Wit and Wisden
FRANK KEATING
Two white-coated codgers bent over some sticks in north London yesterday morning. One cleared his throat and, in ritual tone of relief and contentment refound, undramatically announced, ‘Play!’ Considering everything, all was well with the world, and the 2006 first-class cricket season was officially under way at Lord’s — MCC v. Nottinghamshire; today begin six more threesweater jobs when the gates are opened to the summer at the antique shrines of Hove and Chelmsford, Headingley and the Oval, Fenners and the Parks. Custom unstale, as ever, first toasts to the new season had been drunk in central London on Tuesday 11 April at the convivial black-tie dinner to launch the 143rd edition of the game’s illustriously perennial mustardy almanack.
Weighing in at precisely 1,600 pages, Wisden may be nearing unpickupability; for sure, there is an unputdownability about editor Matthew Engel’s latest annual, which makes 2006’s doorstop the most compelling (and collectable) must-have for many years. Last summer’s ravishing Ashes series sees to that. Every dot and comma of that spectacular seven weeks is first chronicled once again, then sagely, not to say sparkily, scrutinised. Reflections in tranquillity — from that breathtaking overture at Lord’s on the very first morning (21 July: Australia 97 for five at lunch) to England’s jubilant inner-city lap of honour via Trafalgar Square and No. 10 Downing Street on 13 September.
Apart from Wisden’s overladen table of refreshed annual goodies, Engel devotes 70 pages alone to the Ashes reverie. I enjoyed ‘hawkeye’ Simon Hughes’s clinical postmortem: had umpire Bowden not given Kasprowicz out at Edgbaston (a marginal decision) to give England victory by two runs, and not given Pietersen ‘in’ (correctly) at the Oval when he was on nought — ‘then Australia would have regained the Ashes’; and Paul Hayward’s pay-off hits the spot on that debutant’s curtsey of astonishing brio: ‘Pietersen is surely the first man in flannels who chose to be famous, who set out to be world-renowned. ... So now we have to stand back to find out whether he will be remembered as the cricketer who ate himself or a legend of the willow.’ It would be a kindness, yet again, to keep the gist of Engel’s editor’s notes — beautifully phrased with courteous urbanity, but with viperishly poisonous intent — away from the pusillanimous International Cricket Council (having left Lord’s they are now swanning it in the Middle East in, as Engel puts it, ‘their Dubaivory tower’): when not wringing their hands, they’re sitting on them. (On page 1,373, by the way, there is an excruciating, harrowing report by an unidentified writer headed simply ‘Cricket in Zimbabwe’.) Engel saves a quiverful of ammo, too, seriously to unsettle the game’s gormlessly crass administrators nearer home, including Blair’s gongs and his (for a change) ‘use of sporting honours as a publicity stunt’; and has a last desperate swipe over the English Cricket Board’s sellout to Sky, meaning live cricket has disappeared from the screens of more than half the homes in the country till at least 2010: ‘It would be a help if the ECB admitted the disaster, instead of denying it. But the gung-ho gimme-de-money county chairmen who negotiated the wretched deal were in full cry even as the Ashes was proving them wrong.’ I fancy there is still an outcry in store over Sky. Once the summer begins, that is.
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