and coach education, addressing any gaps identified through the dressing-room review. Removing barriers in talent pathways 6. Action to aid progress into professional teams of people from diverse backgrounds (especially…

While it’s batters who are in the crosshairs, spare a thought for the umpires, who stand little more than 20 yards from huge hunks of willow unleashing scattergun missiles. They have around 0.4 seconds to react and regularly have their view obscured by the bowler’s follow-through, with the possibility of ricochets putting them further at risk. Chris Kelly, the ECB umpires’ manager, says it’s an ongoing concern. “It’s been on our radar for a long time,” he tells WCM. “There’s no doubt that there is a threat there. The batsmen are now playing flat-bat shots where you’d normally expect the ball to go square of the wicket. But they don’t, they go straight back at you. “The challenge of all of this is we can’t direct them to wear any…

Von Krumm Press, £25 The triumphal arch of Patrick Ferriday’s title refers, rather nicely, to the great sweep of Wilfred Rhodes’ career. In his first game he bowled to Grace and in his final outing to Bradman, thus offering a human connection between cricket’s shaping force and its greatest exponent. And yet, as the lovely cover image makes plain, the triumphal arch may also be a description of Rhodes’ beautiful bowling action itself, another great sweep as he came in, left arm around the wicket. Rhodes sent down 185,742 deliveries in his career, just one of the statistics attached to him that will never be replicated. There are the 4,204 wickets (an all-time record), the 39,969 runs in – wait for it – 1,110 matches (no T20s back then either,…

BRUCE CHAPMAN Emeritus professor at the college of Business and Economics, Australian National University Study, my boy, study I was born in Canberra, Australia in 1951, and from my first memories I was taken, more accurately obsessed, with the achievements of Don Bradman, even though he had retired from cricket three years before I came about. As a child I read everything I could about him, including the classic book owned by my grandfather, A Century of Cricketers, and (the AG Moyes hagiography) Bradman. These accounts whetted my appetite and fed my enthusiasm for Bradman, and this led me to write a letter to him, in October 1962. In the letter I posed a problem for him to consider, in the hope that sorting this out might take his interest…

ROHIT ASCENDS My favourite player, India’s reluctant genius Rohit Sharma, has assumed the ODI captaincy from Virat Kohli. While he’s likely to bring a little more lightness to the role (not everything’s a war dance), he’ll still bring real tactical nous to the job. Don’t be fooled by the languidness of that godlike pull shot, Rohit is nobody’s pushover. WHO ONLY CRICKET KNOW: HUTTON’S MEN IN THE WEST INDIES, 1953/54 I read this book last month after listening to its author, David Woodhouse, give a superb account to an audience at The Oval of the events surrounding the MCC’s epochal tour of the Caribbean in 1953/54. I won’t go into details, as there’s an extract in this magazine, but suffice to say that it’s exceptional, tapping into issues around race,…

Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack editor and Daily Mail writer @the_topspin It was a measure of Eoin Morgan’s special status. No sooner had England been knocked out of the T20 World Cup on a cathartic night for New Zealand in the Gulf, than the fretting began about his future. Was he aiming for the tournament’s next edition, in Australia in 2022? “I hope so,” he said cheerfully. Might Chris Silverwood reach his own conclusions first? “He’s got to make that decision himself, I believe,” said England’s head coach. For the English game, these were uncharted waters. We’re used to debates about the Test captain, to tears, text messages and tribulations. But the one-day job has always felt more Sancho Panza than Don Quixote: until Morgan’s white-ball revolution, no one was too fussed…

1 Eileen Ash, the world’s oldest Test cricketer, has died at the age of 110. A right-arm seamer, she debuted for England in 1937 and played seven Tests either side of World War Two before retiring in 1949. Clare Connor, the ECB’s managing director of women’s cricket, said: “Our sport owes so much to its pioneers and Eileen was one of them. I am deeply sad to be saying goodbye to her.” 2 India defeated New Zealand 1-0 in a two-match Test series, sealing the victory with a 372-run victory at Mumbai which was notable for Kiwi left-arm spinner Ajaz Patel becoming the third player in Test history to take all 10 wickets in an innings. Ravichandran Ashwin was named Player of the Series after taking 14 wickets at 11.35.…

Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-at-large @SternWords Greg Chappell describes his latest book as “a final reckoning of sorts”. It’s an ominous phrase, suggestive of score settling. The reality is more of a record-straightening, which might seem odd for a 73-year-old who has put his name to multiple publications over the years. But the former Australia captain, selector, and head coach of India has a restless mind and believes “lessons can take a whole lifetime to sink in”. One of the lessons he wants to share is about the handling of the ball-tampering scandal of 2018 that engulfed Australian cricket. Chappell was a selector at the time and says he was one of many people at Cricket Australia who were uncomfortable about the win-at-all-costs mentality of the men’s national team, skippered by…

★ LETTER OF THE MONTH The game’s melting pot has never been richer I happened to see a fabulous photo after the second India v New Zealand Test of Axar Patel, Ajaz Patel, Rachin Ravindra and Ravi Jadeja, all four of whom took part in the series. Ajaz Patel was born in Mumbai and Ravindra in Wellington to Indian parents, but both play for New Zealand. It got me thinking about the issues of racism that will quite rightly dominate our sport for years to come. I think it is worth recognising the relative harmony that seems to exist in large parts of the sport – players may not be downing beers in each others’ dressing rooms at the end of play but the camaraderie between international players, brought about…

Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-in-chief @Phil_Wisden It’s a shame that the Members of Parliament who effected such sorrow for Azeem Rafiq’s devastating testimony do not read this magazine. Had they happened to pick up the August or September editions from 2020, for example, and turned to the pages where Rafiq was opening up for the first time, they might not have been quite so shocked by what he subsequently had to tell them. They would have learnt that in 2019 just 5.8 per cent of male players from the 18 first-class counties, overseas pros excluded, were British-Asian. And this: that in 2018, the number of ethnic minority players in county academies (aged 15-18) was running at 23 per cent, and yet, in the same year, that figure dropped to 8 per…

Yorkshire maintain that Rafiq being called a ‘P***’ was something he should have taken as banter. It’s such an outlandish thing to say it almost feels like deliberate gaslighting. The most generous possible interpretation is willful ignorance. So it’s worth remembering that this is the word racists have used for decades when attacking British Asians in the street. Yorkshire is no stranger to this – Bradford, for example, was a key site of Asian youth forming collectives for self-defence against racist thuggery in the 70s and 80s. Ed Lewis The hearings were extraordinary, brutal and I feel ashamed that the game we all love and its structures have so badly let down Azeem Rafiq, and the countless others with stories like his. The club game is full of good people…

ADAM RUTHERFORD Author of How To Argue With A Racist @AdamRutherford The game is rigged. We talk of the spirit of cricket as something intangible yet knowable, a fragile code that exemplifies the zenith of fairness. But the playing field is not level, the wicket is not true. The recent testimonies of Azeem Rafiq, of Ebony Rainford-Brent, Michael Holding, Nasser Hussain and so many others expose the poison that the sport is riddled with. Racism is in the fabric of cricket, as it is in the fabric of our society. This shouldn’t be a surprise, and yet somehow Rafiq’s words were shocking to all who heard them – except for every Brown or Black person in the country, for whom it was business as usual. We all know that cricket…

PHIL WALKER Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-in-chief @Phil_Wisden Bradman’s world record Headingley, Leeds July 1930 PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN The hordes congregate around the greatness of one man. Bradman, then just 21, departs the field 309* after day one of the third Ashes Test. That night in his diary he wrote, with presumably comic dryness (although Bradman was not renowned for his wit): “We won the toss and batted. Archie [Jackson] out for one. I followed, and at stumps was 309 not out.” The following day he would take his score up to 334. His series tally of 974 runs remains by some distance the highest individual return in the Ashes. Australia won the series 2-1. Bodyline Jardine talks SCG, Sydney December 1932 PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN The England captain Douglas Jardine gathers his team…

At the heart of club cricket JOHN FULLER Editor of the Cricket Yorkshire website and newsletter How do you picture a cricket club? In an ideal world, you might conjure up one with multiple teams, a phalanx of juniors, Clubmark-accredited, nets, league matches and a freshly painted pavilion. According to the ECB, there are 3,000 clubs across England and Wales offering opportunities for adults and it’s fair to say that their circumstances differ wildly. Yet, beyond participation data and Play-Cricket sites are the truly DIY clubs; those that exist organically and with minimal organisation. They play friendlies, off the radar of county boards and don’t need much to get a game on. WCM talked to a handful of teams that began life (or were resuscitated) in recent years to learn…

