The year cricket battled back from the brink

With no play before July, the sport was in financial crisis. Yet England squeezed in 18 matches and the counties had returned by September. In this year’s Wisden, out today, editor Lawrence Booth reflects on...

Cricket has never been less important than in 2020 — and never more. As coronavirus spread, it seemed frivolous to wonder when the season might start, or whether anyone would be there to watch. Months later, with the Uk’s death toll into six figures, even writing about runs and wickets felt wrong.

But cricket, like everything else, had its heart ripped out, and its soul very nearly crushed. it lost family and friends. it made compromises to survive and may take years to recover. the story is far from over. the pace of events was dizzying, shocking. David Hodgkiss was the Lancashire chairman when Wisden 2020 was printing; by publication, he had died. And the obituaries this year include at least 15 others linked to covid-19.

they were all ages and from every corner of the game. Lee Nurse was just 43, and had played for Berkshire. riaz Sheikh, a former leg- spinner who was 51, once dismissed inzamam-ul-Haq.

Phil Wright, aged 60, was Leicestershire’s popular dressing-room attendant. the 73-year-old chetan chauhan will always be four decades younger, dragged by Sunil Gavaskar towards the pavilion after an lbw decision in a test at Melbourne. ken Merchant, a member of the cricket Society, died at the age of 81, on the same day as his wife, in the same Southend hospital ward. Peter edrich, cousin of Bill and John, was 93.

How did cricket go on? the trite answer is it had to. And in the game’s continuance came a kind of salvation.

FROM THE ABYSS

IN EARLY 2019, the ECB’S annual report identified two threats to cricket beyond their control: terrorism and national mourning. A year later, shortly after the World Health Organisation declared a ‘public health emergency of international concern’, the ECB added a third: communicable disease.

this coincided with the first cases of covid- 19 in the Uk, though it was still regarded, more or less, as a problem for china. Within days, cricket was facing its greatest disruption since the

Second World War. the ecB rose to the challenge. Swift measures taken by chief executive tom Harrison spared the english game the worst of the financial damage.

the biosecure bubble organised by director of events Steve elworthy proved unburstable, allowing england’s men to fulfil all 18 home internationals in 10 strange weeks. With the domestic fixture list looking like a ghost town, the counties squeezed in two competitions. it was faintly miraculous.

the board might have done one thing differently. they had allowed their reserves to dwindle from £73million in 2015-16 to £17m four years later, which suggested they had been paying lip service to the possibility of bombs disrupting a money-spinning visit by india.

it’s also true that their obsession with the Hundred — delayed by 12 months because of the pandemic, and missed by few — had cost them more than planned.

But, as Boris Johnson bragged about shaking hands in hospitals, then dithered over a start date for cricket while snooker fans were allowed inside the crucible, there was more decisive governance from Lord’s than the commons.

the price was still huge. the women’s game, it was made clear, was expendable, and spared a wipeout only by the decision of West indies to visit Derby in September. Funding was cut further down the ladder, and may not return. the ECB slashed 20 per cent of their workforce. After fears cricket might lose £380m, a shortfall of around £110m was almost a triumph. But it was sobering.

cricket’s absence in April, May and June had left everyone bereft. We all missed the matches, the drama, the ebb and flow. But there was a more profound silence: gone was the reassuring buzz of an english summer, a sense that, somewhere, there was a game going on, a tale in the making, honey still for tea. For cricket lovers, checking the score is a comforting ritual. its loss was impossible to measure.

the previous summer had left optimism in the air. england were world champions, Ben Stokes the colossus of Leeds. there was hope cricket might overcome the disadvantage of the tV paywall. in early 2020, Stokes was at it again, inspiring a series victory in South Africa. england headed for Sri Lanka in March, and the new season could not start quickly enough. instead, cricket again shrank in the national mind.

Until now, the lack of a satellite dish had not necessarily left the game out of reach. Fans could always buy a ticket, assuming they could afford one. But playing behind closed doors removed that option, and so — initially — cricket’s relationship with its TV paymasters became more pliant than ever. the game was happening for one reason: broadcasting contracts. Sky’s coverage remained peerless, but when pundits were analysing rory Burns’s front-foot technique in an empty stadium, sport’s eternal balance between importance and irrelevance was too fine for comfort.

And yet cricket has always adapted. Not for the first time, it came back from the brink. With little else going on, even empty grounds began to resemble hives of activity. Fans found ways of staying in touch.

During the 2019 World cup, Test Match Special received 11.3m ‘online listening requests’; last summer, it was 14.5m, despite the test opponents being neither