Lehmann named Wisden Australia's Cricketer of the Year

Darren Lehmann, who selflessly offered his Test place to Michael Clarke, is Wisden Australia's Cricketer of the Year. The award is recognition of Lehmann's belated, unlikely and romantic international purple patch, which is currently on hold after he injured his hamstring in the third Test at Nagpur.

The 2004-05 edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack Australia, published today, is a history-making edition: the front image of a roaring Shane Warne is the first full-colour pictorial cover in Wisden's 141-year history.

Wisden Australia mourns the modern trend towards "McCricket", calling for a stop to "back-to-back Tests, whistlestop tours, twoand four-Test series and all other dunderheaded attempts to jam Test cricket into a polystyrene carton and shove it down our throats as quickly as possible". For its first 125 years, the five-Test series was cricket's prestige forum. But Australia have played only one in the past three years and India one in the past seven. New Zealand last played a five-Test series 33 years ago, Pakistan 12 years ago and Sri Lanka have never played one.

Wisden Australia's new editor Christian Ryan writes in his Editor's Notes: "Only when Australia play England are we now assured the unique thrill of a five-Test series. And beware the hardheads: with their calculators for brains and cash registers for hearts, they are plotting to take even that away from us. Cricket tampers with its own crazy, bewitching rhythms at its peril."

The disappearance of the five-Test series is one of several troublesome issues confronted by a feistier, revamped edition. Cricket Australia (CA) comes in for the fiercest criticism. Of the board's eagerness to play against a race-based Zimbabwean side, and its description of this year's tour to Zimbabwe as "a tick in a box", Wisden Australia wonders: "Have Australian cricket administrators no heart, no moral existence at all?"

Of the Sri Lankan offspinner Muttiah Muralitharan's refusal to come to Australia last July, it says CA did not try hard enough to change his mind. "Anything, everything should have been done to make sure he felt comfortable ... Australia is the only cricketing nation Murali has felt compelled to stay away from. History will judge us accordingly."

The 2004-05 edition of Wisden Australia is at 976 pages the biggest ever and the first - in Australia or England - to incorporate balls faced and boundaries hit in Test scorecards. Among several innovations is a new section called "Farewells", women's player profiles, a beefed-up back half and two new tables listing the full career records of every Australian Test and one-day player in order of appearance.