One story has come to sum up 2021 in English cricket – the racism shockingly inherent in the game. In many ways it has been a story of our times, moving so quickly that only social media could really keep up. Indeed, it’s legitimate to think that were it not for social media and the kind of pressure it can exert, Azeem Rafiq might still be waiting for Yorkshire’s report to come out. The ‘dead tree’ newspapers play a different role now that they can no longer break the news, and if they cannot, then where does that leave traditional book publishing when it comes to the contemporary agenda? One answer emerged in the form of Michael Holding’s standout book Why We Kneel, How We Rise (reviewed WCM46). It had…

WILL BURNS My Golden Summer The author and poet remembers Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison’s glorious send-off Talk to anybody roughly my age, let’s call it 40, about the year which changed their relationship with cricket most profoundly and I’m sure almost all of them will say 2005 with its free-toair Tests and that incredible Ashes. And in a strange way my feelings towards the summer of 2009 have their origin in that glorious, era-defining series which so captured the minds of the public, sporting or non-sporting, cricketloving or non-cricket-loving. In retrospect 2005 seems like a natural high point for a generation of cricketers who appeared as well-loved as they were talented. For my part it was Steve Harmison who had my heart. This wasn’t just to do with his…

Wisden Cricket Monthly Australia correspondent @collinsadam “What’s the go with this Tim Paine business?” Since arriving back in Australia, a couple of days after Paine’s tenure as Test captain was brought to an abrupt end when sexually explicit messages he had sent to a female Cricket Tasmania co-worker in 2017 emerged, I’ve fielded a version of this question from practically every friend I’ve seen. Implicit in the probing is the sense that something doesn’t quite add up: if sports stars are routinely caught up in sex scandals, why did this one become, in effect, career-ending? Put like that, the curiosity makes sense. It’s clear that we have been operating in a low-information environment. By pulling the pin in the way that Paine did – whilst pointing to the fact that…

When you’ve devoted your life to a single sport, you can be left with a substantial hole in your life after retirement. “When I finished playing cricket, I knew that I wanted to play sport,” says Chappell. “I thought about sports I’d played before, but they were all team games and I didn’t want that commitment to training.” Having “actively avoided playing golf most of my life”, he took up the pastime of the middle-aged man. And, of course, he’s no weekend hacker, playing off a handicap of three (or the Golf Australia mark of 2.7 to be specific). “It’s somewhere to put the mental energy and my personality loves the challenge of stretching myself. I play three days a week but [during lockdown] we got up to about five…

Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-in-chief @Phil_Wisden The first interview I did with Dawid Malan came in the build-up to England’s last Ashes tour. He’d recently made his Test debut, was struggling a bit, but doing just enough to make the winter squad. The conversation was routine, both of us going through the motions, when at the end, out of mild curiosity and for a lack of something to say, I asked him what music he liked listening to. “I don’t tend to listen to music,” he told me. Too much of it, he added, tended to put him on edge. He derived little pleasure from it, and found it made him uneasy. He preferred the silence. A few months after that interview, at the WACA in Perth, Malan managed to block…

Following the resignation of Roger Hutton, Yorkshire moved quickly to appoint Lord Kamlesh Patel as club chair. Appearing at the hearing, he labelled the report into allegations of racism “flawed” and vowed to transform the club’s culture. In early December, he made his intentions clear, sacking the entire 16-person coaching staff including the director of cricket, Martyn Moxon, and head coach, Andrew Gale. Before their removal, Moxon had been signed off with a stress-related illness and Gale had been suspended following the discovery of an anti-Semitic tweet. While Patel said it was necessary to “move on from the past and become a culture which is progressive and inclusive”, the decision was understood to have been poorly received by several members of the dressing room. Patel moved swiftly to appoint Darren…

Wisden.com features editor @Taha_Wisden Even before all of this – the first revelations of what he’d experienced, the long wait for action, and the near two-hour testimony that shook the establishment – the story was no ordinary one. Born in Karachi in 1991, Azeem Rafiq moved to England 20 years ago. It didn’t take long for him to be identified as a special talent by Yorkshire and England, and he led future greats – Root, Stokes, Buttler – as his country’s under-19s captain. He was an off-spinner who held his own with the bat, but he, alongside the likes of Ajmal Shahzad and Adil Rashid, stood for something much more at Headingley: evidence that Yorkshire CCC, the White Rose, a club that until 1992 had only allowed people born within…

