Notes by the editor
At faraway Hobart, in long-ago January 2015, Ben Stokes played an innings that had English cricket quietly sobbing at the perversity of it all. The squad for the World Cup was already picked, and Stokes - after enough ducks to fill a pond - had been left out. Now, wearing the liberating Big Bash colours of Melbourne Renegades, he smashed 77 off 37 balls. Gleeful Aussies had their fun: the Poms couldn't even pick the right blokes! And they had a point: a few weeks later, England messed up their sixth World Cup in a row.
By January 2016, Stokes was making his countrymen cheer, not weep, his 258 off 198 balls at Cape Town the most sustained act of wanton violence by an England batsman in any format. Under a fiery sun, by Table Mountain's giant anvil, he was forging his team's future. As for the immediate past, the year between his two innings had been one of the most significant in the history of English cricket.
The transformation began in earnest in May, when a timid defeat in Barbados was followed by a tumultuous victory over New Zealand at Lord's - and England instantly became a side you wanted to tell your friends about. There would be rapids down river, but the players were now approaching them head on, not paddling round the edge, quoting the percentage chance of falling in. Like Shakespeare's King John, they were discovering that their "soul hath elbow room". To watch them was to share their sense of release.
Records fell like confetti. England passed 400 for the first time in a one-day international, and knocked off 350 in another. They made their highest oneday score overseas, in Dubai (355 for five), then smashed it a few weeks later, in Bloemfontein (399 for nine). Jos Buttler scored a hundred off 66 balls, then - as if unsated - off 46. Stuart Broad took eight for 15 as Australia were demolished for 60 in the Trent Bridge Test, then six for 17 to skittle South Africa for 83 at Johannesburg. Joe Root passed 50 on 21 occasions in 2015 alone, leaving England's previous best (16 by Marcus Trescothick in 2003) in his wake. The two most resonant national records fell one after the other: in Antigua, Jimmy Anderson overtook Ian Botham's number of Test wickets, and went on past 400; at Leeds, Alastair Cook surpassed Graham Gooch's number of Test runs, and approached 10,000. Wherever you looked, pulses raced. Even in quieter moments, England were rewriting history: Cook's innings of 263 in Abu Dhabi was Test cricket's third-longest.
None of this guaranteed success, and the one-day defeat in South Africa in February, after England had led 2-0, underlined the importance of brain as well as brawn. But better this than what had come before. And the change in mood was hard to miss: after the sobs and the scowls, England were cracking a smile. The joy made the preceding year all the more exasperating. Leading the charge sheet was the drearily predictable World Cup - a car crash that took place in slow motion while everyone pleaded for fifth gear. When Paul Downton, the managing director, returned from the tournament, he unwittingly confirmed the problem: 50-over cricket, he announced - as if letting us in on a secret - was now being played at Twenty20 speed. Forget leather on willow: the sound of the English game in early 2015 was palm on forehead.
Downton's inevitable sacking in April was soon followed by the botched dismissal of coach Peter Moores, announced moments after Andrew Strauss had been confirmed as Downton's replacement. When Strauss made it clear there was no way back for Kevin Pietersen - just as he was blitzing a triplecentury - one wondered what awkwardness was next. But subsequent events suggested Strauss was right. In a delightful turn-up for the form guide, the ECB - having spent the previous year losing touch with reality - were making some smart decisions.
Just as when he was captain, Strauss wanted cricketers who could think for themselves. Confirmed as the man who would continue to dictate the direction of the limited-overs sides, Eoin Morgan was reborn. It caught on: from June until the end of the South Africa series, no team could match England's oneday run-rate of 6.27. Back in March, at the World Cup, a batsman had been berated for getting out as he attempted to go over the top; three months later, against New Zealand at Edgbaston, England did nothing else, turning 202 for six into an era-defining 408 for nine. Five days after that, batting first at the Rose Bowl, they were bowled out for 302 with 28 balls unused. Careless? On the contrary, said Morgan: it was all part of the new philosophy.
