New wine but gotta lotta bottle

Cricket is not short on ritual and the annual ceremony that accompanies the publication of the Wisden Almanack is as comforting as it is familiar. A hard-backed perennial, the arrival of each new edition helps to break ground for the coming season, while shining its golden light over the events of the preceding year. It is simultaneously nostalgia in physical form and a new piece of kit to lavish with attention. Suckers like us don't stand a chance.

Who will be the Five Cricketers of the Year? Does the editor have any surprises in store? What picture will be on the cover (a relatively new concern, this)? Those who devotedly follow the yellow brick road are likely to find themselves breathless before they have taken a step; heart rates will then increase as fumbling fingers flick through delicate pages. "Have you seen what they've done with the Records section?"

Likely as not, there will be no one around to answer that question. Personally, I find communing with the Almanack to be a private business, one that reminds me of Fuchsia heading up to the attic in Gormenghast, where she goes to escape from the world and while away the hours among "the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing". The game has been storing stuff up for centuries and a new Wisden is a fresh opportunity to have a rummage; it will require dedicated time to sift through all the little wonders.

That does not make the Almanack a fusty relic by any means, and the current editor, Lawrence Booth, might even have raised a few bushy eyebrows with the decision to introduce an award for the leading woman cricketer. Meg Lanning is the unarguable choice (though she only gets a page, compared to Kumar Sangakkara's two as leading man), while for the first time every women's series played during the year is recorded. "Both moves are overdue," Booth writes in his preface.

This is the most significant change, and a progressive one, though Booth had already demonstrated himself to be a moderniser by dropping the Laws from his first edition, in 2012 (evidently the good book had become a bit bulky to carry around in the breast pocket of an umpire's jacket). It is the job of Wisden's editor to set the tone, of course, and Booth's 2015 Notes are particularly strident.

There is nothing like a good crisis to get the juices flowing and in this area English cricket runneth over. Maybe things have always been this way - and you could fill an anthology with the complaints of Wisden editors past - but the concerns expressed are largely modern ones, with Booth writing thoughtfully about the disconnect between the ECB and the public, and the issues of relevancy sparked by last year's decline in playing numbers. Rather than grumble about the lbw law or fielding restrictions, Booth also uses his Notes to call for greater inclusion of Britain's Asian community.

Rather like the presence of Moeen Ali on the cover, this comes as a reminder that cricket's boundaries are usually self-imposed and we ought to look beyond them. Such an endeavour might be a little fraught however, and Moeen, one of this year's Five, is the subject of a nuanced piece by Sarfraz Manzoor examining why the England allrounder of Pakistani heritage was booed by India fans last summer.

Inevitably, one man who did not play for England features on a fair few of the 1500 pages. The spectre of Kevin Pietersen still stalks the landscape and, after 12 months that have threatened to drive us all KP nuts, the Almanack finds room for the devil - Patrick Collins curtly dissects his autobiography in the review section - as well as his beatific batting, in Simon Hughes' appreciation.

Booth, meanwhile, offers the written equivalent of a facepalm when summing up the ECB's inept handling of the situation as it staked everything on a struggling Alastair Cook.

As ever, pithy wisdom and memorable phrases abound - Tanya Aldred's description of Gary Ballance as "the chunky neighbourhood plumber with the sensible tool belt who thrusts his hands in the cistern, fiddles about a bit and gets everything working again" is particularly good - and there is fun to be had in pieces on games (by Harry Pearson) and nicknames (Gideon Haigh). A century on from their deaths, WG Grace and Victor Trumper ("catlike" long before Pietersen was) are remembered; and Sangakkara shows some elegant strokes of a different kind in a piece about his retiring buddy, Mahela Jayawardene.

In among the doyens, there are fresh voices trying to articulate the game, from Nishant Joshi (better known as @AltCricket) to ESPNcricinfo's own Jarrod Kimber. Actually, three of the Five Cricketers of the Year were written by colleagues and I should here declare my own conflict of interest - though hopefully not one on the scale of owning an IPL franchise.

Still, you were probably not waiting for my recommendation before joining the yellow-jacketed adherents. Like I said, appreciating Wisden is a personal matter and whether you turn straight to the obituaries or the index of unusual occurrences, the attic is once again full of diversions.

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, 2015
Edited by Lawrence Booth
Bloomsbury
1520 pages, £50