At an age when the norm and pulse are dictated by the ravenous market, Wisden Almanack has resisted such temptations. It has consistently, and faithfully, reasserted its pedigree as cricket’s sanest voice, a constant in changing times. The third Indian edition delivers much the same, essentially celebrating the game as well as its literature, harmonising within 850-odd pages a range of contributors.
Balanced and refined, analysis, opinions, perspectives, reflections and tributes are strung together with an unforced cadence, much like a beguiling Test match throwing up all the variegated emotions of life on a cricket field.
Some of them are trenchant without being torpid; stylish but uncompromising on substance; critical but seldom cynical. It says much for the quality of the writing that even series summaries don’t feel redundant, rather they refreshingly dust up your memory.
It’s best to resist speculative browsing and begin from the preface, featuring excerpts of an essay penned by the inimitable Jack Hobbs for Crickmania, published in 1939 (the full piece is reproduced later).
“As a player I have visited Australia, South Africa and other countries but I place an Indian tour as the most fascinating of them all,” so he wrote. Seven-and-a-half decades later, India is the throbbing nerve centre of the game, financial and otherwise.
A few pages later, Osman Samiuddin dissects the various layers of intrigue in ICC’s tripartite power-sharing agreement, a razor-sharp but dexterous critique, pile-driving home a set of fresher points like the administrative ineptness of the ‘Small Seven’.
“For long, the flip side to the funk cricket administration finds itself in has been that smaller boards — the Small Seven — have let their fiefdoms wither away. They have been happy to survive on handouts from ICC events and India tours, failing to bump up their own revenue streams.”
With a touch of concern than fear, he rounds up thus: “So if you feared the devil was behind these changes, bear in mind that the details are still to become clear.”
Moving on, three farewells stand out. There is much to savour in Lawrence Booth’s eulogy for Jacques Kallis.
Neil Manthorp delivers a characteristically thoughtful appreciation of Graeme Smith while Anand Vasu delectably narrates the bonding between two of Sri Lanka’s finest touch artistes and great chums, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene.
Another Sri Lankan, Angelo Mathews, is among the six cricketers of the year. Angelo’s pen portrait by Jarrord Kimber is replete with glittering one-liners, like “Angelo is too good to exist, so they made him”. As engaging is Sandeep Dwivedi’s micro-bildungsroman of Ajinkya Rahane.
Jonathan Liew reviews cricket books, which may not make for comfortable reading for Indian authors. A good many of them are familiar to Indian readers, while Liew introduces us to some lesser-known works, like Then Came Massacre: The Story of Maurice Tait (by Just Parkinson), Harry Pearson’s Trundlers and David Gower’s second autobiography Endangered Species among many others. Peter Oborne’s Wounded Tiger is adjudged book of the year.
In recent years, Wisden has devoted increasing space to cricket’s profile in the media and the latest issue sustains that trend. There are essays on how cricket is covered by the vernacular press, existing almost like a subaltern entity. On one side is the story of pioneering writers in Kannada, who have coined vernacular equivalents to wicket (huddari) and run (ota), the rich legacy of Bengali writers, before fanboy adulation of Sourav Ganguly got the better of some of them, and the robust Marathi reportage. Sadly, though, cricket reporting in Tamil is not as elevated, laments chronicler Badri Seshadri. Likewise, considerable space is devoted to the evolution of cricket culture vis-a-vis clubs in the country’s metropolises.
The only quibble perhaps is that there are few photos.
But overall, Wisden has emphasised that it still is cricket’s Bible, without being churchy.
Wisden Almanack (third edition)
Edited by Suresh Menon
Pages: 869
Published by Bloomsbury India
Price: Rs 699