Strauss also took his time over the appointment of Moores's long-term successor, which allowed the genial assistant coach Paul Farbrace to seep into the team's core. And it meant Strauss could work on persuading Trevor Bayliss to join the fold, having recognised a man who, like himself, was comfortable in his own skin - and who, in Sri Lanka, had already worked well with Farbrace. In an age of obsessive measurability, there were moments when Bayliss felt like the anti-coach, an endearingly scruffy retort to the audit culture. He had come to the attention of his future boss during a ten-minute timeout at the 2014 IPL final, when Bayliss was in charge of Kolkata Knight Riders. Milling around, hands in pockets, he was - noted Strauss - "calming his batsmen down, rather than geeing them up". It was a wonderful irony that England played their most electrifying cricket for years after choosing an expert at lowering the volume.
The English game had begun 2015 apparently clinging to G. K. Chesterton's definition of hope as "the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate". Victory at the Wanderers in January 2016, to knock South Africa off the top of the Test rankings, confirmed that a different kind of hope had taken hold. It was the most uplifting story in international cricket all year, the more so for being utterly unexpected.
Captain Cook changes tack
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Alastair Cook
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Cook's soul found elbow room too. A few months after being sacked as one-day captain, he cited the World Cup debacle as evidence that the selectors had got it wrong: famously stubborn, he was still in denial. But, as the summer progressed, he was both given space to breathe, and encouraged to listen to others - a balancing act delicately handled by Bayliss and Farbrace.
During that Lord's Test against New Zealand, his second-innings 162 allowed Root and Stokes to be themselves, establishing a model in which the captain's safety valve at one end usually gave rise to just the right amount of combustion at the other. As Cook's confidence grew, his ears opened, ending an era in which those outside the bubble were regarded with suspicion, and sometimes worse. By the Ashes, with the dressing-room well and truly his, he was out-captaining Michael Clarke. In South Africa, he looked more at ease than either Hashim Amla, who resigned after two Tests, or A. B. de Villiers, who sounded resigned after only one: "I almost feel like all hope is gone."
Yet both series threw up an unforeseen problem: England used to be slow starters; but Cook's team were actually winning too early. Defeats in the dead Tests at The Oval and Centurion were a reminder that talk of returning to No. 1 in the rankings was premature. Indeed, England had now lost seven out of eight concluding Tests of a series, and had needed the Trent Bridge tour de force to end a sequence of seven alternate wins and defeats, which had made them the most reliably inconsistent Test team ever.
Gaps needed plugging. At the end of the South Africa series, five of England's top seven had a career average under 35; the second opener's slot
looked like a curse; and the lack of a world-class spinner - so evident during the 2-0 defeat by Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates - had been glossed over. The excitement was tempered by the work that remained. Nor had everyone been convinced by the quality of the Ashes. Yet, at a time
when bat has too often held sway over ball, it was curious to nitpick about events at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge, even if Australia's pair of first innings seemed intent on proving the Annie Hall theory that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. Wickets threatened to lose their value, and the only over-my-dead-body batting of the series came from Cook, in losing causes at Lord's and The Oval. It made his character transplant as captain all the more notable.
The land of the long white cordon
There were patronising ruffles of the hair for the New Zealanders, who had allegedly helped rid England of their stiff upper lip, as if their main function was to loosen Cook's men up ahead of the Ashes. But the first telling partnership of the new era - 161 at five an over between Root and Stokes on the first day at Lord's - came about not because England were trying to match the New Zealanders' joie de vivre (they hadn't batted yet), but because Brendon McCullum's aggressive fields left them with little option. Spaces opened up, runs flowed.
Did he over-attack? Probably. But, with apologies to the American wit James Thurber, "you might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward". McCullum deserves every cricket-lover's thanks for treating it like a game, not a war by other means. For the first time, few English fans wanted the pre-Ashes appetiser to end.
