Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 90 i Wisden Cricket Monthly

LAST MONTH, I…. ◆ Started Richard Whitehead’s exceptionally well-researched and very readable new book about England’s wild Ashes triumph in 1954-55 – recommended (so far) ◆ Listened open-mouthed to Mel Jones’ account of how Afghanistan’s female cricketers were spirited out of the country (next month for that one) ◆ Shared a massive plate of jerk chicken with Brian Lara in Soho ◆ Saw Davina Perrin make an outrageously good 70-odd for the Superchargers ◆ Sat among a load of very clued-up kids at a Hundred game who, I dare say, put forward a pretty strong case for the defence……

It’s the day after the start of this year’s Hundred and I’m sitting on a bench at Charlton Park in south-east London next to a barrel full of crisps. Less than 24 hours earlier, Grace Harris had upstaged Meg Lanning at Lord’s as London Spirit downed their cross-town rivals Oval Invincibles, before Sam Curran and Rashid Khan helped the green team bounce back in the evening’s men’s fixture. Some of those players are here today, clocking on for a KP Snacks sponsors’ event to celebrate installing their hundredth grassroots community cricket pitch across England and Wales. Naturally enough, photo opportunities are offered up with ex-England striker Jermain Defoe and X Factor contestant turned radio host, Fleur East. A young girl walks up to a table of players, pen and paper…

Covering all 18 first-class counties in every issue, including news, interviews and stats from the men’s and women’s game Derbyshire NEXT MEN’S MATCHES: Surrey, ODC (H), Aug 22; Hants, ODC (A), Aug 24; Essex, ODC (H), Aug 26; Middx, CC (A), Sep 8-11; Glam, CC (H), Sep 15-18; Kent, CC (A), Sep 24-27 Reece returns but Falcons falter Having propped up the Blast’s North Group, Derbyshire would have been looking forward to resuming their promotion push out of Division Two, where they’ve resided since 2014. Unfortunately, they ran into an inspired Rehan Ahmed. The 20-year-old England all-rounder scored a century and took 13 wickets as the hosts slumped to a 189-run defeat at to leaders Leicestershire. A draw at Northants followed and, suddenly, having occupied a promotion place for much…

BEN GARDNER Wisden.com managing editor Joe Root waited nine months to rise just one place in the all-time Test run-scorers list and then ticked off three more in one day. It happened at Old Trafford in the process of a routine 150, the second of what would become a trio of hundreds this summer at the hands of a team against whom Root has now made a staggering 13 Test centuries. Rahul Dravid and Jacques Kallis were seen off in the space of a couple of deliveries, and then 90 runs later came Ricky Ponting. Punter himself was on air to watch himself be pushed into third place. “A magnificent moment in history,” Ponting said. “Just the one more to go now. About 2,500 runs behind, but the way that…

ADAM COLLINS WCM Australia correspondent A confession: I am an Australian who doesn’t have a pathological hatred of the current England team. I’m not exactly enthralled by them either, but moderation on the first count puts me in a clear minority. Now, obviously, there’s the small matter of a rivalry that goes back to a time before Australia was a federated nation. I wrote in these pages four years ago about the familiar and boring escalation to any Ashes scrap – the wars of words, and so on. If you can get a repetitive stress injury from reading the same bull and bluster every four years, we’re about to put ourselves in a collective brace. But doesn’t it feel different this time? Visceral? Why, then? What is it about the…

RICHARD WHITEHEAD Author and former Times journalist In a five-minute early evening radio sports desk on July 27, 1954, the names of the 17 England players who would attempt to retain the Ashes in Australia in the coming winter were revealed to an expectant public. Until that broadcast on the BBC Home Service, not even the cricketers themselves knew if they would be boarding the SS Orsova at Tilbury on September 15 for a sixth-month assignment on the other side of the world. There was a heady cocktail of joy and high emotion mingled with anger and disappointment. The Northamptonshire tyros Frank Tyson and Keith Andrew were delighted to be included, as was the 21-year-old Kent batter Colin Cowdrey. On the flip side, there was fury far beyond the boundaries…

ISSUE 90 Sometimes all it takes is an innocent camera, and a strangely sensitive directional microphone. From the boundary at The Oval, still days out from the final Test, reporters noticed India head coach Gautam Gambhir arguing with Surrey’s head of ground staff Lee Fortis. Even from 40 metres away, you could get the gist. “You’re just a groundsman, nothing more,” was the unsavoury line picked up from Gambhir. The gripes included Fortis telling the India coaching staff where they could and couldn’t stand, and where they could put their drinks bottles. Assistant coach Sitanshu Kotak said Fortis had been “a bit arrogant”. An impromptu media scrum, with Fortis at the centre, was quickly assembled, in which the questions ranged from the existential – “Are you happy?”, which extended into,…

