Notes by the editor
The warning signs were there. At the England awards dinner in the Long Room in June, a TV montage pussyfooted around the previous 12 months. The women cricketers featured prominently, which was just as well: from the men's efforts a few months earlier in Australia, there were only two snippets. And they did not quite tell the whole story - Stuart Broad celebrating his Brisbane five-for, Ben Stokes en route to his century at Perth. England had taken a leaf out of Australia's book: this was an Ashes whitewash.
Had it been a one-coat attempt to tart things up at the start of a new era, the ECB might have deserved some sympathy. Who in that room didn't want to move on from the 5-0? But in 2014 English cricket repeatedly lost touch - not just with things it wished had never happened, but with the basic idea that the national team belongs to us all.
A few wins might have deflected attention from a charge sheet that would include the mishandling of the Kevin Pietersen affair, worrying Test attendances outside London, a head-in-the-sand attitude to the one-day team, and - not yet a decade after the 2005 Ashes had presented English cricket with a golden chance to attract a new generation to the sport - a fall in the number of recreational players, of which more later.
But the wins were too few. Starting with the drubbing in Australia, England lost eight full series out of ten across the formats in 2014, to say nothing of their defeat by the Netherlands at the World Twenty20. In all, they lost 28 games. Only once had this been surpassed in a calendar year by one of the eight major teams - the dysfunctional 2010 Pakistanis. England's 15 victories did include three in a row during a heartening Test comeback against India. But, in a single year, their win/loss deficit had never been as high as 13. And the only three Full Members they didn't lose at least one game to were the only three they didn't play: Pakistan, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.
Then, with weeks to go before a World Cup for which they had supposedly been planning since 2011, the ECB sacked Alastair Cook as one-day captain - the correct decision, but several months too late. Peter Moores, one of those party to the move (and, to add to the air of chaos, England's third coach of the year) had just been explaining why Cook should stay. Now, he claimed his axing was "the right thing to do". It hardly oozed conviction.
On the whole, the power brokers indulged in mutual backslapping. National selector James Whitaker had called Cook "our exceptional leader"; Paul Downton, the ECB's new managing director, hailed Moores as the "outstanding coach of his generation"; chairman Giles Clarke trumpeted Downton as a "man of great judgment". It was a nexus of self-preservation - yet, as the wagons circled, the wheels kept threatening to come off.
To leave the sacking of Cook so late made little sense. Had he stepped down in August after the 3-1 Test win over India, he could have done so with his post-Ashes reputation partly restored. This would have allowed him to gather his strength for a ludicrous run of 17 Tests in less than ten months, starting in Great Optimism in Antigua in April 2015 and ending in Near Exhaustion in South Africa in January 2016. (As someone pointed out, 17 Tests are almost a third of Don Bradman's career.)
Trouble was, Cook had become more than just a cricketer: cast by his employers in the role of latter-day saint to Pietersen's fallen angel, he was now an article of faith. Clarke even suggested the Cooks were "very much the sort of people we want the England captain and his family to be", which was all well and good but couldn't stop him edging behind. Downton, Whitaker and Moores were all bound up with his fate: Cook had to succeed, as much for others as for himself. It was an intolerable position.
Few disputed his potential value to the Test side, and the dignity he showed under fire as England lost to Sri Lanka, then fell behind against India, was one of the most impressively stoical features of the summer. But five one-dayers against India and seven in Sri Lanka should have been Eoin Morgan's chance to learn the ropes. Instead, Cook floundered, not waving but drowning. By the end of two series defeats - as heavy as they were predictable - he had not scored an international hundred in 59 innings. There was no spinning that. This was a pity, because there were reasons to be cheerful. At No. 3, Gary Ballance was an instant hit, Moeen Ali made an entrance, and Joe Root rediscovered his touch in the middle order. Some of Jimmy Anderson's spells were bewitching. But England overplayed their hand: the Test win over a supine India did not mean Cook would effect a similar transformation of the one-day side. This seemed obvious to everyone - except to the men who run the game.
