But during these dark days there remained one shining light: the irrepressible Darren Gough. A year prior to plummeting to the bottom of the pile, Dazzler emerged from the gloom and gave England supporters something to smile about by bowling his side to a famous victory over South Africa.

Darren Gough – Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1999

First published in the 1999 Wisden Almanack

There are two different England teams these days. This is nothing to do with the increasingly disparate Test and one-day sides, because the difference affects them both. One lot is the downbeat, fatalistic crew who have become all too familiar: heads bowed, expecting the worst. The other is seen when Darren Gough is fit and firing.

At Old Trafford against New Zealand in 1994, Gough made one of the most sensational Test debuts of modern times. He took a wicket in his first over and had figures of four for 47. Earlier, he had gone out and hit a rousing 65, with 10 fours. He was 23 years old. Everyone yelled “New Botham”, which was not a Yorkshire mining village but already a cliché, and later a rather sad joke.

That winter, with England having been humiliated in the Melbourne Test, they went to Sydney looking hopeless. One young man took the game by the scruff. England 309 (Gough 51, and a thrilling 51 at that). Australia 116 all out (Gough six for 49). The Test was not quite won, but its hero was suddenly the hottest property in English sport. He was young, good-looking, an authentic Yorkshireman with that air of sleeves-up defiance which the nation adores. Vast wealth as well as glory looked a certainty.

But Gough had felt pain in his left foot even while the cheers were echoing. He ignored it. In a one-day international a few days later, he broke down and went home with his foot in plaster. It took four years to recapture that exuberance, in which time his career veered between wretched injuries and fated comebacks. His batting form went to pieces. And at the start of England’s next Ashes tour, he became the sort of bowler everyone drops catches off, which was never Botham’s fate. He was a star who twinkled rather than blazed.

And yet the omens of 1994 have been proved right. And in 1998 he delivered. At Headingley, with his home crowd roaring him on, he ripped through South Africa’s second innings to settle the series: six for 42 – three of them in a dramatic opening burst. Then he was at the heart of England’s epic win in Melbourne before starting 1999 with a hat-trick in the Sydney Test. In any case, Gough’s contribution to the team cannot merely be computed. He is an inspirational cricketer in an uninspiring era. And his successes make the Tests he has missed even more poignant.

Darren Gough was born at Barnsley on September 18, 1970. No town in cricket has such a rich tradition of character and characters: Geoffrey Boycott, Dickie Bird, Michael Parkinson. Gough was not born straight into the tradition. His father, a pest control officer, was a sports fan rather than a performer. But young Darren quickly established himself as a breathtakingly good sportsman and, at school, was captain of football, rugby and athletics as well as cricket.

Football came first, and was the centre of Gough’s early ambitions as he went through the Barnsley FC youth system and then became a Government-funded trainee at Rotherham United. He was a midfielder – “stylish” he insists – modelling himself on Glenn Hoddle, and dreaming of a transfer to Tottenham. It never happened. “It was a time when football was all about quick runners, and I wasn’t good enough.” But then came another traineeship: this time with Yorkshire. And the club thought enough of him to give him a go in the first team right at the start of the 1989 season. The side travelled from Leeds to Lord’s by train. Darren’s dad took him to the station; David Bairstow, the captain, gave the lad, just 18, a big bearhug and promised Dad he would look after him. Pressure can override promises. Gough had to bowl 13 consecutive overs in the second innings. He ended up injured, and played only once more all season.

As seems to be Gough’s fate, fulfilment came slower than expected. He remained a member of the first-team squad, considered too valuable to be wasted much in the Second Eleven, but he was not getting enough chances to be kept happy. At the start of 1993, he thought he would give it one more season before thinking about another county. Then the opportunities came, and he grabbed them: 57 first-class wickets that season, followed by an A tour to South Africa, and his Test debut. But the glory was transient. He played again in 1995 when not quite ready. For a while, he ceased to be a certain choice, and was ignored (mysteriously) through the summer of 1996. In 1997, he began to feel pains in his left leg and was forced to pull out of the West Indies tour. When he reappeared, at Edgbaston, he broke a finger.

But the selectors knew now how much they wanted him: David Graveney, the chairman, called him the pulse of the team. And when Gough came back into the South Africa series, so did England. His bowling was highly skilled by now. Though he could not match Allan Donald on the speedometer, he was consistently quicker than anyone else, and was able to offer just about every other weapon in the fast bowling armoury as well – with the possible exception of really telling bounce. Pace bowlers like Gough who are not six-footers tend to produce deliveries that skid rather than leap.

Above all, though, in a team of brooders and worriers, he stood out for his bullish enthusiasm. England need Darren Gough, and not just for his wickets.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2012 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Mark Taylor – Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1990

First published in the 1990 Wisden Almanack

It was no coincidence that the Australian team’s record sequence of first-innings totals of 400 or more in nine consecutive Test matches in 1989 began with Mark Taylor’s arrival on the Test scene. The sturdily built 24-year-old left-hander from New South Wales was the missing link the selectors had been seeking, even though it meant breaking up the previously successful combination of Geoff Marsh and David Boon to accommodate him. The critical point in Taylor’s favour was his left-handedness, which allowed a return to the left- and right-hand opening combination advocated by Australia’s coach, Bob Simpson, whose own partnership with southpaw Bill Lawry in the 1960s had been so prolific.