*Only available to UK residents CONTACT US AT Wisden Cricket Monthly, Unit 3.G01, The Leather Market, 11-13 Weston Street, London, SE1 3ER editorial@wisden.com * LETTER OF THE MONTH Coles makes red-hot claim I realise that there is a huge amount of talented young players across the world; your selection [WCM89] is testament to that and is very fine. But one name I’d put forward: James Coles. He does the lot, does it all very well, is modest and level-headed, and was born in Buckinghamshire (I may be biased with the last point). Many congratulations on another fine issue. Nick Gee Keeping the game in perspective It was interesting to note something of a recurring theme in interviews with prominent cricketers in last month’s issue. The likes of Saif Zaib, Adam…

PHIL WALKER WCM editor-in-chief Those scenes at the end. Those pictures. Siraj in tears, Woakes in a sling. Go on, tell us it doesn’t matter. Tell us that no one cares these days and anyhow it’s all about money. Nowhere, that day, the taste of defeat. Only degrees of triumph. And thus how quickly the sludge drained away, and with it the bad actors who’d sought to flip a few ‘flashpoints’ into clicks for money. This was never a nasty series. But then again, joy doesn’t do the numbers like confected aggro. The players of both sides never looked more together and human and knackered than on that final morning, Day 25. Later that afternoon, McCullum looked out across The Oval, where his team had got within a single hit…

KATYA WITNEY Wisden senior writer The celebratory scenes on the outfield at The Oval drew back the curtain on the characters who had created the drama. There was Mohammed Siraj, wideeyed and defiant, playing to the crowd. Shubman Gill, at the centre of it all but retaining his composure, all too aware of the cameras following his every move. Then, on the outskirts of the group, there was Washington Sundar, clambering on the backs of an enclosed circle. It’s a group Sundar has had to fight hard to be a part of. He wasn’t picked for the first Test at Headingley, only coming in at Edgbaston as a second spinner who could bolster a brittle tail. That was just his sixth Test match in four years, having spent three-and-a-half years…

SAM DALLING Freelance sportswriter “Amar! Is that a bowling ball?!” bellows Tom Brown, only half joking, as two of his colleagues, Amar Rashid and Gemaal Hussain, each of them clutching a warm-up bat and a mitt, whack a glistening red sphere between them. Rashid wears the grin of a naughty child caught about to pull a chair from beneath his brother. “G had it,” he says. Hussain’s smile is broad too. The trio are preparing for another day’s work at the South Asian Cricket Academy (SACA) and WCM has been invited to join them behind the scenes. It is 45 minutes before the final 96 overs of SACA’s game against Lancashire’s second XI. Sunshine beats down on Rochdale Cricket Club and the players are stretching with SACA’s head of medical,…

Perusing the “20-odd scrapbooks my late mother made”, John Punchard sometimes wonders whether his glass is half-full or half-empty. Starting in 1973 as a 15-year-old debutant for Royton, whose ground his house overlooks, 33 and a half seasons of Central Lancashire League first XI cricket before the league folded in 2015 brought just one league title (five times finishing runner-up) and one Wood Cup (four final defeats). Also lost were his sole county cup final, his sole final in the ‘Inter-League Cup’ (contested by CLL and Lancashire League clubs), all four finals for the CLL rep XI and both national finals with the Lancashire Cricket Association side. His only final with Lancashire over-50s resulted in a three-run defeat to Oxfordshire on the Lord’s Nursery Ground, although Punchard did contribute 76…

How’s this for a script. In her last match for her country – a World Cup final on home soil – the world’s best player top scores, is at the crease when the winning runs are hit and ends the competition with an average of 149. Alas, it’s only half a script. Lindsay Reeler was 27 years old and had no idea she was playing her last game for Australia. At the time she was probably the most stylish women’s batter in the world, with a cover drive that should have been set to music, and definitely the most productive; an ethereal talent who produced high art in industrial quantities. But she was a superstar in the shadows: in the late 1980s, the concept of a women’s cricket superstar was…

15. THE WILLOW WAND BY DEREK BIRLEY (1979) The Willow Wand was not the first book to disrupt the comfortable celebration of cricket as “more than a game” embodied in the quasi-official histories by HS Altham, EW Swanton and other members of the Lord’s inner circle. Its author, Derek Birley, acknowledged he was following in the footsteps of a “remarkable” history of cricket published in 1970 by Major Rowland Bowen (whom we’ll encounter much later in this series as the editor of the iconoclastic Cricket Quarterly). Birley also drew on a subterranean tradition of withering asides – by pros such as Albert Knight, Cec Parkin, Fred Root, Herbert Sutcliffe and Jim Laker – on the incompetence or hypocrisy of the amateurs who were ordering them about. Nor was this collection…

If history is always written by the victors, then who nurtures the memories of those who don’t quite get over the line? It’s a question that appears to have vexed this England team all summer long, as they’ve ventured deeper into the weeds of a ‘legacy-defining’ six months – a catchall term that has caught on precisely because the Bazball era feels closer to its end than its beginning. Perhaps it’s a cruel debate to be having so soon after such an epic Test series, and with so many broken bodies littered across the narrative. The margins against India were so fine, and the spectacle so engrossing – particularly in an all-timer of a finish at The Oval – that it feels disrespectful to the endeavour to quibble about the…