It says something about cricket's standing in New Zealand right now that both McCullum and Kane Williamson are among our Five - the first Kiwi
double in their 86-year Test history (dare we point out that a third member of this year's selection, Ben Stokes, was born in Christchurch?) In late February, in his final game at international level, McCullum bade farewell in excelsis, with a Test-record 54-ball hundred off Australia. Williamson is also the first from his country to be named Wisden's Leading Cricketer in the World, while Suzie Bates wins the women's equivalent. For so long, the black cap denoted underdoggedness. This summer, like never before, county cricket will be full of disarmingly modest, talented New Zealanders, and barely a grim forward defensive between them.
Out of the darkness
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It was to the cricket media's embarrassment that Death of a Gentleman, a documentary by Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber, was one of the few attempts to tackle the sport's maladministration. Yet the film attracted a strange gripe: it apparently lacked a smoking gun - beloved of those who have read too much Agatha Christie, or possibly of journalists who prefer others to do the work for them.
Not only did the grumble betray the low standards to which sporting executives are held (heck, wasn't cricket governance the exemplar next to football, cycling, athletics, tennis and the rest?) It also overlooked the fact that the gun had been smouldering since early 2014, when the Big Three effected their heist, splitting cricket into the haves and the have-sod-alls, then telling us with a straight face that it was for the good of the game. If DoaG was a howl at the loss of a sport's innocence, then events either side of its London premiere in July confirmed it was not vanishing into the void.
One by one, willingly or otherwise, the masterminds behind the ICC takeover left the positions that had allowed them such unaccountable power in the first place. Dean Kino, Cricket Australia's head of legal affairs, had departed in September 2014. Then, in May 2015, ECB chairman Giles Clarke bumped himself upstairs into the attic of the presidency. A few months later, CA chairman Wally Edwards stepped down, full of praise for India's N. Srinivasan, who was doing "a fantastic job". The Indian Supreme Court thought otherwise. Embroiled in a seemingly interminable corruption scandal, Srinivasan had already lost the BCCI presidency, and in November was finally forced out of his cushy ICC chairmanship. Sundar Raman, Srinivasan's righthand man and previously head of the IPL, jumped before he was pushed. And then there were none; cricket breathed a little more freely. All along, a small but dependable group of apologists argued that England and Australia had been obliged to join forces with India, because the alternative meant the Indians going it alone, presumably in some eternal dystopia of DLF Maximums. This was ludicrous: India's fans would never stand for a world in which their country couldn't be champions, or the next Sachin Tendulkar couldn't score all his hundreds.
The excuse sounded even feebler when Shashank Manohar, having replaced Srinivasan at the head of the BCCI and the ICC, gave an interview to The Hindu in which he regretted "the three major countries bullying the ICC", condemned India's 22% share of global cricket's pie ("you cannot make the poor poorer and the rich richer only because you have the clout"), and stressed the importance of competitive bilateral series. Surprise, surprise: the takeover, it turned out, had been a matter of urgency only for those who urgently wanted more money.
The iniquities of the power grab, which left Big Three representatives in charge of all the major ICC departments, hardly needed spelling out, but Manohar was on hand to help: "You should have the best man, whether he comes from Zimbabwe or West Indies, or even from an Associate or Affiliate, to work on a committee, who will promote the interests of the ICC." Lord Woolf had made a similar point in a 2012 report considered so damaging to the status quo that it was lowered, nostrils pinched, into the bin.
But Manohar seemed to have accepted the idea, mooted in these pages and elsewhere in recent years, that the BCCI have a wider duty to the game. Crucially, Indian cricket's very own glasnost belied the suggestion that resistance is futile, that DoaG was farting against thunder. When Justice Lodha delivered a list of recommendations for the Indian game - including the appointments of an ethics officer and an independent auditor - he was speaking the language of reconciliation, not the de haut en bas discourse that had filmgoers booing Clarke when he appeared on screen during an early showing in Sheffield.
Then, in February this year, came a breakthrough that would never have happened if a few - though far too few - journalists hadn't continued to rattle the gilded cage: the ICC chair could no longer be filled by a current officeholder at a national governing body, which was bad news for Clarke. And the Big Three's reforms would be reviewed in full. There was talk of banning the term "Big Three" altogether (two syllables had rarely sounded so toxic).