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Needless to say, Pietersen didn't get so much as a namecheck that evening in the Long Room. It's true that, ever since his sacking at the start of the year, he had been behaving like a jilted pantomime dame. But his England record 13,779 international runs did not warrant their airbrushing. A brief thank you at the dinner would have been sensible: Pietersen v England was now playing out on an almost daily basis in the court of public opinion.
The ECB appeared petty. Their comments on the fallout with Pietersen should have been clear and concise: if you're widely regarded as a pain, it helps if you're scoring lots more runs than anyone else. Instead, England botched the PR battle. They hinted that some darker truth about his behaviour would emerge once a confidentiality agreement expired in October. Yet the lull merely prolonged the fiasco. And, when the dirt failed to materialise, the ECB looked rudderless; worse, in the eyes of those agitating for an explanation, they looked indifferent.
Even the ICC appeared to be laughing: by the end of the Sri Lanka series, and five months after his last game, Pietersen was ranked England's best Test batsman. It was typical of a story beyond the ECB's control that their best moment was not of their own making. Having searched in vain for the words that justified his sacking, they were gifted a 324-page solution: an autobiography so full of rancour that BBC chat-show host Graham Norton suggested to Pietersen, "Maybe, just maybe, team sport's not for you…"
Thereafter, the ECB simply had to sit back and watch him display the lack of self-awareness that had contributed to his downfall in the first place. When Whitaker and Downton confirmed there would be no rapprochement, Pietersen described their remarks as "disrespectful" - having spent many pages of his book calling many people many names. Early in 2015 he was at it again, referring to "all the muppets" on low wages in county cricket, perhaps forgetting he had once been one himself.
All the while, he kept insisting how happy he was in the land of Twenty20 franchises - and agitating for an international recall. The whole thing would have been sad, if it hadn't been so absurd.
Skyfall
In November, the results of the ECB's own National Playing Survey revealed that fewer people played the game at recreational level in 2014 than a year before. The 7% drop - from 908,000 to 844,000 - looked even worse when you considered that 192,000 were classed as "cameo" players. This did not, alas, mean a glut of less-gifted David Gowers: to qualify as a cameo player, you had to have participated in one or two weeks of a season defined as 26.
A further 405,000 were deemed "occasional" - between three and 11 weeks. Now was not the moment to be losing from the international stage a player who might have persuaded youngsters to try out their flamingo shots or switch hits in the park.
That's assuming they'd have been able to watch Pietersen at all. The fall in numbers - the equivalent of 5,818 playing XIs, or 223 teams a week throughout the summer - did not nullify the ECB's claim that their deal with Sky had brought more money into the sport, nor the work that money has enabled the board to do, especially in women's and disability cricket. But the maths queried the claim's relevance. And it's why the news of the extension of the Sky deal to 2019 was met with quiet despair, both among those unable to afford a satellite dish and those who fear for the game's future.
To focus on the excellence of Sky's coverage is to deliberately miss the point. And, while the ECB are correct to say that terrestrial channels have failed to bid for rights, they must have known that would always be the case when they lobbied to have Test cricket removed from the list of sporting events guaranteed to be available to all. The ECB chased the money and have cut their cloth accordingly. To hear them scaremonger about the financial cost of a return to the BBC or Channel 4 is to wonder how cricket ever got by in the first place.
Both board and broadcaster would win brownie points if - to repeat last year's suggestion in these pages - Sky gave away just a little live action on its free channel, Pick. Highlights, with their lack of tension and their appeal to the converted, go only so far. Cricket needs to be able to attract passing trade. It's not fair to put all the blame on the ECB and Sky: cricket in England these days is regarded as a luxury in a busy world, and dads (men make up 93% of the 844,000 still playing) are less inclined to spend time away from their families. Then there's the elephant in the classroom: the decline of cricket in our state schools, despite the work of the Chance to Shine charity and others.
