Wisden Cricket Monthly Issue 60

“Hales missed the 2019 World Cup and deservedly so, but the agonies he must have felt watching on were surely punishment enough For all his riches, Jason Roy can’t buy a run. One of the sadder motifs of the summer has had Roy bent-double at the crease, his torso slumped over a collapsed front leg, palms loosely outstretched to break the fall. When Roy is bowled, which is often, pitilessly soul-crushingly often, the whole edifice is castled with him. His walk-offs have gotten slower over time, degenerating from the casual shrugs of early spring, to the sardonically philosophical (midseason), and finally to this: the horror, the horror. I have a theory about form in the age of whacking it: form in the age of Jason Roy. It goes like this.…

RED BALL RETURNS Oh, how we’ve missed you! Despite the inevitable gnashing of teeth with the publication of Andrew Strauss’ high-performance review, which recommends yet another structural shake-up (see page 20), and the permanent sense of a game being attacked and squeezed, it’s still a genuine thrill to buckle up for the last few weeks of the summer with only the Championship for company. Focus will naturally be on the top division, and Surrey, Hampshire and Lancashire. But Division Two’s promotion race brings its own stories. Can Mickey Arthur’s Derbyshire pull it off? Will Shubman Gill propel Glamorgan to the line, or can Middlesex hold them at bay? This is the stuff right here. Long will it continue, in whatever form. YES…. NO… WAIT… SORRY OK, so this is a…

October 2022 EDITORIAL T: 0203 696 5737 E: editorial@wisden.com Editor-In-Chief: Phil Walker Magazine Editor: Jo Harman Editor-At-Large: John Stern Staff Writers: Ben Gardner, Taha Hashim, Yas Rana, James Wallace Reviews Editor: Jon Hotten EDITORIAL BOARD Paul Allott, Lawrence Booth, Mark Butcher, Isa Guha, David Lloyd, Suresh Menon, Alison Mitchell, Daniel Norcross, Christian Ryan Contributors: Lawrence Booth, Jeremy Coney, Vithushan Ehantharajah, Mel Farrell, Isa Guha, Michael Holding, David Lloyd, Amer Malik, Andrew Miller, Raf Nicholson, Scott Oliver, Mark Ramprakash, Matt Roller, Glenn Turner, Richard Whitehead, Andy Zaltzman DESIGN Chief Designer: Joe Provis Designer: Rob Whitehouse PHOTOGRAPHY All photography by Getty Images (unless stated) COMMERCIAL T: 0203 696 5732 E: sales@wisden.com Commercial Manager: Toby Phillips MARKETING T: 0203 696 5730 E: contact@wisden.com Marketing Director: Sam Stow MANAGEMENT T: 0203 696 5730 E:…

Anibis bird flies into shot as Steve Smith shoulders arms to Victor Nyauchi in a historic ODI between Australia and Zimbabwe at the Riverway Stadium in Queensland. Nyauchi, a 30-year-old seamer playing his eighth ODI, returns the miserly figures of 6-3-15-1 but is upstaged by the leg-spinner Ryan Burl, whose return of 5-10 in three overs skittles the hosts for 141. Zimbabwe knock off their target with 11 overs to spare, skipper Regis Chakabva steering his side home to seal their first-ever ODI victory in Australia. The Aussies take the series 2-1 but it’s a heartening result for the tourists, who a month earlier claimed their first ODI series win over Bangladesh since 2013. 3rd ODI, Townsville September 3 Australia 141 (Warner 94; Burl 5-10) v Zimbabwe 142-7 (Chakabva 37*;…

Wisden Cricket Monthly columnist, UK editor of ESPNcricinfo and former editor of The Cricketer @miller_cricket Woooooaaaaarrghhh!” Apologies for the in-your-face introduction, but I’m just giving you a taste of what it felt like to be a viewer of Sky’s dedicated cricket channel, shortly after the conclusion of England’s rousing victory in the second Test against South Africa in Manchester. The clue should have been in the rebranding – channel 404 had been ‘Sky Hundred’ for the duration of the competition. And so, not long after a few basic pleasantries had been exchanged at Old Trafford, Sky’s feed jumped with minimal warning straight into the midst of Kevin Pietersen’s bombastic commentary at Lord’s, as a perfectly decent London Spirit boundary was greeted like the second coming of Andrew Flintoff’s ‘Hello Massive’…

Former England batter and current Middlesex batting coach @MarkRamprakash The 37-page document released by the ECB last month has given us the first clues as to what might come out of the high-performance review into English men’s cricket. Already I’m wary of the analysis it has produced. It has been prepared by Twenty First Group, a sports intelligence agency, and includes some fairly generic statements. For instance, it tells us that “England seamers do not travel well” and “spinners have limited opportunity to develop in the domestic game”. You don’t have to be a sports intelligence company to know these things – we’ve been saying them for years. My father was a statistician and worked in the Civil Service for about 20 years, producing reports for governments. He always said,…