Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 75 i Wisden Cricket Monthly

LAWRENCE BOOTH Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack editor and Daily Mail writer @BoothCricket When West Indies announced their squad for January’s two-Test series in Australia, the groans echoed around the world. Going into battle against a team they had not beaten in a Test match since chasing down a world-record 418 in Antigua more than 20 years earlier, they had named seven uncapped players in a party of 15. Australia had just whitewashed Pakistan. It was going to be a massacre. The first Test at Adelaide seemed to confirm the fears: Australia won by 10 wickets, their 25th victory over West Indies in 30 games. Then came Brisbane, where off-spinner Kevin Sinclair performed a cartwheel and a backflip after dismissing Usman Khawaja, and Shamar Joseph ran the breadth of the Gabba after…

Well, that’s another gone. Huh? Proper player. Taken his final bow. Dean Elgar. Ah yes, I saw that. Never really got into him, to be honest. Bit stodgy at the crease. That’s exactly the sort of half-brained comment I’d expect from you. I’m just saying, you know, there were other players I’d rather watch going about their business. You see, this is why I despair of youngsters today. Erm, we’re exactly the same age. Well, you people today. You’re so bloody entitled, always in a rush, like a flock of magpies on speed: “Oooh look – shiny – want want want, now now now, more more more…” It drives me mad. You want all your thrills immediately. God forbid you should have to wait a while and experience some delayed…

Hampshire The Hawks have bolstered their pace-bowling options for this summer ’s T20 Blast by signing Australian all-rounder Michael Neser for the first eight group matches before Afghanistan’s Naveen-ul-Haq, who has spent the last three campaigns with Leicestershire, steps in for the remainder of the tournament. Neser will also be available for a handful of Championship matches, acting as cover for overseas players Kyle Abbott and Mohammad Abbas. Leicestershire The Foxes have also snapped up an Aussie, securing the services of opening batter Will Pucovski for the first five matches of the Championship season. The 26-yearold, who made his Test debut in 2021 but has since been beset by a succession of concussions, averages 43.94 in first-class cricket and will provide cover while Wiaan Mulder completes the South African season.…

In association with David Gower ’s most reliable hangover cure was batting against the West Indies’ fast bowlers of the 1980s. “ That surge of adrenaline as the first ball whistled past your nose,” he said, “always seemed to shake the system up a bit.” Facing the four horsemen of the apocalypse was a pretty good reason to raise a glass in the first place, whether to numb the pain or wearily celebrate professional validation. For batters of Gower ’s generation, the West Indies were the only litmus test in town. “If you got runs against them, it meant a helluva lot,” says Bruce Laird, the former Australian opener who consistently did just that. “You knew you’d batted your arse off and you’d got through it. You felt fulfilled.” In…

BEN BLOOM Freelance sportswriter; former sports reporter at The Telegraph @benbloomsport Rory Hamilton-Brown is not a particularly easy man to track down. The former Surrey and Englandunder 19 captain doesn’t have a social media presence and retains no connection to the sport in which he was once considered one of the country ’s outstanding talents. His only online footprint is a defunct LinkedIn profile and a Companies House page containing details of a family business that is no longer searchable. To the outside world, Hamilton-Brown essentially disappeared upon retiring from cricket in 2015, which is just the way he likes it. I’ve always had nagging questions about what exactly happened to the bright young thing who was named Surrey skipper at the tender age of 22, becoming the county ’s…

On the morning of January 31, three kit maestros from Serious Cricket drove a branded van through the Alec Stewart Gate at the Kia Oval, full to the brim with the best bits of equipment for 2024. By the end of the day, we had a much better idea of which bats will fly this year, which soft goods will shimmer and shine, and how many of our batting ‘testers’ are in some kind of nick for the new season (answer: not all of them). Nothing ushers in the optimism of summer like a first look at pristine cricket bats, and seeing the boys carrying armfuls of unblemished blades to the indoor school, ready for testing, I was reminded of the old Goochie line when he saw a pile of…

