Tabla de contenidos para Issue 76 en Wisden Cricket Monthly

And so to the Tolerance Oval, with history in the air, for the closing stages of Afghanistan v Ireland. Welcome to Test cricket’s newest plot of land – considered one of Abu Dhabi’s very best alternatives for those occasions when, say, you need to move a Test match because a local school has booked the main pitch for its sports day. The Tolerance claims to hold up to 12,000 fans, but let’s not dwell on that. Ireland are four down and almost there. It’s still turning – they were 13-3 at one stage, still 98 shy – but Andy Balbirnie is dead-batting his way down the last. Afghanistan’s brilliant teenage quick, Naveed Zadran, has blown out, Ziaur-Rehman’s very tidy left-arm slows have been blunted, and Niall O’Brien has long since…

Author, publisher and founder of Fairfield Books Mike Procter could have been an all-time great of Test cricket. Bowling at speed in his seven Tests, all against Australia, he took 41 wickets at a breathtaking average of 15, and he had a second string of effective off-breaks. As a batter, one of only three men alongside CB Fry and Don Bradman to score six successive first-class centuries, he could turn a match with his powerful, classical hitting. Yet, after the age of 23, with South Africa excluded, he played no Test cricket. Apart from the two seasons of Kerry Packer’s World Series, his stage was the domestic game: in South Africa and England. Some of his contemporaries became infected by bitterness, not always able to motivate themselves for what seemed…

DIVISION ONE Durham CAPTAIN: Scott Borthwick HEAD COACH: Ryan Campbell LAST YEAR: 1st in Division Two IN: Colin Ackermann, Callum Parkinson (both Leics) OUT: Liam Trevaskis (Leics), Harry Cranshaw, Luke Doneathy, Ross Whitfield (all released), Tom Mackintosh (retired) OVERSEAS: David Bedingham (SA), Scott Boland (Aus) KEY PLAYER: Alex Lees – the burly left-handed opener bossed 7 Number of Durham players who averaged 50-plus with the bat last year Division Two last summer, striking at 76 and finishing as the Championship’s leading runscorer. In doing so he set the tone for Durham’s aggressive style that brought them seven wins and a return to the top tier for the first time since 2016. The question is whether Lees can maintain that fluidity against higher quality attacks, something he failed to do with…

Son of Jamaica I grew up in a small town on the north coast of Jamaica, a place called Port Maria. Back then, it was six months football, six months cricket. My dad’s side of the family were cricket mad and Dad played a bit. There was a concrete strip in the backyard and we had kids on the road my age, so we played together. I started playing competitively in primary school. That section of Jamaica has a very strong history and culture of age-group cricket at school level, so I started playing in front of pretty big crowds when I was a kid because the whole town would come and watch us play in school competitions. The first trip to Sabina Park My dad took me to watch…

Iget quite nervous, so I focus on my breathing. I try to be aware of what my body is doing as I walk out to bat, and just try to relax as much as possible. I try not to think about it too much. Sometimes I’m like: “I’m going to open for England and it’s such a big thing.” In the past I’ve made it a big thing for myself, putting a lot of expectation on myself to do well. The trick is to tell yourself that it’s just another game of cricket. And it’s about realising that and being aware of it and being able to ground yourself in that moment. That way I might actually enjoy it! In a run-chase my targets don’t involve numbers. I don’t think…

Ifind something fresh to interest me nearly every day. Last year I was searching through a file of letters sent to Arthur Langford, who was in all but name editor of The Cricketer magazine for many years, when I came across a most intriguing postcard. It was sent to Langford by a Lt DE Young from a prisonerof-war camp in Germany in March 1943. I established that this was Douglas Young [below left], who had played for Oxford University before the war, taking 50 wickets with his leg-breaks. He became a schoolmaster after the war, a strict disciplinarian who taught languages (though not, it seems, German) at Wellington College and played for Surrey 2nd XI and Berkshire. His postcard reads: “Many thanks for the Cricketers which you sent me which…

1. Yashasvi Jaiswal India The 22-year-old retains his place from last month after a spectacular maiden home Test series. Jaiswal followed his double-hundred at Vizag with a sumptuous unbeaten 214 to put the hosts out of sight at Rajkot before making half-centuries in the fourth and fifth Tests as India turned the screw on England. His tally of 26 sixes across the series is an all-time record, surpassing the previous best of 19 by the next man in our XI. 2. Rohit Sharma India Criticised for conservative captaincy and poor shot selection in India’s shock defeat at Hyderabad, Rohit led from the front as his team fought back to defeat England 4-1, hitting first-innings hundreds at Rajkot and Dharamsala to set the tone in comprehensive victories and in the process…

