Pop goes the Wisden
MICHAEL HENDERSON
The weather turned this week, but, even without the blue skies that have graced
the last four weeks, summer arrived with the publication of Wisden. The famous yellow-coloured cricket almanac is celebrating its 140th year, and is bigger than ever, But, this year, the customary acclaim has been withheld. By putting a photograph of Michael Vaughan, the England batsman, on the cover, instead of a taster of the articles inside, the publishers have turned one of sport's finest traditions on its head.
The editor, Tim de Lisle, is unrepentant. The cover, he has said with some emphasis, should reflect the drama of the game. Wisden was in danger of becoming 'fusty', left behind by a restless age. He's wrong. In fact he has hit his own wicket, and can now brood on his dismissal throughout this and every other summer. De Lisle did the job for one year only. Matthew Engel, a former editor, returns for the next edition and there is already talk of a return to more familiar ways.
For an amiable chap, de Lisle (Eton and Oxford, but you probably guessed that bit) has been the victim of some withering jibes from his peers. One journalist, asked what it was about him that he disliked, replied, The angle of his chin.' Michael Carey, a superb cricket writer, once noted the names of Peter Deeley (a former Telegraph correspondent) and de Lisle in the papers, and paid homage to Cole Porter: 'It's D-eeley, it's de Lisle, it's crlovely!'
To be fair to de Lisle, which we must be, he proved a fine editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly, the almanac's magazine, which will merge later this year with The Cricketer. But since he left that post three years ago he has written about pop music, which is no job for anybody over 16. It is a world of froth and bubble, where style takes precedence over substance, and has a habit of infecting everybody who enters it.
Photographs are wonderful — in newspapers but not on the dust jacket of a muchloved annual publication. This one does not make the game more 'accessible' or 'modern'. It merely makes a famous book look ordinary. The choice of the photograph itself is a mistake. Instead of showing Vaughan — a batsman admired for his beauty of stroke — driving a ball through cover, it marks the moment of one of his seven Test centuries in the last year, with the player charging down the pitch, raising his left fist in triumph in the manner of all modem sportsmen.
You don't have to be a fuddy-duddy to object to the choice of image, or the thinking behind it. There is too much triumphalism in sport today, and nobody needs to see it on the front cover of a book that, by tradition, has taken a longer view of a game that respects the past. Everybody is a conservative, said Kingsley Amis, in an area they know something about. De Lisle loves cricket but he has made an error of judgment here that no amount of honeyed words will wash away.
Inside the covers there is another howler. The one-off editor has provided 'a guide for new readers'. New readers, indeed! Wisden is aimed at graduates of the summer game. not freshmen. In any case, is it really that difficult for 'new readers' to understand an index, or to get the hang of something that may, on first acquaintance, puzzle them? When you shell Out 30-odd quid for a book, you do so out of conviction rather than a vague curiosity.
So the summer game has got off to a poor start, with Wisden one wicket down and its editor back 'in the shed'. Perhaps Vaughan (the lovely cover driver, not the mid-wicket charger) will make amends. F
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