There was even talk of India giving back some of the money. So there are reasons to be cheerful. They are fragile, it's true, and a reversal of the heist would simply mean a return from the fire to the frying pan that so troubled Lord Woolf. But the age of the Big YouKnowWhat, as murky an episode as any in the annals of cricket administration, may be over before it has properly begun. With any luck, DoaG will not need a sequel.
No time to stand and stare
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Cricket, though, is not in a position to be complacent. One afternoon in late September, two days after the end of the County Championship, it ought to have shifted uneasily in its still-grassy whites. Nearly 90,000 spectators had arrived at Wembley to watch a game of rugby between Ireland and Romania. One of the teams could barely claim home advantage, the other was ranked 17th in the world. It was like packing out the MCG for a one-day international between New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.
Two months later, a match between Australia and New Zealand that might normally have elicited a groan about Test cricket's irrelevance instead drew a gasp, as 123,000 poured into Adelaide Oval over three days of lowscoring tension. The first day/night Test worked a treat, though it left an unsettling thought: national boards had spent years nodding solemnly at the idea of Test cricket's primacy, yet the pink-ball initiative had been the work of MCC.
Then, on January 2, in another awkward moment for those who believe cricket's charm lies in its immutability, over 80,000 turned up in Melbourne to cheer on the two local Twenty20 franchises, only 7,500 fewer than the combined home four-day Championship attendances in 2015 of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Until late 2011, the Stars and the Renegades had been nothing more than a twinkle in the marketing executive's eye, yet the Big Bash has already moved into ninth place in the list of the world's most-watched sporting leagues, not far behind Spanish football's long-established La Liga. There are lessons here, and they will determine cricket's future. If that sounds like a familiar warning, then the truth is that the sport is changing more quickly than ever - so quickly that it has little time to work out where it's going, let alone how to get there. Cricket is "here today, in next week tomorrow", to quote Mr Toad. Keeping up is half the trick.
The ICC appear to have few doubts, since they want their sport to become "the world's favourite" (which may come as a surprise to football). Yet they have equivocated over cricket's presence at the Olympics, and contracted the World Cup. Rugby, by contrast, will appear at the Rio Games in the seven-aside format, and reaped the rewards of its broader horizons when Japan beat South Africa at their own World Cup in September - a story that resonated beyond the back pages.
Even the pink-ball Test was approached with caution, the build-up characterised by the kind of anguish - the ball may misbehave, the statistics shouldn't count, lunch cannot be taken at tea - that too often passes as concern for the game's integrity. In the event, one of cricket's most traditional venues witnessed an arresting blend of old and new: pink and green, whites and floodlights, a technicolour sunset that didn't require photoshop. And it all happened at a time of day/night when families were free to attend. The limitedovers formats realised this a while back, and it was hammered home repeatedly during the winter, when a flick of the TV remote revealed full houses for all manner of domestic 20-over games, and empty seats at too many Tests. It was like trading a rave for a library.
To which the defiant response may well be: "What's wrong with that?" But the era of taking pride in Test cricket's exclusivity is over. These days crowds gather for Test matches only on special occasions. Otherwise, they stay away. The risk is that more players will start to emulate their West Indian colleagues and stay away too. Even de Villiers, speaking before the match in January which marked his long-awaited ascent to South Africa's Test captaincy, already seemed to be looking forward to a breather - though not from the IPL, where he is thought to earn about ten times as much as he does from his central contract.
Day/night Test cricket must be given a chance, even in countries where we're continually told it can't work. If English crowds can sit through chilly
floodlit one-dayers in September, why can't they cope in June, July and August? The ECB chairman Colin Graves is open to the idea, and so are the Test-match counties. And if it takes off everywhere, boards can use the extra revenue to prove to their stars that they needn't become soulless freelancers, forever scouring the globe for their next fix.