An alternative prize will be provided if the winner is aged under 18, or if requested *Only available to UK residents LETTER OF THE MONTH David v Goliath As England prepare to play Test matches against West Indies and Sri Lanka, I feel it is a shame that visiting national teams no longer play first-class matches against the English counties. Those matches sometimes ended with surprising and delightful results, which I am sure many of your readers will remember with great glee. For example, in 1996 Derbyshire beat India by 10 wickets at Derby, and in 2001 Hampshire beat Australia by two wickets at the Rose Bowl. Going back further in time, the immensely powerful Australian team of 1930 played a thrilling match against Gloucestershire at Bristol which incredibly ended…

It’s not worth writing about Zak Crawley from a distance, swapping notes over there with the bloodless. He’ll always be a first-person kind of player, all pure, fragile talent of the kind that draws you in so close that the peripheral stuff – the state of the game, who’s at the other end, what happens next – gets lost in the pistol crack of the moment. An hour in his company at the crease is never dull. He’s a weird mix of easy, fluid casualness and neurotic hyper-urgency, like a languid concert cellist forever on the verge of twanging a string. Even during the bad times, of which there were loads, he still failed compellingly. It was always, always a talking point. Crawley nick off again, did he? See that…

THE GREAT... Another Ashes tour on the horizon, another act of complacency from England. Alec Bedser and Trevor Bailey were both rested for this final match against a Pakistan side in only their second series as a Test-playing nation. England had picked their party forAustralia so in came Northamptonshire’s FrankTyson for his debut. He was already considered perhaps the fastest bowler in the world “but he looks more like a preoccupied scientist”, said the Daily Mirror. The ‘Typhoon’ took wickets with his 15th and 16th balls in Test cricket. Abdul Hafeez Kardar’s side had been in England for more than three months and were ready for home. They’d lost only two of their 24 first-class matches, but it had been a terrible summer with seven of 16 days’ Test cricket…

West Indies were upset in more ways than one. The world’s best team arrived in New Zealand from Australia with more than $140,000 in prize money. “We got carried away thinking we were God’s children,” admitted Michael Holding in Fire in Babylon. “We’ll walk this.” The absence of Viv Richards, who had returned home with hip and back problems, should not have been felt too keenly. The Kiwis had won only three Tests in the whole of the 1970s but they did have Richard Hadlee, and the great seamer took five wickets in a West Indies first innings of 140. The home side then built a first-innings lead of 109 despite taking a “physical hammering”, according to Wisden. Already unimpressed with the cold weather and the sausages-and-beans lunches, West Indies…

From the moment Azeem Rafiq first spoke publicly about racism at Yorkshire to this magazine in 2020, there have been revelations, headlines and soul-searching. Inevitably the focus has been on the county club. But, as this is ultimately about our society, it certainly affects non-professional cricket too. While significant steps continue to be made, there is so much still to do when it comes to equity, diversity and inclusion in our game. It would be easy to distil Yorkshire cricket into a tainted, unedifying mess, but it’s more complex than that and there are many reasons to marvel at the game here. Part of that complexity is down to sheer numbers. There are over 800 recreational cricket clubs spread across Yorkshire, each of them playing weekly, equating to around 125,000…

THE CORE WORKOUT Three sets of: Front plank – 60 seconds Side plank (left) – 60 seconds Side plank (right) – 60 seconds Russian twists – 8-16 reps Ifeel like I’ve always had a bit of pace. I’ve obviously got height as well which helps, but there’s stuff you can work on within your action to make you quicker. Your momentum needs to be heading towards the target. I used to be quite out of time with my gather. My arms and my legs weren’t coordinated at all. As a result, I was almost falling backwards because everything landed wrong. I worked on it with Jack Brooks [Somerset seamer turned coach]. We used poles to create the channel of where I was going to run. We made it as tight…

Archives Liberation Front, AU$55 Does Australian cricket have a puritanical streak? Does the country itself? It’s a place built on the principle of a fair go, one that eulogises its ‘battlers’ both on the field of play and in the economy. Is there an innate, small-c conservatism hidden within this broad-brush love of simple mateship and workaday life? I write this soon after Australia beat New Zealand at Christchurch by chasing 281 with three wickets in hand, when Alex Carey was left unbeaten on 98 as captain Pat Cummins hit the winning runs. “I had no idea he was on 98,” said the man who was presumably looking closely at the scoreboard of the man who had been batting out there all day. This balance, entirely on team over individual,…