THE WCM COACHING TEAM “Mark Ramprakash: People often say that indoor practice is completely different to outdoor practice, and of course it is in many ways. But it’s all you’ve got in winter, so you need to make the most of it. I relished the opportunity to work on my game in the nets. I always thought there were benefits to be gained. Yes, indoor surfaces are generally quicker and bouncier than you’ll find outside, but you can use that to your advantage. By the time you start playing outside you should have improved your front-foot play and be able to get forward without any concerns about the short-pitched delivery. Early season, anything short you’ll be climbing into because you’ve been practising on a quick surface indoors. “As a top-order…

“You know, I find myself giggling when I remember some of those dismissals!” I grew up in Halls Village, a small community in Barbados. Cricket was part of our culture, we found every little nook and cranny to play it. Some days we’d go down to the beach and that was the greatest fast bowling academy you’ve ever seen. With just a tennis ball it seemed like you could bowl as fast as anybody in the world. I arrived in England to start my professional career on my 20th birthday. I had represented the West Indies Young Cricketers in England the year before, in 1978, but suffered from injuries. At the time, the Lancashire League had Andy Roberts, Michael Holding and Kapil Dev all playing in it. I started playing…

January 24, the day before the Hyderabad Test It’s been very strange not playing cricket and not being with the lads for such a long period of time, but with the camaraderie that we’ve developed, everyone just clicked straight away when we met up in Abu Dhabi – it was as if we’d been together since the Ashes. That fearless environment that Baz and Stokesy create starts from the camaraderie and the training. Just allowing everyone to bond so closely, you trust everyone in the team. It’s a weird thing to say but it means you’re not fearing someone taking your place. They’ve built an environment where you know that you’ll get your chance to impress as long as you do the right things and help the other lads out.…

An alternative prize will be provided if the winner is aged under 18, or if requested *Only available to UK residents We reserve the right to edit letters for length and clarity ★ LETTER OF THE MONTH Winds of change Sandwiched between the World Cup and a Test series in India, the lack of WCM’s coverage of England’s white-ball tour to the West Indies is perhaps not surprising. A tour that pitted the World Cup non-qualifiers against an underperforming England team, deprived of many of its heroes, was not widely anticipated. For those of us who had the privilege to be there, however, it was a compelling and highly competitive series. While Phil Salt was England’s standout performer, Shai Hope’s contributions, some big hitting and stylish batting (a future star…

Michael Holding is speaking to WCM just a few weeks before turning 70, but there will be no great fanfare to mark the occasion. “I haven’t celebrated a birthday since my 16th,” he says, “so I won’t be celebrating this one.” No chance of a surprise party? The horsemen of the apocalypse gathering to honour the youngest member of the quartet’s milestone? “ Well,” he replies evenly, “I think they know not to do that.” In truth, Holding has never had much time for personal landmarks, and the idea of revisiting his past glories holds little interest for him. And so, when offered the chance to re-examine his career with the use of archive data mined by CricViz, he responds with a healthy dose of scepticism. “I think data is…

Clem Hill Australia v England Melbourne Cricket Ground, Melbourne January 2, 1902 The first of 83 men and women to be dismissed for 99 in Test cricket, Clem Hill was a prodigiously talented lefthander from Adelaide who had a problematic relationship with the nineties. Having been bowled four short of a maiden Test hundred as a 20-year-old in his first home Ashes in 1897, Hill went on an unparalleled streak of jugdodging when England returned four years later, reeling off scores of 99, 98 and 97 in successive innings. The first of those knocks came at the MCG after a sodden surface had seen 25 wickets fall for 221 runs. Hill, moved down to No.7 in Australia’s second innings to avoid the most treacherous conditions, arrived at the crease at…

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If the sweet spot in a batting career begins at 28, then the summer of 1992 could have been the most golden for Paul Burn, a flame-haired run-machine from the pit village of Sacriston who had averaged 51.12 for Durham over the previous five Minor Counties Championship campaigns but was told there was no spare ticket for the county’s promotion to the professional game. “I was disappointed at the time, but I’ve never lost any sleep over it,” he says. “A lot of people seemed more put out that I didn’t get a contract than what I was.” Instead, Burn threw himself into a prolific club career that had got going with 895 Tyneside Senior League (TSL) runs for Sacriston in 1983, aged 19. Over the next 18 years, seven…