The relevance is all
Quiz question: how many international games in 2015 counted for nothing beyond pride? If the definition is games which couldn't affect the outcome of a bilateral series, the answer is 18, of which five occurred in the 11 Test series (of at least three games) that either finished or started in the calendar year. And the new year began as the old ended, with Australia taking a 3-0 lead over India in their five-match one-day series, and India retaliating with a 2-0 lead in the three-match Twenty20 series.
Walkovers happen, but cricket would benefit if they didn't happen in a vacuum. A former Wisden editor, Matthew Engel, devised an easy-to-grasp Test championship, which gave rise to the ICC's own version, based on a wellmeaning formula no one can understand. Yet last summer's women's Ashes provided a glimpse of a solution, already suggested elsewhere for the good reason that it makes sense: hand out points for every win on a bilateral tour (say, six for a Test, three for a one-day international and two for a Twenty20), tot them up, then award three to the overall winner, or one each in case of a draw. England against Australia (the men's version) would have resulted in a 26-21 home win, with England taking their three points into a league table in which every Full Member play every other over four years, home and away, to determine an overall world champion. And the second Twenty20 between South Africa and England at Johannesburg on February 21, the final game of the tour, would have determined its outcome. South Africa won the game, which under this system would have earned them a 19-18 victory. Rather than fade away, England might have kept going until the end.
The system could operate within the formats as well, so that Associate teams who have official status in one of the limited-overs versions, but can't play Test cricket, can challenge for their leagues. This wouldn't eliminate dead games altogether, but it might make the difference between losing a Test series 3-0 or 2-1 significant enough to focus minds: 18-0 compared with 12-6. The lure of corruption would also be reduced. Cricket is crying out for a wider context that appeals to the floating fan. This could be a start.
Now or never
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No one seemed sure quite how offended to be when not a single member of England's Ashes-winning team made the 12-strong shortlist for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year award. One thing was clear: the four cricketers to have won the gong - Jim Laker (1956), David Steele (1975), Ian Botham (1981) and Andrew Flintoff (2005) - all attested to the fact that, when Australia are in town, cricket invades the national psyche. Not this time. Perhaps the public have got used to England beating them. But when Root's batting or Broad's bowling can't make the top dozen, something is amiss. Since England's home internationals will be hidden away on satellite TV until 2019 and almost certainly beyond, it's time for a terrestrial channel to step in and offer to cover the domestic game. And since that domestic game has to grab the attention of a generation who have never - if their parents don't own Sky - experienced the thrill of stumbling across the cricket on an idle afternoon, this means a franchise Twenty20 tournament.
Most of the counties don't want it, of course, just as many of them didn't want Twenty20 when it was narrowly voted through more than a decade ago. Neither did they welcome the franchise proposal mooted by MCC and Surrey in 2008. Had they done so, they might not now be watching Australia's Big Bash with such envy - or wondering why every other nation has developed a domestic Twenty20 tournament that packs a more powerful punch than their own.
The ECB are rightly concerned by the counties' grip on the game. The fear is that cricket will fade into obscurity if something isn't done to court new
fans. Given the talent on show in the England team at the moment, that would be a scandal. But the ECB can help too. When Surrey asked if they could digitally broadcast home matches not on Sky, the ECB said no. Similarly, the free online coverage of Nottinghamshire's home Championship matches has to stop when Sky are televising another domestic game. This is monopolism gone mad. But if counties continue to pander to their mainly traditionalist members - Twenty20, remember, was never about preaching to the converted - the very last chance for a franchise competition to help bankroll the four-day stuff may disappear for good.
Fleshing out the problem
A chat with one of the very few female journalists in the Lord's media centre last summer was interrupted when a former Test star passed behind her, pinched her bottom, and disappeared without a word. Was she OK? A shrug. "It's just the way he is." During England's limited-overs series in the UAE in November, play kept stopping because people were walking in front of the sightscreen. After the third instance in quick succession, TV identified the miscreant, a young blonde cheerleader. The commentator considered how best to exploit this gift, then drooled: "I think she'll be forgiven." And whenever there was female flesh to be found among the spectators during England's tour of South Africa, the camera found it. Ladies, if your thigh or cleavage was not broadcast from the grassy banks of Kingsmead or Newlands in 2015-16, you probably weren't there.