Taylor’s arrival did more than disturb the line of the opposing new-ball bowlers. It triggered a chain reaction which slotted into place a previously fragmented batting order. Boon quickly relished his role as a strokeplaying third opener at No. 3, and Dean Jones, inconsistent against the new ball, moved down a place to No. 4 and then to No. 5, where he began collecting runs with a cocksure zest which ideally complemented the higher order. Yet without doubt it was Taylor, the least experienced of the top six, who was the key batsman in Australia’s triumphal march through England in the summer of 1989.

Before his arrival in England, Mark Anthony Taylor was virtually unknown outside Australia, apart perhaps from his unwitting role in the confusion that followed the selection of his offspinning club and state teammate, Peter Taylor, for the Sydney Test against England in January 1987. (Mark believed for three hours that he was in the Test team.) By the time he left England four months and 1,669 first-class runs later, his name was being written into the record books alongside some of the game’s immortals. His Test aggregate against England of 839 runs at an average of 83.90 had been bettered in an Ashes series only by Bradman and Hammond (both in five Tests to Taylor’s six), and at The Oval he had moved ahead of Neil Harvey, a fellow New South Wales left-hander, into third place on the all-time list of runscorers in a single series. By the end of the year, with two more centuries at home in the two Tests against Sri Lanka, he had become the first player to hit 1,000 runs in his first calendar year of Test cricket, finishing 1989 with 1,219 runs at an average of 64.15 from 11 Tests.

In the opinion of his captain, Allan Border, Taylor played the crucial innings of the Ashes series when, Australia having been sent in to bat on a suspect pitch, he batted throughout the first day of the first Test at Headingley, a ground littered with the broken dreams of previous Australian sides. Playing in only his third Test, Taylor was less interested in personal milestones than in surviving until six o’clock, and he spent a sleepless night on 96 before reaching his maiden Test century the following morning. He went on to make 136, and later that day Stephen Waugh also hit his first Test hundred in an Australian total of 601 for seven declared. The die had been cast.

Taylor was to become a familiar sight to England’s bowlers that summer. He occupied the crease for almost 38 hours – the equivalent of more than six full playing days – throughout the series. His 11 innings produced a sequence which read 136, 60, 62, 27, 43, 51, 85, 37 not out, 291, 71 and 48, with his 219 at Trent Bridge the highest in Ashes Tests in almost a quarter of a century. In that innings, he and Marsh batted throughout the first day for 301 and carried on the following day to 329, the highest opening stand in the history of Anglo-Australian cricket. Such was his consistency that in a sequence of 25 first-class innings on tour, he failed to get into the twenties or beyond only once. England’s selectors would have given their eye-teeth for such reliability.

Born in Leeton, New South Wales, on October 27, 1964, Taylor learned the basics of batting while his father threw cork compo balls to him in the concrete garage of their home in Wagga Wagga, where the family had moved when Mark was eight. The family cricketing hero was Arthur Morris, the great New South Wales left-hand opener, whose 1948 aggregate of 696 Taylor passed in the fifth Test at Trent Bridge. Morris wrote to congratulate him. He played his first organised cricket at South Wagga primary school when he was 10 and, always an opening batsman, scored his first century at the age of 13 for the Lake Albert club at Bolton in Wagga. Geoff Lawson, another product of the club, recalls watching the innings. The family then moved to Sydney, where Taylor played for Chatswood High School and in the Lindfield Shires under 16 grade before joining Northern Districts, where he still plays. He joined the Waugh twins, Stephen and Mark, in under 19 youth internationals for Australia against Sri Lanka in 1982/83.

Taylor, a qualified surveyor, broke into the state team at the start of the 1985/86 season and promptly scored nearly 1,000 runs in the first season. Another solid year was followed by a lean season in 1987/88, after which he spent an English summer with Greenmount, helping them win the Bolton League for the first time by scoring more than 1,300 runs at an average of 70. It was there that he gained the confidence to become a strokeplayer and so strugged off the “stodgy” label wwhich had been attached to him earlier in his career. That summer in Australia he was called into the Australian team for the last two Tests against the touring West Indians, even though he had not scored a century all season.

Like most of his Australian teammates, Taylor favours a light bat – about two and a half pounds – and a comfortable, traditional stance. Once considered primarily a legside player, he developed his offside driving in England, where he made a speciality of back-foot shots through the covers. He is a superb slip fieldsman – some say the best Australian since Simpson – and plays off a single-figure handicap at golf. Strangely, perhaps, he swings right-handed, but it is the least orthodox thing about him.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2012 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Rahul Dravid – Wisden Cricketer of the Year 2000

First published in the 2000 Wisden Almanack

Think of modern Indian batsmen, and the Englishman thinks of Tendulkar. Even regular cricket followers find it hard to recognise the other members of India’s top order. This may be a comment on the enduring gulfs in culture, or more simply, gaps in fixtures; but after the summer of 1999 it is an unsustainable position. India supplied two of the outstanding batsmen of the World Cup, and neither of them was Tendulkar.

Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid had introduced themselves three years earlier. They made their Test debuts together at Lord’s, Ganguly scoring 131 and Dravid 95 from No. 7. David Lloyd, then England coach, had been told by his observers that Ganguly would open the face of his bat outside off stump, while Dravid’s weakness was working the straight ball to leg. This dossier was quickly consigned to the out-tray.

Three years on, and the scene changes to Taunton, its bucolic traditions given over for a day to Asian exuberance. India are playing Sri Lanka in a World Cup group match. India lose a wicket in the opening over but they will not lose another until the total has reached 324. Ganguly and Dravid’s stand of 318 is, by a distance, a record for any wicket in international one-day cricket (until November, when Ganguly and Tendulkar raise it to 331). For Dravid, the day brings his second century in four days. Despite India’s failure to qualify for the second round, he would complete the tournament as its leading runscorer, and return home feted as a hero among perceived failures. To his embarrassment, Dravid fan clubs have sprung up, their membership loaded with teenage girls, and though his features may still be shamefully unfamiliar in England, they have attracted advertisers and film-makers in the land where star cricketers are national property.

RAHUL DRAVID was born in Indore on January 11, 1973. The son of a food scientist, he was firmly encouraged to complete his studies before branching into sport, and obtained a degree in commerce at Bangalore University. But he made his first-class debut at 18, for Karnataka, and scored 134 in his second match. He was soon identified as one of the meteors of Indian cricket. Shy and introspective, he did not seek attention, but it was to come his way naturally, through weight of runs and an impression of quiet authority that led him to captaining most of the teams he represented.

At first, his method was a painstaking one, his fierce determination to preserve his wicket matched by a desire to learn. In Toronto one year, he buttonholed Ian Chappell at a party and put searching questions to him for an hour. At Lord’s he learned how to succeed and how to fail, all in the same innings. Had he made five more runs, it would have been the first time in the history of Test cricket that two debutants in the same team had made centuries. “It hurt,” he recalls. “But I realised it would not do me any good to keep thinking about it.” He went out in the next Test and made 84.

At the start of 1999, India, a team that had spent too long confining its talents to one-day cricket, played a sudden raft of Test matches. They were beaten 1-0 in New Zealand, but the third game of that series, at Hamilton, belonged to Dravid, who made an elegant, eight-hour 190 in the first innings and followed it with 103 not out in the second. In Colombo seven weeks later, he made his fifth Test century, against Sri Lanka. By now, he had a Test average of 54 and had cemented his preferred place at No. 3.

Next, though, came the World Cup and further evidence that this pleasing player is far more capable than most of his countrymen on alien pitches, reason enough for Kent to engage Dravid as their overseas player for 2000. He was also to demonstrate that his game had moved on and that he was resourceful enough to dominate.

In late November, as he waited in a Mumbai hotel for the flight to Australia and another challenging chapter in his development, Dravid reflected on his golden year. “I have improved a lot since 1996,” he said earnestly, “but my game can still progress further.” Taunton, he said, had been “great fun, fantastic”, but the World Cup, overall, had left him with mixed emotions. “There are such expectations of us at home. We are followed very closely and people were disappointed. We had no excuses, although I thought we played well enough to reach the semi-finals.”

Dravid certainly did. His total of 461 runs, 63 more than his closest challenger Steve Waugh (Ganguly was third with 379), contained not only two successive centuries but also fifties under pressure against England and Pakistan. His batting was as undemonstrative as his personality, but as eloquent, too. It spoke of a man who has the time, both in technique and age, to graduate into the very highest company, and to do it with an understated, old-fashioned grace.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2012 edition of the Wisden Almanack.

Curtly Ambrose – Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1992

Published in the 1992 Wisden Almanack

The spectre of the gangling Curtly Ambrose will undoubtedly haunt those batsmen unfortunate enough to confront him in England in 1991, when the 27-year-old Antiguan carried all before him, and single-handedly almost stilled the nascent Test career of Graeme Hick, a figure so thoroughly disenchanted before the series was complete that the selectors were forced to drop him.

Ambrose has the ability to exert a debilitating psychological influence which so often precipitates a cluster of wickets after the initial breach has been made. It is no fun waiting in the wings, knowing your time is nigh. Hick, as an obvious example, often looked a sentenced man on his way to the crease, and this from a player who usually raced down the pavilion steps in expectation of the plunder to come.

No other explanation exists, either, for that telling passage off the first ball of the Fourth Test at Edgbaston, when Graham Gooch sparred at a widish loosener from Ambrose, only for Carl Hooper, uncharacteristically, to put the chance to grass. Surely no other bowler could have provoked such an involuntary response from the England captain.

