Wisden honours Bazball heroes Brook and Wood

ENGLAND’S Harry Brook and Mark Wood are honoured, while Bazball is celebrated, in the latest edition of the cricketing bible.

Brook and Wood are named as two of the five cricketers of the year along with Australians Usman Khawaja and Mitchell Starc and Ashleigh Gardner from their all- conquering women’s team in the 161st Wisden Almanack, published today. Mail

Sport’s own Lawrence Booth lauds England’s audacious approach to Test cricket under skipper Ben Stokes and head coach Brendon McCullum in his brilliant editor’s notes.

Brook, who missed the tour of India to be with his seriously-ill grandmother, who has since died, is honoured after becoming England’s best and most important young batsman and playing crucial hands in the Ashes wins at Headingley and the Oval.

Wood, meanwhile, is included after ‘turning the Ashes on its head’ with his arrival for the third Test in Leeds when ‘he topped 96mph, took five for 34 and pushed Australia on to the back foot, literally and figuratively.’

Booth is an unashamed supporter of Bazball and gives an example of ticket sales for this summer’s slightly underwhelming Test series against West Indies and Sri Lanka as evidence of the importance of the work Stokes and McCullum are doing.

‘As Britain froze in the winter a tweet arrived to warm the cockles,’ he writes. ‘Tickets for the first three days of the Edgbaston

Test against West Indies in late July had sold out — unprecedented so far in advance of a non-Ashes match.

‘Amid the gloomy outlook for Test cricket, here was a glimmer of hope. Proof that if you put on a show, bums will fill seats. And the 2023 Ashes were a show all right, up there with 1981 and 2005.’