JO HARMAN Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine editor @Jo_Wisden Will Pucovski should be opening up for his country in the Ashes. Instead, the 23-year-old batting prodigy is recovering from what is believed to be his 10th concussion. He experienced the first while playing Aussie rules as a teenager, a teammate’s knee crashing into his skull during training and forcing him to take six months out of school. Since then, the hits have kept on coming at an alarming rate. He’s bumped his head on a door at home, on the turf when diving to complete a run, been hit by an errant ball at training, and received several blows to the head while batting – all of these leading to concussion symptoms and spells on the sidelines. The latest concussion, sustained…

The former Surrey opener recalls two contrasting spells in the same game en route to the club’s first Championship in 16 years 4-36 Morne Morkel Surrey v Somerset | County Championship | Guildford, 2018 In this game of memorable spells, we saw the two extremes of county cricket bowling coalescing in one match. Neither was less spectacular than the other, and from my vantage point close to the bat, I’ll never forget them. When, in 2018, Surrey played Somerset at Woodbridge Road in Guildford, it was one versus two in the County Championship. Surrey hadn’t won the title since 2002, while Somerset had yet to win it in their history. It was a huge match. And looking back, the pivotal moment in our eventual title win. We batted first and…

From the mid-1960s to the mid-70s, arguably the best non-professional batter in England was an estate agent from the Costa del Sole: Grimsby-born Martin Maslin, the first amateur to win Player of the Match awards in both the Gillette and B&H Cup. The latter came courtesy of an unbeaten 103 at Trent Bridge in 1976, the first of just five tons scored by Minor Counties XI players in 139 B&H games. “I was on 99 not out with one ball left,” he recalls, “then managed to hit a four. To do it on my favourite ground was special.” Two years earlier, ‘Maz’ had been Lincolnshire’s star man in their shock defeat of Glamorgan, sending down 12-2-29-3 as the hosts slipped to 59-8 before recovering to 155, then steering the ship…

Two-nil down in the five-match series, the first MCC tour party to be captained by a professional arrived in British Guiana (now Guyana) to find a battalion of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders helping enforce a state of emergency. This had been imposed from London by Winston Churchill’s government because of the Communist tendencies of democratically elected nationalist leaders. In this tense atmosphere, the ‘colony game’ before the Test match proved an ill-tempered affair, giving rise to formal and reciprocal protests. Hutton objected to “the worst umpiring I have seen in first-class cricket”; the umpires, Alwyn Rollox and Cecil Kippins, complained about Hutton’s failure to control some of his players. The Daily Mail’s Alex Bannister had little difficulty locating the umpires’ complaint to a moment late on the third day when…

Heathrow, October 21, 1974 Front to back: Mike Denness (captain), John Edrich, Alan Knott, Bob Taylor, Fred Titmus, Bernard Thomas (physio), Keith Fletcher, Dennis Amiss, Peter Lever, David Lloyd, Brian Luckhurst, Derek Underwood, Geoff Arnold, Chris Old, Mike Hendrick, Tony Greig, Bob Willis, Alan Smith (assistant manager), Alec Bedser (tour manager) The Backstory Could England keep a grip on the urn? Captain Mike Denness and tour manager Alec Bedser thought so. Both pronounced themselves “quietly confident” at the press conference before they boarded a British Airways jumbo jet bound for Australia. But as the party posed for Patrick Eagar outside the Excelsior Hotel, much of the talk was about who wasn’t there rather than who was. Geoffrey Boycott had flatly refused to tour, while paceman John Snow had been left…

The Brisbane Test, assuming covidious fate did not tediously intervene, will have been the 22nd Ashes contest at The Gabba. There have been 16 victories in those games – 12 for Australia, four for England – and the winning team has proceeded to win the series 14 times, including the last 11 instances since England came back from a Brisbane battering in 1954/55, a series in which Colin Cowdrey scored the first (and possibly best) of his 22 Test hundreds, a week after his 22nd birthday. This year’s series-opener had been preceded by approximately 22 minutes of relevant preparation, a far cry from, for example, the Bodyline tour of 1932/33, when England had played 22 days of cricket before the first Test at the SCG, in which Wally Hammond scored…