No amount of TV money can forestall social change. At least the ECB showed they hadn't lost their sense of humour: they partly blamed the weather. But the hubbub around the Big Bash at the start of 2015, broadcast in Australia on free-to-air television, was a reminder of a basic truth. Give people the chance to tune into live cricket, and it has a fighting chance of entering the national debate. Ten years on from the greatest Test series of the lot - broadcast by Channel 4 - cricket is loitering at the edges of the conversation. If you can remember the celebrations in Trafalgar Square, be sure to tell your grandchildren.
Hang on! What's this?
In January this year, the ECB and Sky joined forces to flag up the rather different findings of a separate piece of research. Sport England's Active People Survey claimed a 12% year-on-year increase in the number of people aged 16 or over who had played cricket (by which they meant for at least half an hour on at least four days of the previous four weeks).
Not that the good news bore much scrutiny. The 167,200 respondents who fulfilled the criteria up to October 2014 did indeed represent an improvement on the preceding 12 months. But it was fewer than 2011-12 (183,400) and even fewer than 2010-11 (215,500). In other words, the year-on-year rise was part of a three-year fall of 22%.
Such wild fluctuations indicate the findings should be treated with caution: the ECB's own survey, which factored in data gathered from 1.2m scorecards, was far more rigorous. But, if you exploit a story, don't expect it to go unchallenged.
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The demise of Pietersen demanded a box-office replacement or two, and at times England's conservatism was maddening. Jos Buttler's 121 off 74 balls in a one-day international against Sri Lanka prompted not unmitigated admiration, but a caution from his captain that he wasn't ready for Test cricket.
And the reluctance to pick Alex Hales in the 50-over side after his unbeaten 116 off 64 against the Sri Lankans during the World Twenty20 did little for his confidence when he finally got a crack. Had Ranjitsinhji been around today, he'd probably have been told to go easy on the leg-glance. What were England scared of? Happily, Moeen Ali remained uninfected, nearly saving a Test at Headingley by himself, stunning India with his offspin, and charming his way to a 72-ball hundred in Colombo. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive when an England batsman used his feet in Asia!
When the decision to put Ali on the cover of this book popped up on social media in January, one or two inferred tokenism, which was an insult both to the man himself and to the contribution of British Asians to the English game. The 2011 census measured the South Asian community at 7%of the population. Last year's ECB survey found that 30% of our grassroots cricketers are from ethnic minorities, mostly Asian; others believe the figure is higher. Yet, at firstclass level, it shrinks to around 6%.
If the England team really want to unlock their full potential, it is perverse to be so reliant on (white) southern Africans and smash-and-grab raids across the Irish Sea, and so ignore the more natural solution on our doorstep. It will require work: many young British Asians do not regard cricket as a proper career, and some clubs - especially in Yorkshire - insist they are already doing their bit, that integration has to be a mutual process.
There remains, however, a damaging perception among Britain's South Asian communities that their best young cricketers are not wanted. No doubt there have been instances of prejudice. But the fair-mindedness of the vast majority of clubs needs to be conveyed to aspiring Anglo-Asian cricketers, too many of whom take refuge in informal, Asian-only leagues, unseen and ignored by the Establishment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of these youngsters do not know how to join the mainstream.
The ECB have woken up to the problem. Those with inside knowledge of the British-Asian cricket scene say direct marketing is key: clubs and academies need to bombard their local schools with information, while county sides could tailor their Twenty20 marketing around an Asian star (here, then, with our domestic Twenty20 tournament meandering towards irrelevance, is a possible solution). And on a boozy night in Chelmsford, say, a quieter family enclosure might help.
Most importantly, we need individuals. It cannot all depend on Moeen Ali. The fact that he was jeered in his native Birmingham by fellow British Asians was a reminder that role models can be elusive, for all sorts of reasons. But the English game needs an Asian player to prosper beyond a few Tests here and there. Too many of England's Asian cricketers have fallen by the wayside. Only once their impact at international level lives up to the grass roots demographics can the sport claim to be truly representative.