Ambrose accounted for Hick six times out of seven before England’s new recruit was relieved of duty to undergo a very necessary period of recuperation outside the demanding environment of Test cricket. But in that he was not alone. Others before had had their profile reduced by the 6ft 7in marauder who was born on September 21, 1963 in Swetes, a village in the parched interior of Antigua.

Curtly Elconn Lynwall Ambrose grew up as a natural basketballer and considered migrating to the United States before starting cricket at seventeen, graduating from beach cricket and umpiring to the parish team. Andy Roberts was an early mentor, emphasising the psychological aspect of bowling and instilling a belief in Ambrose that he could join countrymen Baptiste, Ferris and Benjamin at the highest level.

After an early foray in the West Indies regional competition in 1985-86, when four wickets cost 35 runs apiece, he left an indelible mark on the 1987-88 competition in establishing a record of 35 wickets at only 15.51 during his first full season, thereby erasing Winston Davis’s previous tournament best of 33, which had stood since 1982-83.

The West Indian selectors immediately pitched him into Test cricket that April, against Pakistan at Bourda, but it was an inauspicious début, coinciding with West Indies’ first home defeat for a decade.

In 1986, at Viv Richards’s instigation, Ambrose had summered in England, playing for Chester Boughton Hall in the Liverpool Competition, where he is remembered as “an inveterate late arriver, though he only lived across the road.” The following year he moved to Heywood in the Central Lancashire League, in which he garnered 115 cheap wickets, and in 1988 he was back again, but this time as a member of the West Indian touring team.

Extremely shy and retiring, and sometimes lugubrious in his formative years as a cricketer, he never enjoyed the tag of “pro” and has tended towards recluseness beneath the ubiquitous “Walkman”. Yet he occasionally gives evidence of a rare humour. Once asked which was his favourite football team, he replied, “Crown Paints, man!”

If, as his name suggests, he is not quite a Lindwall in terms of the range of his bowling, he does have outright pace and he generates a disconcerting, steepling bounce from fuller-length deliveries. But while he was once no-balled for throwing, by the Trinidadian umpire, Clyde Cumberbatch, in the Leewards’ first match of the 1987-88 Red Stripe Cup, against Trinidad & Tobago at Guaracara Park, Ambrose’s action is unequivocally legal.

His height and a slender, sinewy wrist contribute greatly to the final velocity, the wrist snapping forward at the instant of release to impart extra thrust to the ball’s downward trajectory. Michael Holding had this vital asset, and Courtney Walsh’s wrist action, too, has given rise to notions of illegal delivery. Never a great swinger of the ball, he compensates with a smooth, leggy run-up, fast arm action and accuracy.

Like Joel Garner, he possesses a lethal yorker and a nasty bouncer, but his career-best eight for 45 against hapless England at Bridgetown in 1990 owed everything to the virtues of speed and straightness. Five victims were lbw, pinned to their stumps as Ambrose squared a series England had waged so gallantly until then.

Jeffrey Dujon’s station has allowed him a unique insight into the relative merits of the phalanx of West Indies quicks over the years, and in his assessment Holding was undeniably the fastest, while Roberts, an introvert and a deep thinker, was capable of delivering two different bouncers with no discernible change in action. “Wonderful control was the essence, and the faster one shocked some very good batsmen,” Dujon affirms.

He reserves special affection, too, for the relatively inexperienced Ambrose, who he reckons has the credentials to take his place among the greats. “He is mature beyond his years, has pace, accuracy, heart and determination, plus, importantly, real pride in economical figures.”

The crucial question now is for how long a spindly frame can withstand the rigours of Test-match bowling. Ambrose has spearheaded West Indies’ attack for four years, and Richards, his captain, has already demanded a considerable work-load; yet his appetite for the game and that keen concern for the economy rate have remained undimmed.

His consistency has become a byword since the 1988 tour of England, his first, which produced 22 Test wickets at cost 20.22. In Australia in 1988-89 he was the most outstanding performer with 26 wickets at 21.46, and last summer against England his 28 wickets cost 20 apiece. Moreover, he was arguably the essential difference between the two sides in what proved to be a zestful series.

Assuredly, not many batsmen will relish another confrontation, but they have at least been granted some respite. West Indies’ next full series is not until the winter of 1992-93, in Australia, when “Amby” will be looking to improve on an outstanding Test record of 140 wickets at 23.14. By then, he will have entered the peak years for a bowler of his type, 28 to 32, still with only five years of international cricket behind him. It is an awesome prospect.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2012 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Mushtaq Ahmed – Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1997

Published in the 1997 Wisden Almanack

By taking 45 wickets in six Tests for Pakistan between November 1995 and August 1996 Mushtaq Ahmed confirmed his status as the final member – alongside Shane Warne and Anil Kumble – of a glittering triumvirate of wrist-spinners who adorn the modern game. Mushtaq is the most enchanting of the lot.

