G Smith: Wisden - Yellow brick at game's foundations (4 April 1998)

4 April 1998

Yellow brick at game's foundations

By Giles Smith

THE new Wisden is out, and it's fatter than ever. Count 'em: 1,472 pages - the whole of cricket in a yellow housebrick. What with the tables and the tiny print, the publication it most resembles at first flick is a railway timetable, though obviously the Cricketers' Almanack 1998 has a far closer relation to what happens in the real world.

Made by obsessives for obsessives, volumes of Wisden now themselves enjoy the status of a fetish. Collectors rack them up, season by season - presumably because you never know when you will need to check the 1997 ICC Trophy third place play-off bowling figures again.

Wisden should really come in its own neatly tailored miniature anorak. And in a way it does. John Wisden & Co Ltd take a page in the new edition to advertise their range of facsimile dust-jackets. The idea is that you keep the real ones safe and clean (for an eventuality that only you know about) while the bogus jackets stand in as body-doubles. This is anal retention at a pressure, in sheer pounds per square inch, that even Stanley Gibbons would not have dared to speculate upon.

Yet so what if the stale whiff of clubhouse and old fart appears to comes off these newly minted pages? To get between the covers and read the bits which are in prose is to discover that Wisden in 1998, and at the age of 135, is muscular as a puppy - and more vigorously alive than county cricket.

A moribund or terminally dusty institution would not, I suggest, mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of its most famous historical figure by kicking his butt. Geoffrey Moorhouse's essay on W G Grace - though it finds space to admire the doctor for his impromptu surgery on a fieldsman impaled on the boundary fence at Old Trafford - also reveals him to have been a cheat, a grasping hypocrite and, to cap it all, an unstylish cricketer.

One fifth of the cost of taking a 13-man England team to Australia in 1891 went into Grace's pocket, he was the beneficiary of more testimonials than the legendary Dave Podmore, and entrance prices would frequently have to be doubled to cover his breathtaking appearance fees. In an age in which Nike was still merely a Greek goddess, Grace took £1 million at today's prices out of his sport - while brazenly arguing that professionalism would kill off the game.

But even Moorhouse would join Matthew Engel, the editor of Wisden, in wondering why cricket is so reluctant to celebrate Grace. The MCC will play the Rest of the World at Lord's on July 18. Not in a salute to the game's great original, however, but in memory of Princess Diana. One does not wish to seem ungrateful, but the People's Princess was to cricket what her ex-husband is to tag wrestling. This, as Engel states, is out of order, though not unpredictable in a country now sentimental to the point of madness.

Argument keeps the editorial passages of Wisden alive and clearly 1997 offered much to argue about. It was the year Lord MacLaurin, the chairman of the English Cricket Board, proposed replacing the County Championship with three conferences - a system characterised by Engel as "the least interesting formula for any sporting competition ever devised". (It got thrown out.) It could probably be demonstrated on a graph, spanning the ages, that the more confused and panicked cricket becomes, the more energised Wisden gets - and the more valuable it becomes in protecting the spirit of the game, as upheld by those who love and watch it, rather than those who play and run it.

Emblematically, in the obituary of Field Marshal Sir Archibald James Halkett Cassels, his having led the liberation of Le Havre and St Valery figures less prominently than the 72 he managed against the RAF in 1932. But even here it does not pay to stereotype Wisden. In the obituary of Leslie Frewin, his work, while head of publicity at Elstree Studios, in devising the mink bikini worn by Diana Dors at Cannes, features ahead of his chairmanship of the Lord's Taverners.

The house journal of a cozily snoozing, hermetically sealed community? The obituaries don't suggest so: ". . . found hanged, aged 46"; ". . . died, aged 52, from malaria"; ". . . died after being mugged in Paris".

If the new Wisden feels like a bracingly modern document, then this is not simply a matter of the dutiful cataloguing of Internet websites and video releases. Cricket's ready affiliation with the Internet is unsurprising. The needy exchange of arcane information; the high degree of nerdery; the required patience in the face of the tryingly featureless: these cultures are made for one another.

Wisden's modernness would have to do with other things, including an enlightened editorial policy. The MCC may not admit women - either literally or even, in the case of certain of their members, as a concept. Wisden does. Its deputy editor is a woman - Harriet Monkhouse - and Christine Forrest, the book's production editor, retires this year after working on the last 20 volumes. She admitted in a recent interview that she was more interested in numbers than in cricket - but then so are a lot of the people who have been reading her work.

Since 1996, the book has incorporated an 'Index of Unusual Occurrences'. This is a sop aimed directly at people like me, who don't know much about cricket but will move with pathetic eagerness towards any story marked 'Man dressed as carrot ejected from Test match'. (See page 400 of the new edition. He was done for 'drunken and abusive behaviour', and was, of course, a university lecturer.)

But few people on earth apart from Bill Frindall of Test Match Special will read every word and figure of Wisden, and, without this particular index of the bizarre, many of us would never know that a ball hit for six by Graeme Hick during a second round NatWest Trophy match between Essex and Worcestershire at Chelmsford last July passed through an open pavilion window and struck a spectator named Doris Day.

And where else, other than in Wisden, could you learn that Michael Atherton has an admirer who sends him baked goods and letters signed, "Your Number One Suffolk Fan and Crazy Cake Lady". This kind of reporting, as much as keeping the record straight, is what Wisden is for. Long may it grow fatter.

Incidentally, I was pleased to read that the former Sussex bowler Ed Giddins, who received an 18-month ban from county cricket after testing positive for cocaine, (a phase in his life in which, if he wished, he could have signed his letters "Number One Sussex Fast Bowler and Crazy Coke Man"), got by through the winter by selling Christmas trees. Apparently Giddins was always odds on to be able to look after himself outside cricket's protective wrapper: he had already worked as a topless barman, a dustman and a landscape gardener. This season he will be playing for Warwickshire, whom I have decided, immediately and unconditionally and for no other reason, to support.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)