Fractured, yet together
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Maybe England is just less of a cricket country than Australia. The grief on the streets of Macksville following the death in November of Phillip Hughes would have been harder to imagine had the same fate befallen an English cricketer on the fringes of the Test team. His loss hurt Australia for reasons that went beyond the immediate tragedy of a young man dying in full view while doing what he loved. He was a terra firma cricketer of the kind treasured by Australians, the country boy cheered all the way from the backyard to the big smoke; English cricket once had a similar storyline, but the coal mines and their fast bowlers are gone.
Hughes made his compatriots feel the Test dressing-room was within their reach. His death left cricket feeling grievously fractured, yet - by touching everyone - reassuringly together. Were there lessons to be drawn? Perhaps only that cricket, more than most games, regards reality as an intrusion. Players talk reverentially of perspective, as if the misfortune of others has convinced them of the triviality of sport. Yet it rarely lasts long: a fortnight after Hughes died, David Warner, Virat Kohli and Shikhar Dhawan were all fined for a squabble during the Adelaide Test.
Bickering continued throughout the Australia-India series. There was no doubting Michael Clarke's sincerity when he urged cricket to "listen to" and "cherish" his friend's spirit. But it's not being disrespectful to point out that the normal rhythms quickly return. It's the reason Hughes was mourned so widely: the blow was mortal - and cricket's treasured sense of innocence felt it too.
Do as we say, not as we do
The West Indians' decision to abort their tour of India in October, with five internationals - including a three-Test series - still to play, was not as shocking as it should have been. Caribbean cricket has been a mess for years: sooner or later they really were going to take their bats and balls home - and to hell with the consequences.
Yet what followed said much about cricket's new global politics. One of the scariest aspects of the ICC takeover at the start of 2014 by India, England and Australia had been the rubber-stamping of a system of governance containing even fewer checks and balances than before - unless you were one of the three who could choose when and how to be checked and balanced. (Answer: not often and not easily.)
And so the BCCI threatened to sue the penniless WICB for £27m, and cancelled bilateral commitments, only a year after West Indies had stepped in to help India stage-manage Sachin Tendulkar's farewell. But, with the ICC sidelined and the Future Tours Programme extinct in all but name, who was going to warn India about the consequences of bankrupting a fellow Full Member, especially one as popular with the purists as West Indies?
That popularity is waning, but not everyone appreciated the irony of India's response. In 2013, they had unilaterally shortened their tour of South Africa because of the hosts' temerity in going public with the fixture list before consulting the BCCI, who also wanted to punish them for appointing a chief executive they didn't like. South African cricket lost an estimated £11.5m. But India had weight to throw around; West Indies had only the remnants of a once-great sporting empire, and that counts for nothing in the boardroom.
We should feel sorry for the Indian fans who lost out on the only Test cricket of their home season. But, when the Indian board released a statement accusing their West Indian counterparts of giving "little thought to the future of the game, the players and the long-standing relations between the BCCI and WICB", the double standards were eye-watering.
Just desserts
The leaking of minutes from an ICC executive board meeting had already made clear India's position on the "future of the game". An ICC ethics officer had reminded everyone that members were obliged to act in the best interests of cricket - a point so uncontentious it should never have needed stating. But among those present was Narayanaswami Srinivasan, then the president of the BCCI, with fingers in other pies besides. The minutes dolefully recorded: "Mr Srinivasan explained that he did not agree with that principle, and that his position was that he was representing the BCCI."
Last June, Srinivasan was confirmed as chairman of the ICC, ostensibly the most powerful position in the governance of a global game for which his affection was, by his own admission, limited. The appointment itself was exasperating enough. Worse, it came not long after India's Supreme Court had ordered Srinivasan to step down as president of the BCCI while investigations continued into the 2013 IPL spot-fixing scandal. But cricket's administrators have their own sartorial code: if the cap doesn't fit, try a different one, safe in the knowledge that others - the ECB and Cricket Australia, mainly - will be tilting the mirror to find the most flattering angle.