Warne’s success stems from prodigious spin and accuracy, Kumble’s from prodigious bounce and accuracy; like superbly schooled sheepdogs, both pen batsmen down before picking them off with clinical ruthlessness. Mushtaq prefers to lure batsmen to their end in the traditional manner. He is the arch-deceiver, possessing every nefarious variation in the wrist-spinner’s armoury.

Unlike the others, he has a googly which is indecipherable to most international batsmen. His instincts are to outwit opponents rather than wear them down.

He is the most impetuous of the trio, which is often betrayed by the frenzied nature of his appealing. He cannot hide his exasperation when a batsman thrusts his front leg down the pitch in the pretence of playing a shot without being penalised by umpires, who are often equally bamboozled by his spin.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I tell the umpire a straight one is coming, so watch out” – a ploy that has yet to meet with conspicuous success. He has usually been the most expensive of the three in his headlong pursuit of wickets rather than maidens. Indeed, at Brisbane in November 1995, this profligacy led to his omission from the Test team.

Sometimes his variations were too pronounced and too frequent. When he was at Somerset in 1995, many opponents, following the advice of Martin Crowe, started to play him as an off-spinner because he impatiently bowled so many googlies. For a while his county colleagues nicknamed him Tauseef after the Pakistani off-spinner of the 1980s. In Australia he talked to Warne, more about the mental approach to wrist-spinning than the mechanics. Warne stressed the benefits of restricting batsmen and of preying on their frustration. Mushtaq took note.

Recalled for the two Tests in Hobart and Sydney, he gathered 18 wickets; there were ten more at Christchurch against New Zealand. But his maturity was confirmed in the three-Test series against England in the summer of 1996. He spun Pakistan to victory on the final afternoons at Lord’s and The Oval. His innate competitiveness was now allied to patience, and this became clear to all at Lord’s. Having bowled 48 overs since taking a wicket in England’s first innings, he suddenly mesmerised the batsmen, conjuring figures of five for 11 from 57 balls between lunch and tea.

On the last day at The Oval, he bowled 30 overs unchanged from the Vauxhall End to take six for 67, which he regards as his finest Test spell yet. He recognised that Mike Atherton was the key English batsman, and on both final days he dismissed him when bowling – Warne-style – from around the wicket. Once Atherton was gone, the rest of the English order was nonplussed as Mushtaq whirled out an assortment of unrecognisable deliveries. In the glow of victory, his grateful captain, Wasim Akram, proclaimed that Mushtaq was better than Warne.

His conversations with Warne had been productive, but his first role model was inevitably Abdul Qadir, Pakistan’s impish leg-spinner of the 1980s. As a nine-year-old in Sahiwal, where Mushtaq was born on June 28, 1970, he would bounce up to the wicket aping Qadir and he soon discovered that he could torment much larger schoolfriends with his looping, teasing tweakers. He first haunted English batsmen at the age of 17 during the notorious 1987-88 tour by Mike Gatting’s side, taking six for 81 for the Punjab Chief Minister’s XI in his home town.

In January 1990, he flew out to Australia to replace Abdul Qadir and made his Test debut in Adelaide. However, his first international excursion was notable for the wrong reasons; in the next match, a state game in Melbourne, he was warned for running on the pitch by umpire Robin Bailhache, who eventually instructed the captain for the day, Ramiz Raja, to remove Mushtaq from the attack.

The Pakistan team refused to accept this ruling and walked off the ground; play could be resumed only after an uneasy compromise had been hatched. The 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand prompted happier memories. Pakistan won the tournament and Mushtaq’s bag of 16 wickets was a vital contribution. In the final against England he took three crucial wickets – Hick, who was completely baffled by that googly, Gooch and Reeve. Curiously, at this stage of his career Mushtaq, despite being a wrist-spinner, was more effective – and more secure – in Pakistan’s one-day team.

During the victorious 1992 tour of England, during which he captured 15 Test wickets, he was signed up by Somerset. He quickly proved to be an inspired recruit. In two and a half seasons he took 217 Championship wickets. He became as popular as any of his illustrious predecessors at Taunton – in the dressing-room, the committee rooms, the kitchens and the members’ stand.

Cricket chairman Brian Rose recalls: “The whole process of signing him took five minutes – he was so keen to come. He has been the model overseas player; he wins matches for the club and adds members. At Taunton, he is happy to bowl all day and he usually does; in the absence of Waqar Younis he is even allowed the luxury of bowling at the tail.”

But a 40-over spell from Mushtaq is never dull; every over is an adventure. One of his ambitions is to take 100 wickets in a season for Somerset – his best haul so far is 92. He is also the most entertaining of tailenders, who once won a Test with his bat, when he added 57 with Inzamam-ul-Haq for the last wicket to defeat Australia in Karachi in 1994-95. His batting, like his motoring, should be keenly observed; it is erratic and potentially destructive

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2012 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Graeme Hick – Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1987

Published in the 1987 Wisden Almanack

At any one time there are perhaps half-a-dozen cricketers in England who inspire people to say: Ah, I think I’ll go to that match tomorrow just to watch him play. Usually, such a compelling player is a batsman, such as David Gower or Viv Richards or Martin Crowe. In 1986, the name of Graeme Ashley Hick was added to that élite list of cricketers who actively excite followers of the game.