In association with 1. A COUNTRY CRICKET-MATCH (COLLECTED IN OUR VILLAGE, 1824) BY MARY RUSSELL MITFORD In the 18th and early 19th century, as cricket gradually developed from a folk pastime into a spectator sport, most writing about the “glorious, manly, British game” had been in verse. But the first great prose description of a cricket match was written by a woman and published in The Lady’s Magazine. Exactly 200 years ago, Mary Russell Mitford collected her magazine columns in book form under the title Our Village. Her fictional hamlet is fairly obviously based on Three Mile Cross near Reading, where she lived in a cottage for 30 years after her family had fallen on hard times. Mitford was born 15 miles away from Jane Austen, went to the same…

ANDREW MILLER Wisden Cricket Monthly columnist, UK editor of ESPNcricinfo and former editor of The Cricketer @miller_cricket There’s no escaping the optics, nor the realpolitik. Whether you think that Colin Graves’ return to Yorkshire is a ghastly expression of cricket’s moral void, or the unavoidable upshot of a crisis that has steered the club onto the rocks, the deed is done, and his consortium is now embedded in the boardroom at Headingley, with licence to determine the future of the most important club in the land. And for that reason it probably is time, as Graves himself stated earlier this month, to draw a “line in the sand” as regards the club’s recent turmoil – not because his re-election as chair provides any sort of closure to those who feel…

“Pope batted with a unique combination of substance, defiance, soloism and audacity, and his knock clearly sits at the top table of England hundreds overseas. But it feels too early to say whether it’s the greatest. We need to let the dust settle, the recency bias fade and the series result reveal itself” ROB SMYTH Guardian and WCM writer I can recommend the humble pie. Ollie Pope wasn’t in my England team before Harry Brook left the tour, so I watched with joyous incredulity as he devised a career-defining 196. Pope batted with a unique combination of substance, defiance, soloism and audacity, and his knock clearly sits at the top table of England hundreds overseas. But it feels too early to say whether it’s the greatest. We need to let…

Gloucestershire are dreaming big on and off the field. Before Christmas, members were told about plans to leave their Nevil Road ground, home since 1889, and venture to grander pastures north of Bristol. And when Mark Alleyne, multiple trophy-winning captain of the white-ball glory days of the 90s and early 2000s, was recently appointed head coach, he told WCM: “I want to boost the expectation of the club. We want to be dining at the top table.” These are bold ambitions. Gloucestershire finished last in the 2023 Championship without a win, having been relegated from the first division in 2022. They did reach the semis of the One-Day Cup but the T20 Blast remains a tough nut to crack, not least because of the strength of the South Group. In…

Love will tear us apart. When Shamar Joseph sprinted off, his teammates frantically following, it invoked something deep and special. Brian Lara cried, Carl Hooper cried, Ian Bishop visibly held back the tears. These were men who have, for the past few years, publicly suppressed their love for the maroon, talking in matter-of-fact terms about the decline of the West Indies Test side as if it were an inevitable part of life. Yet here they were, trying to control the waves of emotion, the purest sense of love that had come rushing back after years of anguish and heartbreak watching their beloved West Indies. I sat bleary-eyed, early Sunday morning, trying to process exactly what I had seen on TV, almost as if it was a very surreal, but very…

WIN! Send in your answers via email (editorial@wisden.com) or via post ( Time Warp, Wisden Cricket Monthly, Fourth Floor, Bedser Stand, Kia Oval, Kennington, London, SE11 5SS). Entries must be received by March 18, 2024. 1. 5 years ago… On February 2, 2019, West Indies beat England by 10 wickets in the second Test at Antigua to take an unassailable 2-0 lead in the series. Which 32-yearold, who made scores of 6 and 17, became the oldest specialist batter to make their Test debut for England since Alan Wells in 1995? 2. 10 years ago… On February 19, 2014, Ireland claimed their first-ever international win against West Indies, defeating their hosts by six wickets in the first T20I at Sabina Park, Jamaica. Which former Windies international coached the Irish to…