Second Test, Hagley Oval, Christchurch, March 8-11 New Zealand 162 (Latham 38; Hazlewood 5-31, Starc 3-59) & 372 (Ravindra 82, Latham 73, Mitchell 58, Williamson 51; Cummins 4-62, Lyon 3-49) v Australia 256 (Labuschagne 90; Henry 7-67) & 281-7 (Carey 98*, Marsh 80; Sears 4-90) Australia won by three wickets Josh Hazlewood finds Daryl Mitchell’s edge and Alex Carey pouches his eighth of 10 catches in the match on day three of a pulsating encounter in Christchurch. Having set Australia 279 for victory and reduced their opponents to 80-5, New Zealand are seemingly on course to claim their first home Test victory over their Trans-Tasman rivals since 1993. However, a 120-run sixth-wicket stand between Carey and Mitch Marsh drags Australia back into the game before Carey and his captain Pat…

Former England batter and current Middlesex batting coach @MarkRamprakash Ican still vividly remember my first encounter with Jimmy Anderson. It was 2002, a County Championship match between Lancashire and Surrey at Old Trafford, and a 19-year-old Anderson was making his first-class debut. The pitch had a bit of pace and carry in it and I’d seen off the opening bowlers when this young kid came on to bowl. He ran in hard, had a quick arm, and the first ball he bowled to me whizzed past my off stump. It was fortunate for me it wasn’t straight. I didn’t face many more deliveries from him before I was run out, but it was clear that he had the energy and uninhibited freedom that you love to see in young fast…

ISSUE 76 Is that it then? Is that really all India and England have to offer? Not in terms of the on-field action, which broadly lived up to the billing, but everything else. These were the teams that gave us the jelly beans incident, that employed the best QCs in the land to argue over who had started a corridor kerfuffle between James Anderson and Ravindra Jadeja. Now all they can muster is some podcast sledging, grumbling about Hawk-Eye, and a few press conference potshots about who invented attacking batting. Really, they should be taking their lead from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, a rivalry borne purely out of cricketing animosity. They don’t like each other much, and, gloriously, they aren’t afraid to make that abundantly clear, trading inflammatory Naagin dances,…

England v Australia England win by six wickets Worcester, Second Test August 24-27, 2005 “I think many people thought we were the wives and girlfriends but never mind!” chuckled Clare Connor, the England Women’s captain who led the side to their first Test series win overAustralia for42 years. The victory was secured only a fortnight before the men’s triumph at The Oval. An open-top bus parade ensued with the men leading the way in one red double-decker and the women following behind, hence Connor’s quip. “It was an incredible day – I’d played for England for 10 years and never beaten Australia,” she added. England escaped with a draw in the first Test at Hove, thanks to an unbeaten century from Arran Brindle. At Worcester, the hero was a youngster…

English cricket was on the defensive. They’d been thrashed in the Ashes the previous summer and rebel tourists were returning to Heathrow from South Africa with tails between legs and the howls of anti-apartheid protesters in their ears. In the Caribbean, Graham Gooch’s side were bracing themselves for another grilling. England hadn’t won a Test against West Indies for 16 years. By contrast, the Windies hadn’t lost a home series since 1973 and lost only one of their last 32 home Tests. England packed the batting, with Nasser Hussain at six for his debut and all-rounder David Capel at seven. “We are up against the best side in the world,” said manager Micky Stewart. But his counterpart Clive Lloyd cautioned: “Many people are under-rating this England side.” England lost the…

Regular readers of my 2023 column may be surprised to learn of my decision to run directly into rather than away from the fire that is recreational cricket administrative responsibility. I have already worked out that as a club with three league sides competing in 18-game seasons we need 594 instances of amateur cricketers willingly giving up their Saturdays for the greater good (promotion up the Surrey Championship pyramid). A summer of desperate last-minute messages awaits. there’s an opportunity to be more than a caretaker captain – the ingredients are there to form a core of players who will be around for several summers. Even more irresistible, though, is the allure of on-field captaincy, an experience I have only had four times in my life. A huge part of the…

2. THE CRICKET MATCH BY HUGH DE SELINCOURT (1924) Acentury after Mary Russell Mitford published her short story ‘A Country Cricket-Match’, Hugh de Selincourt published a short novel with a similarly simple title. JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan and bowler of very slow left-arm, described it as “the best story about cricket or any other game that has ever been written”. A reader coming to The Cricket Match another hundred years on may at first find this judgement both Anglocentric and eccentric. The dialogue now seems almost comically quaint. The posher members of the home village team say things like: “Oh, rather!”, “Confound the chap!”, “Oh Lord! What’s it matter if the old darling does take a nought?” The yokel players pipe up with: “What ho!”, “Oh, drat the…