So when Chris Gayle asked Channel Ten's Mel McLaughlin out for a drink during the Big Bash while she was trying to interview him live on air, the line he was crossing probably didn't feel like a line at all. Gayle even had the good manners ("Don't blush, baby") to check she wasn't making a spectacle of herself. Back in 2014 at the Caribbean Premier League, he had been asked by a female journalist how the pitch felt, an innocuous question replete in the Gayle mind with possibilities. "Well, I haven't touched yours yet," he replied, "so I don't know how it feels." A CPL spokesman helpfully clarified what he had really meant: "Chris is excited for the tournament and was having a laugh with a journalist, who had a laugh back; there was no malice intended."
The absence of malice seems to be the yardstick by which cricket gauges its treatment of women, yet the reaction to Gayle's belittling of McLaughlin suggested all is not lost. Not everyone on Twitter got it (one respondent pointed out that it wasn't as if he had given her cancer). But Melbourne Renegades fined Gayle, and Andrew Flintoff said he had made himself look "a bit of a chop", which is quite an insult in Preston.
In one sense, Gayle was right to be taken aback by the outrage: he was merely fulfilling a role ascribed to him by domestic Twenty20 tournaments
everywhere, hamming it up and trowelling on the charm. As he himself put it, with typical self-effacement: "I build leagues around the world." But even if cricket's problem is also society's, McLaughlin's discomfort ought to be cricket's. As another female journalist explained, two useful skills in maledominated press boxes are "evade" and "deflect". It needn't be like this. And, no, mate: it really isn't just banter.
Good night, everyone
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Banter was not for Richie Benaud. Instead, there were two measures of his unique place in cricket commentary. The first was the number of colleagues who, following his death, said how often they tried to bear in mind his dictum about speaking only when you can add to the picture. The second was the number of colleagues who actually managed to put his dictum into practice.
For it was easier said - or, in Benaud's case, not said - than done. This is where cricket will miss him. Not because he always made for great TV: viewers often longed to know what he really thought, and his perennial irritation about the front-foot no-ball law proved he could do trenchant opinion. It will miss him because his pithiness balanced out the tactic of talking more and more about less and less until everything has been said about nothing.
Benaud has gone now, and with him his pact with the cricket-watching public, who are a lot brighter than most commentators evidently imagine. The phantom fifty Wisden called it "the most heroic nine not out in history". When Alec Stewart was left unbeaten after the abandonment of the 1997-98 Kingston Test because of a dangerous pitch, there was no question he had earned his runs and red ink.
Mike Atherton, Mark Butcher and Nasser Hussain - with three runs between them that morning - may not have shared his pride. But it would have been an insult to everyone to have pretended the game never happened. The same went for the abandoned Test at North Sound, Antigua, in 2008-09, when Andrew Strauss was grateful for his unbeaten six, and Cook for his one not out. Then there was the strange case last October of the New Zealanders' tour game at Sydney's Blacktown International Sportspark being halted after the Cricket Australia XI's openers had put on 503, again because of an unsafe pitch (imagine what they might have scored on a belter).
So the decision by the ECB's Cricket Discipline Commission to expunge from the records the 50-over game between Glamorgan and Hampshire at
Cardiff in August because of threat to life and limb was not just nonsensical - it was without precedent. Wisden feels obliged to respect the ruling; the
alternative would be statistical anarchy. But it does so with apologies to Glamorgan's Colin Ingram, who could have sworn he had made a painstaking
86-ball 51, and must now wonder why he bothered.
What's yours?
Collectors of cricket press releases may have been taken aback to read of the resignation of the "Castle Lager Proteas" Test captain in January. Had the ICC relented, and allowed another nation to join the fold? No: this was what the South African national side call themselves these days. Still, they may be thankful they are not Western Australia, who now rejoice in the name "Alcohol. Think Again Western Warriors". That full stop is crucial: it gives you all the time you need to break out into a cold sweat - and reach for a restorative beer.
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