The 2026 Wisden is the usual riveting read for cricket lovers. But just as the world today is a rather unhappy place, the reader of the new Almanack soon perceives that the state of cricket, and especially English cricket, is rather unhappy too.
In the last 30-40 years, since the editorships of Graeme Wright and Matthew Engel, the Notes by the Editor have increasingly challenged how cricket is run, domestically and internationally. Lawrence Booth, the present editor, is no exception. His observations begin with a clinical and entirely justified attack on the performance of the England team in the catastrophic tour of Australia last winter.
Booth calls for changes of attitude and approach rather than of personnel. The impending series against New Zealand and Pakistan will show whether attitudes are improving and, if so, how effectively. Much editorial matter in the Almanack suggests there must be profound changes to the way the game functions if there is to be any hope of putting things right. Those changes seem unlikely in the short term, given the retention of the main personnel controlling the direction of English cricket.
Booth says of the leadership of English cricket that “they must restore the links with a county game that remains imperfect but is the only finishing school they have”. He understands – and he says, who knows whether in expectation or hope, that Ben Stokes is smart enough to understand it too – that England can only find Test cricketers if they are formed in first-class domestic cricket.
It does seem, however, that the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) struggles to take first-class domestic cricket seriously. Even if Booth is right in assuming that Stokes does get it, it is far from clear the ECB does. The team had come from a white-ball event in New Zealand more remarkable for the amount of drinking that went on there than for any cricketing achievement. None of the boneheads responsible for the strategy of the English game thought that some good old-fashioned four-day matches against state teams, of the sort that always used to open England tours, would improve the chances of success.
But then – and Wisden seems to accept this as an inevitability if professional cricket in England has a future – white-ball cricket must push everything else into the background. It now influences every aspect of the game, and as other articles indicate, the fact that it does reflects the dominance of Indian influence over cricket internationally: not by traditional cricket administrators, but by Indian plutocrats, whose range of investments includes franchises in the Hundred.
That variant of the game – one hesitates actually to call it “cricket” – runs like a thread through the Almanack’s editorial, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the integrity of the sport. The sale of franchises has allowed the ECB to deposit piles of money into the bank accounts of county clubs, helping to keep them solvent. Booth writes that five of the 18 clubs are believed to have been in what the ECB euphemistically terms the “red zone” of financial health.
Wisden does not criticise the Hundred, but nor does it give it a full-throated roar of approval, and precisely for financial reasons. Booth argues that “whether traditionalists like it or not, it has to succeed”, the implication being that county clubs have no other means of securing their long-term survival. This is unfortunate, because the only long-term hope for the Hundred is if the franchise for it can be sold around the world.
There is no sign of that happening, because T20 (which bears more resemblance to cricket) is an internationally recognised format, and with fixture lists so crowded as they are it is unlikely that a second short-form game could be built in to schedules around the world. If it does not catch on, who knows what will happen? But even if does, Booth expresses the fear that the money going into the game will be “swallowed up by a wage-related arms race”.
There is also the question of the enthusiasm the public will continue to show for cricket of any description. The first-class game Booth identifies as essential has not been marketed for years; it is played at either end of the season and not at its height; and it is largely bereft of big names, who prefer either to rest or to play in overseas T20 franchises. An excellent article about the encouragement of cricket in state schools shows that huge efforts are being made by philanthropists, clubs and especially MCC to try to ensure that children without the benefit of a private education can still learn to play cricket, and aspire to be professional cricketers.
The Almanack shows that 10 of the 11 men who played in the final test of the 1976 series against West Indies were state-educated; in the Melbourne Test last December only two (Stokes and Josh Tongue) were not educated at private schools. If most young people are not exposed to cricket – and few play it or have access to watch it on television – they are highly unlikely to go to watch it, however “accessible” it is made.
Some short interviews with cricket lovers and investors shows that for all the hype about the Hundred, concern persists about its effect on the traditional game. One supporter highlights the absurdity that throughout August, with schools on holiday and weather usually ideal for long-form cricket, the fixture list is dominated by white ball competitions. The effect on young people, denied the chance to see serious cricket, is appalling. It also short-changes county members, many of whom prefer long-form cricket.
There is much more besides in the Almanack. There are two fascinating articles on the West Indies fast bowler Roy Gilchrist, who was accused of racism by those who sent him home from a tour of India in the late 1950s for bad behaviour. He boasted he wanted to kill the batsmen at whom he bowled, and sought to decapitate them with beamers. He turns out to have been a nasty piece of work, who later burned his wife’s face with a hot iron. There is also an examination of the link between cricket and coal mining, the problems in cricketing relations between India and Pakistan, reminiscences of Dickie Bird, and – taking us rather brutally back to the real world – the grim fate of Imran Khan, languishing in a cell in Pakistan.
Booth writes censoriously about the England team’s relationship with alcohol, apparently closer than its relationship with cricket. The resort to drink may just be a consequence of a group of boisterous young men on a sunshine holiday with more money than sense; or it may be that the general lack of serious direction in English cricket has driven them to escape through booze. I fear it is the latter, and it cannot go on like this.