Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year includes two West Indian Test players – one current, one former.
Shivnarine Chanderpaul receives cricket’s oldest accolade after sustaining his side’s batting almost single-handedly during the tour of England in 2007, while Ottis Gibson – who played his last Test in 1999 – is named after inspiring Durham’s most successful season of county cricket, during which he also achieved every bowler’s dream by taking all ten wickets in an innings, against Hampshire.
At the end of the 2007 season Gibson was appointed as England’s bowling coach, and retired from first-class cricket. The remaining members of this year’s Wisden Five are the England pair of Ian Bell and Ryan Sidebottom, and the Indian fast bowler Zaheer Khan.
Wes Hall recognised too
In this edition Wisden also names five great cricketers who somehow missed out on being a Cricketer of the Year. One of them is the great West Indian fast bowler Wes Hall, who is profiled in Wisden 2008 by his old friend Tony Cozier. Cozier once faced him in a club match and hit his first ball for four: “You lucky you still living,” said Wes when reminded of this. The other greats who never received the Wisden accolade are Abdul Qadir, Bishan Bedi, Inzamam-ul-Haq and Jeff Thomson.
Mike Atherton, the former England captain, contributes an article on Brian Lara on the retirement from international cricket of the phenomenal West Indian left-hander. Two outstanding Australians who also retired from international cricket during the year, Glenn McGrath and Adam Gilchrist, are similarly featured.
Atherton writes of Lara that “any fair-minded assessment could only conclude that he must be one of the finest entertainers to have played in this or any other era”, adding that “entertainment was the creed by which he lived as a batsman”.
He adds:“It is the West Indian way, of course.…Cricket, put simply, is more fun played the West Indian way. It is to Lara’s great credit that, whatever the circumstances, he stayed faithful to that particular creed.”
The threat of violence
Physical violence is threatening to take over the traditional non-contact game of cricket, according to the 2008 edition of Wisden.
Scyld Berry, editing the Almanack for the first time, writes in his Notes:“We live in a world of chaos, and a cricket match is one of our attempts to impose human organisation upon nature, order upon chaos. It takes much to create and, when angry emotions take over, it is so easy to destroy.”
The 145th edition of the Almanack, published on April 10, suggests that 2007 was characterised by an alarming increase in deliberate physical contact on the field of play, and “the worst example came in the Kanpur international when Gautam Gambhir ran straight down the pitch and straight into Shahid Afridi”.
Berry concludes that the worldwide governing body, the ICC, now “must be no less effective in preventing physical violence. “For once this taboo is broken, it could rapidly spread, just as sledging – sustained personal abuse – has spread from international teams downwards”.
Relative Strengths
Elsewhere in the Notes, Berry wonders why the batsmen of today cannot hit the ball as far as their Victorian counterparts.
The biggest-ever hit of 175 yards, or 160 metres, “from hit to pitch”, was recorded at Oxford in 1856 by Walter Fellows; the Australian George Bonnor struck a ball 160 yards a few years later. Yet the biggest strike in the inaugural World Twenty20 championship, by India’s Yuvraj Singh, was only 119 metres.
Berry offers a possible explanation in the Note entitled “Hail Fellows, well hit”.
Kallis the world’s No. 1…
Wisden 2008 names the South African batsman Jacques Kallis as the No. 1 cricketer on earth for 2007. Kallis becomes the fifth player to win the accolade of “Leading Cricketer in the World” since it began in 2004 to identify the first name on a World XI teamsheet to play Mars. Previous winners include the Australians Ricky Ponting and Shane Warne, Andrew Flintoff of England and, last year, Muttiah Muralitharan of Sri Lanka.
