Wisden’s return to monthly action is welcome
Cricket’s famous marque is back to fight for readers in a glossy battle waged against an old foe, writes Simon Briggs Amid a haze of solvent vapour, I started to wonder whether WG Grace was winking at me
Next month, a long-standing conflict will be resumed in the land of bats and balls. Not England v Australia, but Wisden Cricket Monthly v The Cricketer – a contest fought out over WH Smith news-stands and 100-odd glossy pages.
For cricket tragics, this is a miraculous moment. Because WCM seemed to have died five years ago. It made the mistake of partnering with its rival in a single magazine called The Wisden
Cricketer. But it was always the scrappy younger brother, never quite an equal. One day the Wisden bit simply fell off the masthead.
We thought that would be it, because sports magazines are hardly a sure-fire way to make money. Fourfourtwo is the Pele of the scene, having logged more than 20 years and spawned dozens of overseas spinoffs. In general, though, the success rate for start-ups is about as high as it is for restaurants. On average, they manage
about six issues. The peak sale for a cricket magazine arrived in the summer of 2005. In these happy days, when Andrew Flintoff ate Aussies for breakfast and The Wisden Cricketer
stood unchallenged ( All
Out Cricket, produced by the players’ union, had yet to hit news-stands), the series wrap-up circulated 39,500 copies.
Today, The Cricketer has 15,000 subscribers and between 5,000 and 10,000 monthly sales. All
Out Cricket has expanded but still struggles to reach the five-figure mark. Which is why Phil Walker, AOC’S editor, has bought up the Wisden marque. It is as if the Haas Formula One team had rebranded itself as Lotus, with all the heritage that entails. There’s even a rumour that Trinorth, AOC’S publishing company, is planning to brew
Wisden beer. Whether the new magazine flies commercially or not, this is a job you do for love rather than money. I know this from experience, having begun my sportswriting career as WCM’S office junior. Just over 20 years ago, the title was produced from a suburb of Guildford, in a thicklycarpeted semi adjacent to a dog-grooming parlour.
The Devil Wears Prada, it most definitely wasn’t.
In those pre-digital days, we would lay out the magazine by cutting up paper “galleys”, on which the copy had been typeset, and pasting them on to cardboard A4 sheets with cowgum. This extraordinary substance had to be purchased from the local artists’ suppliers, where it was stored in a flameproof safe.
After a long afternoon spent arranging Scyld Berry’s historical essay on WG Grace, amid a thick haze of solvent vapour, I started to wonder whether the bearded legend was winking at me.
But we would not remain charmingly low-tech for much longer. Apple Macs materialised in time for the 1997 Ashes, along with a long-suffering designer. The circulation war with The Cricketer escalated. We had Jonathan Agnew. They had Christopher MartinJenkins. To the victor went the lucrative Gunn & Moore adverts.
And now, that offBroadway battle for eyeballs is about to be revived. As before, The
Cricketer has the bigger muscles. Its heritage dates to 1921, when it was founded by Asheswinning England captain Pelham “Plum” Warner. Its current editor is another former player, Simon Hughes.
Walker, meanwhile, is placing great faith in the
Wisden imprimatur to transform his product. “We’ll be tapping into the spirit of the Wisden
Almanack,” he told me. The primrose doorstop sells 50,000 copies a year – a figure most sports magazines can only dream of. Still, as a former WCM man myself, I will be cheering for the underdog.