Buried within an 89-page report into the monetary health of English cricket by the financial and business experts Leonard Curtis is a line that might have been written about many county clubs at any time over the last 100 years. “A number of counties,” it suggests, generate “enough revenue to make a small surplus” and hold a “small amount of equity on their balance sheet”. The report continues: “In many ways these clubs could simply be said to be ‘existing’, potentially raising concerns about their future outlook.” And there’s the rub. Is simply existing enough in an age obsessed with growth, or do the 18 first-class counties have to be successful businesses as well as cricket clubs? The very publication of the report, with Michael Vaughan an impressively high-profile frontman,…

Wong slips into gear Issy Wong is one of English cricket’s most intriguing characters. She made her England debut in 2022, aged just 20, and was heralded (not least by herself) as having the potential to become the first female fast bowler to break the 80mph barrier. Exciting but raw, she caught the eye on Test debut against South Africa but her form fell away as she lost her run-up and radar. There have been tough times since but Wong has rediscovered her form and found her way back into the England set-up as a more adaptable bowler who’s less reliant on out-and-out pace. Speaking to Katya Witney on the Wisden Women’s Cricket Weekly Podcast shortly after starring with bat and ball for Warwickshire at Blast Finals Day, she explained…

At some point during our chat in the back garden of a Hertfordshire coffeehouse, most likely between the account of his recent hundred for England Legends and his stated dream to win another Blast – whether that be for Northants, for whom he has a quarter-final coming up, or even one day his belovedly dysfunctional Essex – it hits me who Ravi Bopara reminds me of. Now, for the tape: Bopara is one of my all-time favourite cricketers. Best be forewarned that this is likely to veer into hagiography if we’re not too careful. To me, Bopara – no, let’s go with Ravi – was chiefly a great idea who came within a couple of inside edges of becoming a great success. How we measure such things is subjective of…

A hat-trick ball drilled down the ground for four. A century before lunch. Harry Brook reduced to a supporting role. An eventual unbeaten tally of 184 in an innings where only one other made it to 25. An innings, at Edgbaston, in a heavy defeat, that made basically no difference, except to confirm Jamie Smith as one of the world game’s purest batting talents. Ben Gardner, Wisden.com editor Joe Root’s runs weren’t just notable for their number, but their effortlessness. Perhaps only Bradman has ever made scoring look so easy for so long – and it is all about the look. The frequency with which Root raised his bat in celebration of some absurd milestone masks how special those records are. This was Root transcendent, at peace with his place in…

AADYA SHARMA Editor of Wisden India Mohammed Siraj is a transparent soul. He laughs and jokes on the cricket field, he weeps in sadness and happiness, he sneers at teammates as well as opponents. He tips over a crucial catch at the boundary and calls it a “tragedy”. His heart fuels his game. Inside the Oval media room, with Siraj sat in triumph next to captain Shubman Gill, he looked as excited as he had been on his debut five years ago. That morning, he’d woken up and Googled an image to upload to his phone, proudly showing his new wallpaper to journalists: the word ‘BELIEVE’, and the back shot of Cristiano Ronaldo from his Manchester United days. When Ronaldo left United in 2009, the teenage Siraj was still years…

In South Africa 2023, just before the Women’s T20 World Cup was held in the country for the first time, an under-19 version of the event provided a stage for the best of the teenage talent, now largely afforded space to grow as professionals in the women’s game. The event was a success, with several international stars leading the way – a reminder that the women’s international game still relies on routinely fast-tracking players to the top, often while they’re still at school – with a nerve-jangling England v Australia semi-final the highlight. Of that England side, Ryana MacDonald-Gay has now represented the Test team, while Grace Scrivens leads Essex domestically. From Australia, several of the players involved in the clash now light up the WBBL, and are starting to…

WIN! 1. 5 years ago… On August 25, 2020, James Anderson became the first seamer to take 600 Test wickets. Which Pakistani did he dismiss at Southampton to reach the milestone? 2. 10 years ago… On August 29, 2015, Lancashire won their first T20 Blast. Which county were beaten by 13 runs in the final but went on to lift the trophy the following summer? 3. 15 years ago… On August 29, 2010, England thrashed Pakistan by an innings and 225 runs in the fourth Test at Lord’s to take the series 3-1. Who was named Pakistan’s Player of the Series but didn’t play another Test match until July 2016? 4. 20 years ago… On August 25, 2005, which Australian tearaway dismissed Marcus Trescothick at Trent Bridge to collect his…

I remember November 9, 2022 as if it were yesterday. England were playing the T20 World Cup in Australia and had a Test series in Pakistan coming up the following month. They’d asked for net bowlers at Loughborough for the likes of Ben Duckett and Joe Root and I put my hand up. I went every day, skipping a fair few lectures. The previous day, I’d bowled to Joe briefly, but he also faced a lot of side-arm from the coaches so there was plenty of waiting around. But on the 9th I bowled to him for close to two hours. There was another spinner who had a county contract also in the net, but Joe asked him to stop and wanted me to carry on. That was pretty cool.…