This week marks the 150th anniversary since the first edition of Wisden's cricket almanac. For my 99th post on this blog, it seems somehow fitting to pay homage to a small yellow book which is so beloved of cricket devotees such as me.
To get to the riches of the little yellow book though, people normally have to first make a connection with the great game. This happened to me during the long, improbable summer of 1981. Hitherto, I had paid little attention to quirky game where the men dressed in white tried to knock over three stumps with a mystical looking red ball. In 1981, England entertained the Australians and the tour started very badly for our lot. The new captain Ian Botham was still very young at just 24 years of age and had already made a considerable name for himself on the world stage since his baptism against the same opposition four years earlier. He had though just brought his downbeat team back from a torrid tour of the West Indies against the side I still contend to have been one of the two best to grace the game. A great side has no weak link and that West Indian team was as solid as a rock. The established opening pair of Greenidge and Haynes were always good for a century stand to get the innings off to a flyer. The middle order contained the captain Clive Lloyd whose bat looked like a toy in his enormous hands. His ability to take any attack apart was well known. Alvin Kallicharan had been plying his trade with Warwickshire for a few seasons by then and had every shot in the book. Collis King was a legendary smiter of gargantuan sixes which just left the small matter of Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards. Viv didn't walk on to bat. He swaggered. With some justification. I have never seen any man so comprehensively annihilate the opposition bowling. If Kallicharan had every shot in the book, Viv had several more which weren't and never will be.
Derek Murray was the keeper in those days before you arrived at the wall of death - the bowlers. Just writing their names makes me shudder. Holding, Garner, Marshall and Croft. All fast. All deadly. England didn't stand a chance against that lot so were looking forward to the plane trip home. For the record, Michael Holding along with Richard Hadley of New Zealand is the bowler who has given me the greatest pleasure. Very different bowlers but they both knew how to successfully locate the stumps and both possessed bowling actions that you wished you could give to every young player.
England started the Ashes of 1981 1-0 down with four tests to play. Botham was relieved of the captaincy and looked a shadow of the player who had arrived on the scene a few years earlier. The next three tests were the stuff of legend and I was hooked on cricket for life. It was electric. His 149 not out at Headingley was an astonishing innings because while it enjoyed a little luck, it was played without a care in the world. His five wickets for one run off 29 balls wrapped up proceedings at the next test in Birmingham. Then came the innings for the purist. His century at Old Trafford was as good an innings as you could hope to see. Yes there were five sixes but they weren't risky, they weren't slogs - they were just clinical controlled hitting.
After that, my appetite for cricket just grew and grew. Wisden is the go to book for any lover of the game with its mountain of statistics and records. When Alec Waugh first described it as the "bible of cricket", there was little to add.
In 1889, it introduced its "Six cricketers of the year". Among the notables that year were Johnny Briggs from Lancashire and Bobby Peel from Yorkshire. Briggs would soon be declared insane and consigned to a lunatic asylum for the rest of his days. Today, we call it epilepsy but things were different then and the stigma was palpable.
Bobby Peel's story is perhaps a little more amusing. Sacked by the autocratic Yorkshire president a few years later, the reason for his sacking was given as , "watering the pitch in a socially unacceptable manner". Quite.
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