Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2017

My 51st Wisden and what else needs to be said. A Marmite book - but I need a new one every year

It's Wisden. What more can you say?

Excellent as always

Here’s a nice coincidence; the opening fixtures of the County Championship starts the day after the new Wisden hits the shelves (or your doormat). Yes some friendlies have been played, and Kent got off to a flying start by beating Leeds/Bradford University, but a win is a win as they say, and Wisden will give you something to peruse during the lunch break, or much longer if it’s raining, and will certainly help me alleviate the forthcoming doom and gloom I’ll no doubt suffer over the next six months. To business. It’s best if you skip past pages 323 to 378, as that concentrates on England’s capitulation/disgrace/surrender/shame in India and Bangladesh. Fortunately, what you can get your teeth into is the usual high quality writing and editorial comments. As a traditionalist, I liked the article on the return of the cable-knit sweater for this season and the feature on the kiss of death for some IPL players (those traded for big money but never heard of again). Unfortunately, cricket, like most other sports, has become too money orientated, witness the ridiculous sponsoring of IPL maximums - “That six was brought to you by...” Yes cricket needs cash but it also needs television viewers, which isn’t happening. With Sky’s mind-boggling spending on football, it makes you wonder how long it can continue to invest in cricket (the company called one correspondent back from the West Indies to make him redundant). Terrestrial TV has to be involved but will the ECB, that only seem to see pound signs, listen? There are also fine pieces on two anniversaries; Test Match Special’s 60th and 25 years of Durham being a first-class county, a celebration somewhat diminished by their forced demotion. It’s good to see the women’s cricket section expanded from 21 pages last year to 38. From a purely personal point of view, I’d like to see this part further enlarged. But something would have to be removed to accommodate this. Though the number of entrants was down, the winner of the annual writing competition focused on Lancashire’s Gillette Cup semi final win in 1971; actually it focused on ‘that’ over. And that is the beauty of Wisden; it covers all aspects of the game and doesn’t fixate on one particular area. One of my favourite features are the ‘sound bite’ records within match reports. They tend to carry shoulder shrugging information such as Derbyshire’s conceding of a double hundred in three successive Championship matches being only the fourth instance, but they’re fun all the same. Distressingly, when you look at attendances it makes you wonder how some counties survive. Derbyshire averaged 330 spectators per day’s play in the County Championship whilst Middlesex boasted 2,394, though much of that can be attributed to the final game of the season when more than 21,000 attended over four days. Sixteen pages of colour photos including an action shot of pin-up Ellyse Perry and a rather scary one of ten boys playing on a rooftop in Mumbai as traffic below hurtles by. For the first time since its inception in 2003, Wisden’s Book of the Year, ‘Following On’, is written by a woman; take a bow Emma John. Of course the saddest section in Wisden is the obituaries and last year was no different. Jack Bannister, Donald Carr, Tony Cozier, Martin Crowe, Hanif Mohammad, Rachael Heyhoe-Flint and Ken Higgs are just some that have left the crease for the final time and now fill their space in the pantheon. It’s a sobering thought that time is catching up with all of us who remember cricket on a black and white television. What some who don’t usually read Wisden realise is that it isn’t just cricketers whose deaths are acknowledged; MP Jo Cox, Brian Rix, Terry Wogan and Muhammad Ali also get a mention for various reasons. Despite the 2017 issue having 16 fewer pages than it’s predecessor, you all know what to expect. Buy it; it’ll make a sleep inducing passage of play more bearable