Nineteen years of age at the season’s start, Hick was the first to make 1,000 first-class runs. A tall, broad, white-hatted wielder of a Duncan Fearnley blade, like Crowe, he went on to become one of two to score 2,000 runs, and thereby claimed another title: that of being, at twenty, the youngest batsman to reach this figure in an English season. Len Hutton was 21 when he did so in 1937. It is hard to think there have been many better players at his age than Graeme Hick.

From the start he has been a prodigy. Born on May 23, 1966 in Harare, Zimbabwe, or Salisbury, Rhodesia, as the capital then was, Hick was six years and eight months old when he made his first century, with his own bat and without a box as he remembers. His 105 not out was scored against Mangula Junior School, and it contained 24 4s, the ball travelling quickly over a hard bush ground short of grass. His father, John Hick, had twice represented the district of Mashonaland as a middle-order batsman; he had already taken his son into Salisbury to watch Graeme Pollock bat in Currie Cup matches. But the schoolboy Hick, able at tennis, athletics and hockey (he came to play for the national schools team), did not give particular attention to cricket at first. He simply bowled his high, turning off-breaks for Banket Junior School in 1975– and took 115 wickets for 347 runs, at an average of 3.02 each! As an opening batsman he had made no more than half-a-dozen hundreds by 1979, when he dropped to number three in the Prince Edward High School Under-14 team and served notice of his exceptional talent. That year he acquired the habit of making large, undefeated centuries, and averaged 185 for his school.

The following year, 1980, when living at the family home on the Trelawney tobacco-farming estate, he was found to have meningitis in its milder form. The delay was considerable, but the path already established. For the rest of his schooldays Hick ascended through the various grades: from the national Junior Schools team (of which he was captain), to the Fawns, to the Senior Schools side. So rapid was the progress that at seventeen, while still at school, Hick was selected as a member of the Zimbabwe World Cup party of 1983– the youngest player to have been selected for that country, or for a World Cup tournament.

In 1984 he went to Worcestershire on a Zimbabwe Cricket Union scholarship: at the season’s end he was allowed a Championship début against Surrey and had made 82 when time expired. In 1985, for Worcestershire and the touring Zimbabweans, he scored 1,265 runs at 52.70. His county, needless to say, were happy to preside over the growth of an extraordinary skill. They were especially impressed by the hungry way in which Hick approached his batting, often reaching the crease before the dismissed batsman had dragged himself from the field; by the orthodoxy and straightness of his style, tainted only by the steer through gully that has been forced upon so many by one-day cricket; by his strength, which he has developed through weight-lifting and is the strength of an amiable giant; by his pursuit of excellence, which somehow seems more attainable for a colonial than for someone bred in England; and by his method against short-pitched bowling. Hick pulls along the ground in front of square leg if he plays a shot– no top-edged hooking down to fine leg.

He began last season in fine form, having rewritten a few records at home during the winter. Ireland, touring Zimbabwe, had complained that they were not meeting good enough cricketers, and Hick was called in from his coaching duties around the schools. In a one-day game against Ireland he hit 155 not out (nine 6s, thirteen 4s) in 116 minutes. The next day, a three-day match began against them and Hick was 112 not out overnight. The following day he went on to 309 in less than seven hours (the next highest score was 58). His was the highest ever innings for Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia, or against Ireland.

Back with Worcestershire, centuries flowed like the Severn: two came in the Benson and Hedges Cup, bringing Gold Awards, and six in the Championship. He considered the double-century at Neath was the most enjoyable, the best being the one against Gloucestershire on an uneven wicket at Worcester, when he took some bruises from Courtney Walsh and David Lawrence. Essex were the only other county to choose a batsman regularly as their one overseas player. Neither should Hick’s capacious handed slip-catching be forgotten, nor the potential of those off-breaks.

By the end of the season the question centred not on whether Hick was a great batsman in the making but on which country he would represent. Not Zimbabwe: reluctantly, yet understandably, Hick decided to sever the link with his native land in order to prove himself in Test cricket. New Zealand have sounded him out, offering a four-year qualification period. He was told that he could play for England only in 1991, after ten year’s residence. By then many more runs will surely have flowed beneath the bridge besides New Road.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2012 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Devon Malcolm – Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1995

Published in the 1995 Wisden Almanack

Devon Malcolm is an unlikely hero. He can be erratic, he is hopelessly short-sighted, and at times he is wildly inaccurate. But he possesses an athleticism and physical strength which he combines with an ungainly, almost uncoordinated delivery to produce bowing which at best is lightning fast and straight, and at worst searches in vain for the cut strip.

