CRICKET BIBLE BLASTS ASHES ‘STINKER’
Cricket bible Wisden warns red-ball format... and slams ECB over Stokes
The latest edition of Wisden argues that Test cricket is in need of an overhaul after dubbing the 2017-18 Ashes — its crown jewels — ‘a stinker’ of a series.
In his editor’s notes, Sportsmail’s Lawrence Booth warned the eCB not to take the Ashes for granted in an age when white-ball cricket threatens to totally dominate the landscape, and to learn from the mistakes of this past winter when england passively slipped to a humiliating defeat.
‘The 2017-18 edition, it’s true, was a stinker: one- sided, often boorish and dulled by pitches stripped of their old character,’ Booth writes. ‘ Once, the Ashes needed neither explanation nor justification: they simply were, because they had always been. People do care. But, one suspects, not as much as they did.
‘As a contest, the Ashes needs shaking up. The world game needs it too: if england v Australia sleepwalks towards the retirement home, what chance South Africa v Pakistan?’
eCB chief executive Tom harrison came in for criticism for championing the ‘five pillars of strategy — More play. Great teams. Inspired fans. Strong finance. Good governance’ — when england had already surrendered the urn.
Booth continued: ‘ Time was when a thrashing by Australia might have provoked questions in Parliament. Now, it sounded like an inconvenience. It sounded as if surrendering the Ashes was being taken for granted.’
Of the Ben Stokes saga that provided the unwelcome backdrop for the 4-0 defeat by the Australians, he said it was ‘ reasonable’ that the eCB imposed a suspension while awaiting the Crime Prosecution Service’s decision on a charge of affray but ‘perverse’ to lift it once he was charged, adding: ‘ The chances are england would have lost the Ashes with or without Stokes. But the Bristol brawl burdened an already difficult tour with an impossible load.’
Women dominated Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year list in the 155th edition as the revered yellow bible named a trio of england’s World Cup winners among its fabled five.
Captain heather Knight, all- rounder Nat Sciver and seamer Anya Shrubsole were all honoured after the Lord’s victory last July. The Almanack not so much broke with tradition as belted it out of the ground. In acknowledging Knight’s achievement, Booth wrote: ‘It was the culmination of a personal tour de force that helped change women’s cricket for ever.’
Although Booth insists Sciver is no one-tricky pony, her patenting of a new stroke — the ‘Natmeg’ — was lauded. In Shrubsole, he argued, a ‘national hero’ had been unearthed. As selections maintain an emphasis on the english summer, the other two places went to players influential in surprise successes: Shai hope, whose twin hundreds helped secure West Indies’ epic five-wicket Test victory at headingley, and Jamie Porter, the uncapped essex bowler, whose 75-wicket collection provided the cornerstone of the newly- promoted club’s undefeated County Championship title-winning campaign.
And so for the first time in 16 years, a contemporary men’s england international did not make the quintet. But the policy of casting the net wider and into new places saw Afghanistan’s teenager leg-spinner Rashid Khan become the inaugural winner of the Leading Twenty20 Cricketer in the World (80 wickets in 2017 at a cost of 14 runs apiece).
Virat Kohli and Mithali Raj, both captains of India, took the gongs for men’s and women’s Leading Cricketer in the World.