To the rap of a gavel, and the shuffle of dress shoes on parquet, the 2016 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack announced itself. The game’s most august and long-lived publication – its bible, Mahabharata and superhero multiverse rolled into one – has just launched with its traditional black-tie dinner, the kind of three-course, two-cigar affair beloved of this most gentlemanly sport. It is not that long ago, after all, that the England team used to attend a similarly formal dinner on the eve of each Test match. Into the early 1990s they prepared for five days in the field with a mixture of beef wellington, chocolate mousse and a bottle of Chateau Gower. Whether the port was fortified with protein powders is not recorded.
The almanack dinner has a few rather lovely traditions, not least the fact that, alongside past cricketers of the year stretching back to the 1950s, the publishers invite the country’s top schoolboy player along too, meaning there is at least one person in the room who is not drinking. This year, its annual after-dinner speech was given by the novelist Kamila Shamsie, meaning that a room dominated by ageing white men was spellbound by a Pakistani woman who, as she wittily shared, cannot even play cricket.
It all points to Wisden’s unique remit to bring past and present together. This year’s almanack cover contains two images – its famous woodcut of top-hatted toffs at the crease and Ben Stokes thumping a ball to the boundary, tattoos cascading from his Adidas-branded shirt sleeve. Inside, one piece honours the docile days of pre-second world war cricket while another calls for day-night Tests, but then the almanack, for all its status as a historical authority, has long been a radical voice.
This is the book that has agitated for progress and reform in the game since the days of Sydney Pardon. It is the book that campaigned for a two-division championship and city cricket, and invented the very notion of a Test championship seven years before the ICC adopted the idea. In the days when most of us cannot be bothered to scroll too far back up a WhatsApp chat, a 1,600-page volume is not especially à la mode – yet it contains some of the most timely opinions in the game.
It feels appropriate – and not a little miraculous – that the almanack should appear, genie-like, at this magical moment in English cricket, after a World Twenty20 final that was the final rebranding exercise for our national summer game. The past 12 months, after all, have neatly comprised one of the swiftest and most extraordinary turnarounds an England cricket team have ever enjoyed. Since early 2015 – the Ashes whitewash, the management sackings, Kevin Pietersen’s exit – the team have been on a relentlessly upward journey from comic shambles to triumphant, fun-loving iconoclasts. Thinking about it, I’m pretty sure that is the plot of Pitch Perfect. Paul Feig’s probably optioned the script already.
“To watch them was to share their sense of release,” writes Lawrence Booth in his editor’s notes, calling England’s new attacking style “the most uplifting story in international cricket”. This is not how it used to be. Those who have followed cricket for any length of time, but especially pre-2005, will remember how the almanack used to land heavily at their door, carrying all the weight of its editor’s disapproval for the state of the nation.
But then, the game is changing ever faster. Even the notion that the publication of Wisden marks the “start” of the cricket year seems impossibly quaint in an era when the global calendar is stacked as haphazardly as the central aisle at Lidl. The so-called “off-season” – comprising, this year, the Big Bash League, a World Twenty20 tournament and two major Test series – leaves no pause for breath. And it will not be long until only the most diehard of lunchbox-carrying fans think of April as the start of the county season rather than the kick-off of the IPL.
As the sands shift under our feet, it’s time we nominated some more up-to-date markers that the English cricket season is upon us. Opening fixtures against university opposition do not stir much emotion any more but there are plenty more tangible signs that it is April.
Here are just a few: a story about KP wanting to play Test cricket again; the rare sight of an England player bowling for his county; the winter tans on the Sky commentators; an Ian Bell century; a #kohli hashtag trending; and the growing suspicion, as he describes the New Road pitch as “like a jelly-blancmange”, that the Worcestershire groundsman has been watching a lot of The Great British Bake Off. Gerard Manley Hopkins had it right: nothing is so beautiful as spring.