Ask any South African cricketer and they will have just one memory of the man. Fearsomely fast, searingly straight and awesomely aggressive, devastating Devon was the hero of The Oval in 1994. His 9-57 in the second innings demolished and demoralised South Africa in a way that only outstanding fast bowling can. The analysis was the sixth-best in the history of Test cricket and it elevated Malcolm into English cricketing folklore.

Since twin tours were introduced in England in 1965, no team had ever come back to win or draw a three-match series after falling one behind. England in their selection threw caution to the wind, abandoning hope of fielding a balanced attack in favour of all-out speed. Malcolm was delivered from Chesterfield and Eastbourne and thrust into his favourite arena.

The Oval’s pitch with its generous pace and bounce provided him with an ideal surface on which to perform and rejuvenate his flagging career. Malcolm felt he had been publicly humiliated when sent away from the Lord’s Test match against New Zealand 24 hours before the game. Sensibly, he retained a faith in his own ability and also a respect for the England captain Mike Atherton who as an accomplished opening batsman realises more than most the unsettling effect of raw pace.

Devon Eugene Malcolm was born on February 22, 1963 in Kingston, Jamaica. His father Albert supported the family by working in England, and his mother Brendalee died when Devon was five, leaving him to be brought up by his grandmother in the Jamaican town of St Elizabeth. At school he enjoyed all sports, particularly sprinting, cricket and football. But it was not until he went to join his father in Sheffield in 1979, and began studying at Richmond College, that his cricketing talent was recognised. The college had a cricket team, but it was made up of old boys and staff and Devon became the first student member.

He kept taking five wickets and on his own admission kept scaring people, so much so that his prowess was highlighted in the Sheffield Star. In 1981 he played in the same Yorkshire schools side as Ashley Metcalfe and progressed via Sheffield Caribbean and Sheffield United to selection for the Yorkshire League XI which played the county side in April 1984. His two prized scalps that afternoon were Geoffrey Boycott and Martyn Moxon, both clean bowled.

That performance must have left Yorkshire wondering if the Kingston on Malcolm’s birth certificate might be the Hull variety rather than the Jamaican. But at that stage the strict Yorkshire-born policy applied. He signed for Derbyshire later that season. He told Phil Russell, the Derbyshire coach, that he didn’t want any money for playing, he would play for the love of it. His love of the game has been sorely tested since that day, his career being a constant rollercoaster of selections and non-selections for both Derbyshire and England. Derbyshire, with a large stock of seam bowlers, have had a policy of rest and rotation, believing this is in the best interests of the player, though Malcolm himself thrives on hard work.

Nevertheless, Malcolm was and always will be a raw quick bowler, who will remain indebted to Russell for encouraging him to bowl as fast as possible, and to his fellow Jamaican and teammate at Derby, Michael Holding, who emphasised the levels of concentration that were needed to bowl fast and highlighted the one single factor that transforms Malcolm, more than any other bowler, from also-ran to dangerman: “Follow through straight.”

Since qualifying to play for England, by residence, in 1987, and his triumph at The Oval he played 28 Test matches and took 98 wickets at an average of 35. These are hardly startling figures and reflect the erratic nature of his career. But by the winter of 1989/90 his strike bowling capabilities were well recognised, and his waywardness countered and complemented by a partnership with the admirably straight Angus Fraser. The duo bowled England to an improbable victory in Jamaica, where Malcolm blew away the West Indians’ key batsmen in the second innings, and to the verge of victory in Port of Spain where a match analysis of 10-137 gave him his best and most aggressive performance to date.

His dislike of the generally slower and flatter pitches in England and his apparent inability to adapt to these conditions limited his appearances to the extent that by 1993 he was chosen only for the Oval Test, where he took six wickets against the hitherto rampant Australians. With a West Indies tour coming up after that, he was a natural choice to lead the attack in the winter, but the first serious injury of his career, picked up in the Jamaica Test, scuppered his chances of glory. And when he was dropped again after one Test against New Zealand in 1994, many thought that, at 31, he was finished as a Test cricketer. No one, not even Malcolm at his most resolute, could have dreamed what was to follow when he came back to face South Africa at The Oval.

After a first-day argument, that he describes as healthy, with his captain over the bowling of bouncers at De Villiers and Donald (Atherton wanted them delivered, Malcolm didn’t), events conspired to produce his definitive fast bowing performance. Inspired by the batting efforts of DeFreitas and Gough on Friday evening, goaded into retaliation by a blow between the eyes from a De Villiers bouncer, and kept calm by the reggae on his Walkman in the dressing-room, Devon bowled England to victory and himself into the history books.

P. S. Tradition dictates that we have to mention his batting. He was once officially described, by Conrad Hunte in his capacity as Test match referee, as “one of the worst No. 11s in the game”. It is entertaining, though.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2011 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Damien Martyn – Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 2002

Published in the 2002 Wisden Almanack

Of all the Australian cricketers who swatted aside England during last summer’s Ashes series, Damien Martyn was easily the least well known. Others, such as the Waugh twins, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, had been plying their golden standards of Pommie torture for years. Yet Martyn, and in particular his graceful and uncluttered strokeplay, seemed to arrive almost without warning.