Srinivasan's elevation also meant he assumed charge of the ICC's anti corruption operation, even as the Supreme Court looked into charges of impropriety at Chennai Super Kings, his IPL franchise. Examining the allegation that Srinivasan had hushed up the role played by his son-in-law - Gurunath Meiyappan, a CSK official who was found guilty of placing illegal bets on IPL games - the court said there was only a "suspicion" of a cover-up. And, for this, cricket lovers were supposed to be grateful.
The court had already described Srinivasan's refusal to step aside as "nauseating", and the BCCI as a "mutual benefit society". Then, in January 2015, like a weary parent explaining to a toddler that the choice is jelly or ice cream but not both, the judges told him he could not head up the BCCI and own an IPL franchise, a possibility that arose only after Srinivasan had helped amend the BCCI's constitution in 2008. Asked repeatedly about this conflict of interest, Srinivasan adopted another childish tactic: deny everything.
Yet cricket was getting what it deserved: the non-Big Three countries had been willing to suspend judgment on Srinivasan by voting in favour of the takeover after the promise of inducements, chiefly a little political influence and money-spinning visits by India. Bangladesh's Mustafa Kamal, the new ICC president, summed up the dynamism in the corridors of power: "The president's title is really good for me. It is an ornamental post. I will speak in conferences, give awards in tournaments and chair the ICC's annual conference.
Then, after my time is up, I will hand it over to the next president." Only if it's not too much trouble, Mr Kamal. The Supreme Court's ruling spelt out what should have been perfectly clear all along: the BCCI perform a public function, and were obliged to "send a clear and emphatic message that dishonesty in cricket will not be tolerated". It was a withering comment on the sport's ability to administer itself that India's best legal minds had to bang heads together.
All the while, India slumped to seventh in the Test rankings, three and a half years after they had been top. Yet this decline, which had taken place under Srinivasan and M. S. Dhoni, his endorsement as captain (of both India and CSK), was barely noticed. No, the headlines spawned by Indian cricket these days relate too often to the men who run the game, not those who play it.
Besides, we had already learned what the new deal really meant for world cricket. On July 1, five days after the coronations of Srinivasan and Kamal, the ICC announced that their next six global events would take place in India, England or Australia. If you live in Cape Town, Colombo or Christchurch, don't worry: with judicious use of your alarm clock, you can watch it all on TV.
Faster, higher, stronger? No thanks
Fifty years ago this July, the Imperial Cricket Conference became the International Cricket Conference when Ceylon, Fiji and the USA joined the six Test teams at high table. Now the International Cricket Council have 105 members: you wonder whether they feel like the old woman who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do.
Part of the ICC's mission statement talks of "promoting the global game". This promotion, however, does not extend to the Olympics, whose history reduces cricket to a footnote involving Great Britain and France in 1900. The debate over whether cricket can flourish outside its natural habitat is an old one. Yet when the Big Three assumed control of the ICC's purse strings, they handed market forces the final say: funding would be drastically cut to all but the best six of the non-Test nations. Good news for Afghanistan, bad news for Austria, as they rarely say at the UN.
If Twenty20 cricket were to become an Olympic sport, as rugby sevens will in Rio next year, millions of dollars of government funding would be unlocked to the national boards that need it most. For the ICC, this money and subsequent exposure would both come free. It is not too late for the 2024 Games. But the commitment among the ICC's most powerful nations to promoting the global game comes with a caveat: so long as it doesn't affect us. India fear losing control of their players' image rights, as well as any tournament that doesn't directly benefit their coffers; England don't want their summer messed with every four years.
