Book review: 'Comment is vigorous. Editor Scyld Berry unleashes bouncers at Twenty20 and slow Test over rates'

Published on Saturday 11 April 2009 19:57

WISDEN CRICKETERS' ALMANACK John Wisden & Co£45

A FIXED point in a changing world is as welcome as a harbinger of summer and with the 146th edition of Wisden we get, as always, both. At almost 1,700 pages it is as densely packed with figures and statistics as a Budget blue book – and as incomprehensible to those who don't care what Jack Hobbs averaged in Test matches against Australia, what the scorecard was when Durham played Yorkshire last May on the way to their first County championship, or which left-arm fast bowler has the best Test match analysis on debut. Or ever.

But for those of us who, in spite of ourselves and in spite of the fact that Test match and one-day cricket, with its gimmicky love child Twenty20, now seems to be year-round, still look forward to each new season proper in April, Wisden's chunky Cricketers' Almanack in its unmistakable yellow cover is an integral part of that anticipation.

The latest edition does not disappoint. Most arcane records are there, catering for what was once described as cricket's tendency to record the feats of its players along the lines of "It had never been done by a curate's son, on a Friday, in August, at Dover." For example, this edition, the moment when Australia accused an English batsman of seeing too well – clue, it was an international for the partially sighted and disabled – and the batsman stretchered off after celebrating a hundred too energetically.

Comment is vigorous, under the free-wheeling editorship of Scyld Berry. He unleashes bouncers at Twenty20 and the way such international, rapid-fire competitions as the lucrative Indian Premier League can affect players' expectations and ambitions as well as their pay packets. Almost as fiercely he criticises the way Test teams short-change spectators with funereal over rates when a game that used to produce 20 overs an hour now struggles to complete a dozen.

He encourages his contributors, such as former England captains Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain, to be just as forthright, while regulars such as Matthew Engel, a former Wisden editor, and Peter English – describing the Australian cricket scene as "The empire crumbles" – don't need encouragement to tell it as it is. Or at least as it was in the past 12 cricketing months.

All that and five cricketers of the year to mull over, including for the first time a woman, the outstanding Claire Taylor; profiles of 16 Ashes "greats"; the Wisden world cricketer of the year accolade to cavalier Indian opening batsman Virender Sehwag, and – schoolboy game gets official recognition shock – a World XI to play whichever other planet among the billions in the universe might be silly enough to play this complicated, ludicrous, difficult, endlessly fascinating game.