Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2004 - Matthew Engel

Available as hardback and softback, £35.99 © John Wisden & Co.

Celebrating the golden age

"Let's start by celebrating. In many respects 2003 was a brilliant year for cricket." This is the refreshing way Matthew Engel kicks off this volume, and he is right.

Consider the facts: 2003 produced the first 100mph ball, from Shoaib Akhtar in Cape Town during the World Cup, and the highest Test innings, from Matthew Hayden at Perth. There was one of the great run chases in Test history, with West Indies scoring a record-breaking 418 to defeat Australia at St John's. There were two tremendous Test series - England v South Africa and Australia v India. These "might stand comparison with any in history," comments Engel.

Above all there was the Australian cricket team, probably the greatest of all time. It won the World Cup and was always a fabulously attractive proposition, scoring runs at more than four per over. We are living through a golden age of international cricket.

There can be no higher praise than to say Wisden Cricketers' Almanack does full justice to a memorable year. It soberly records all the salient facts of the first-class game but it captures the flavour too. It combines dry statistics and poetry, an eye for detail and a broad intellectual sweep. It is a marvellous achievement.

Matthew Engel takes guard for a second innings as editor after a stint as Guardian correspondent in the United States. He returns with a new command to his task and has brought about a number of changes. Mainly they are for the better.

Last year's controversial innovation of a picture cover has been retained but the crime ameliorated by bringing back the old Eric Ravilious woodcut. The Laws of Cricket - dropped by last year's editor Tim de Lisle on the basis that "no one pays any attention to them anyway" - have been reinstated.

The five cricketers of the year - they are Andrew Flintoff, Ian Harvey, Gary Kirsten, Graeme Smith and Chris Adams - have been chosen under the old rules, based on the English season. The five are complemented by the Wisden 40, a list of the leading cricketers in the world. This is an excellent new feature, and few would dispute the choice of Ricky Ponting as the outstanding international player of 2003.

The Editor's Notes are exceptionally strong. Engel has some scorching remarks on the Champions Trophy, planned to take place in England at the fag end of this summer. It is greatly to be hoped that the authorities sit up and take notice. Engel is also right to question the encroachment of black armbands on to the field of play.

All readers of a volume as long and glorious as this will have some quibbles, so here are mine. Writers' bylines have become much too frequent. This year they are attached for the first time at the beginning of England's Test match reports. Wisden's commentary possesses an impersonal authority, which is gravely weakened by placing the name of the individual writer in such a prominent position. There is admittedly some scope for bylined pieces in the feature section at the front of the book. It is useful to know, for instance, that Nasser Hussain is the writer of this year's long essay on the retiring Australian captain Steve Waugh, particularly since it contains personal anecdote. But in general anonymity should be the rule.

The prose style is sometimes too colloquial, and this too can intrude on Wisden's authority. There is some lazy writing, for instance jarring references to the `stats' rather than the statistics (see the essay on Brian Lara). But these are small points. The book is a triumph.

As always the minor detail is a large part of the pleasure. One's admiration for Waugh rose even higher at the revelation that he declined an invitation to meet the US president George Bush at Canberra because he was "committed to attend the New South Wales team's seasonal launch". It was pleasing to learn, given the current bereft state of West Indies batting, that Sir Vivian Richards' 19-year-old son Mali Richards scored 319, the highest score in the 90-year history of the Leeward Islands tournament. Page 1,530 reveals that David Hare's play Teeth 'n' Smiles can never be revived in its current form, since it contains a reference to Sussex's failure ever to win the County Championship, an oversight that was finally put right last year.

Just occasionally Wisden fails to make as much as it might of its information. The records section reveals (page 181) that only three batsmen have been `timed out' in the history of the first-class game. Two of these three incidents occurred in the period covered by this volume. It would have been nice to have been told a little more than the bare facts.

Only once would I dare to take issue with the views of an editor of such a massive and scholarly work. Engel remarks in his preface that he is trying to produce "a shorter book - no one wants a 2,000-page Wisden." Don't they? Who says? A volume as majestic as this could never be too long.

Peter Oborne is political editor of the Spectator