Fine. But there are two options that do not include whipping the children soundly and sending them to bed. One, let others play without you. Two, send an Under-23 team, as per Olympic football, but allow the ICC's Associate and Affiliate nations to field full-strength sides. Above all, find a compromise. Even if you mock the idea of a Test match in Beijing, it's a curious form of leadership that stops the dream being financed by someone else.
Sweet and sour
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Whatever else 2014 was, it turned into an extraordinary year for batsmen. At times, they seemed to be playing an especially orgiastic version of Stick Cricket, all computerised mows over midwicket and 30 off the over. In November, Pakistan's Misbah-ul-Haq equalled Viv Richards by hitting a Test century off 56 balls. Later that month, Rohit Sharma made 264 in a one day international at Eden Gardens, outscoring Sri Lanka all by himself. A few weeks after that, Brendon McCullum came within a stroke of Test cricket's fastest double-century. Then, in South Africa at the start of 2015, A. B. de Villiers hit a one-day hundred off a record 31 deliveries (having reached fifty off a record 16). Crash, bang, wallop: it's Bat-man!
The sixes will keep coming, the crowds will keep roaring, and anyone querying the endless adrenalin rush will be told to get a life. Yet cricket's two most basic skills are evolving at different rates: Homo sapiens are clubbing the life out of Neanderthals. While the ball remains a humble lump of cork and leather, bat technology gets more sophisticated, batsmen are bolder and stronger; the free-hit rule punishes bowlers twice for overstepping; and, in one-day cricket, the new fielding restrictions have turned captaincy into a guessing game. Which may be the point.
But fewer youngsters will try to become bowlers: who wants a career as a sacrificial lamb? And, when they become batsmen instead, they will value strength above timing. McCullum, Gayle and de Villiers are thrilling to watch, but so is a cover-drive from Ian Bell that tantalises the fielder all the way to the fence. Sixes should provoke a frisson, not a shrug.
The danger is that elegance, perhaps the most pleasurable part of cricket's spectator experience, will die out. Make the six-hitters earn their reputation by pushing the boundaries back as far as the TV cameras will allow, and stop the sweet spot becoming saccharine by limiting the size of the bat's edge. The lawmakers say they are alive to the problem. Good: then we'll no longer need to grumble about mis-hit sixes sailing into the crowd and persuading a few more youngsters that bowling is a mug's game.
Brotherly glove
Most of us have played in matches dominated by a father and son, or a pair of sisters, and cursed the unfairness of genes. Even the best: the fall of the West Indian empire was confirmed by the Waugh twins, who put on 231 in Jamaica in 1994-95. Four Mohammad brothers (plus a son) have played for Pakistan, and three Chappells (plus a grandad) for Australia. The Headleys, of West Indies and England, spawned three generations of Test cricketers.
Sometimes the family tree can branch unexpectedly: batting against Somerset at Lord's in 1933, Middlesex opener Harry Lee was caught by brother Frank off Jack, another brother. But there can have been nothing like the Plunket Shield match at the Basin Reserve in December, when Auckland's Cachopa boys held nine catches in Wellington's first innings: five for wicketkeeper Brad (aged 26), three for Craig (22), and one for Carl (28). The dismissal of Wellington opener Brady Barnett - lbw b Quinn 6 - looked inoffensive at the time. It ended up being one of the most family-unfriendly in cricket history.
Onwards and upwards
One weekend at university, I threw myself - probably a diversionary tactic - into Anyone But England, that searingly brilliant piece of iconoclasm by Mike Marqusee, a cricket-loving American journalist and a self-confessed "deracinated New York Marxist Jew". Draw a Venn diagram, and he had the field to himself. He made the most of his good fortune. Marqusee died earlier this year, which prompted the reflection that his deconstruction of our sport had come from the heart. In an anniversary edition of his book, he praised cricket for being "so protean, so durable, so forbiddingly idiosyncratic… That is why one should never be too pessimistic about its future." The fact that this part of Wisden has been getting things off its chest for well over a century suggests he probably had a point.
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