To be bracketed among such elite company is the apogee of praise, even in Australia. It may have helped that England’s bowlers were rarely at their best as a unit, but Martyn made the most of his opportunities, scoring his maiden Test century in the opening match at Edgbaston and adding another in Australia’s shock defeat at Headingley. In a rubber Australia took 4-1, he finished the series with 382 runs and an average of 76.40. Yet impressive as his figures were, and they were pretty eye-catching, it was Martyn’s back-foot cover-driving that was the sight of the summer, each stroke a perfect marriage of minimal effort and maximum timing. Because he was brought up on the true, high-bouncing pitches of Perth, his instinct is to stand tall and hit through the line, an action that, despite a distinct lack of footwork, brought him sundry boundaries in the arc between cover and mid off.

Aptly dubbed White Lightning, Donald took 330 wickets in 72 Tests when South Africa returned to the international scene in 1991 but English cricket fans were already familiar with his devastating pace after he had wreaked havoc in county cricket with Warwickshire.

Allan Donald – Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1992

Published in the 1992 Wisden Almanack

The time was October 1986, the place Bloemfontein, the occasion a pre-season celebratory dinner, given by their supporters, for the Orange Free State team. The players, a set of enthusiastic youngsters, were headed by Corrie van Zyl, then the best young fast bowler in South Africa. But Roger Prideaux, the former England, Sussex and Northamptonshire batsman, drew attention to someone else. “That’s the bowler I would take into county cricket,” he said. “He’s nearly 20, and he has as much genuine potential to be fast as any bowler I’ve seen.”

That bowler was Allan Anthony Donald, born on October 20, 1966 in Bloemfontein, where he was educated at the Technical High School and went on to be selected for the South African Schools XI in 1984, as 12th man, and 1985. He made his début for Orange Free State in 1985/86, against Transvaal at The Wanderers, having Jimmy Cook caught behind early on, and since then he has become one of the leading fast bowlers in world cricket. Arguably he is one of only two white bowlers, Australia’s Craig McDermott being the other, who could have forced his way into a full-strength West Indies side in 1991.

Figures can be misleading or unrepresentative, but Donald’s, compared with those of David Lawrence and Devon Malcolm to the end of the 1991 season, provide a telling story. A comparison with Curtly Ambrose’s record is similarly revealing.

The speed of Donald’s advance, even among a breed of cricketer which reaches its peak sooner than most, is outstanding, particularly as he has had to overcome two major problems. The occasional advantage of bowling fast all year round is heavily outweighed by the strain imposed on his body, and Donald has received regular advice from both Warwickshire and Orange Free State about the need to conserve his talent. But while that is a problem, common to most overseas bowlers who ply their trade in England, a bigger one for Donald was fighting his way through the maze of Warwickshire’s contractual obligations to cricketers from abroad.

From 1987 to 1989, he shared the overseas slot at Edgbaston with the West Indian fast bowler, Tony Merrick, and in the first two seasons he managed only 18 first-class games to Merrick’s 30. Such was his glittering promise, however, that in 1989 he headed the national averages with 86 wickets at 16.25 apiece and played an important part in Warwickshire’s success in the NatWest Bank Trophy. It came as no surprise when Warwickshire released Merrick at the end of the summer, and it appeared that all the arguements concerning overseas players had come to an end.

But not so. The county signed Tom Moody for 1990, with the intention of playing him in the Sunday League so that Donald would be spared the strain sometimes brought about by bowling off a shortened run-up. In the event, what happened helped to precipitate a crisis within the club which came close to ending Donald’s career at Edgbaston. Injury, followed by loss of form and confidence, coincided with a magnificent series of Championship innings from Moody and led to Donald being resigned to the fact that the big Australian would be preferred to him for 1991. Happily, the Warwickshire committee decided in the South African’s favour, not only on cricketing grounds but also on the ethical ones of honoring a long-term contract.

Last summer Donald repaid Warwickshire’s faith in him by bowling them to the verge of the Britannic Assurance Championship title, taking 83 wickets at 19.68 to finish behind Waqar Younis in the national first-class averages. Until the last three weeks of the season, his captain, Andy Lloyd, rigidly restricted him to spells of no more than five or six overs, even when he was taking wickets. But Donald showed great reserves of stamina and courage by bowling unchanged for 20 overs in the final home game against Northamptonshire, despite a back injury, and his six for 69 in the second innings to win that game, and another six in the first innings at Taunton, took to eight his five-wicket returns in 1991. Only Waqar Younis exceeded that figure, and twice Donald finished with 10 wickets in a match.

His physical attributes are there for all to see. A magnificent natural athlete, he has a not over-long run-up, which accelerates him into a high, balanced, slightly open action. Despite this openness, he still has that priceless ability to run the ball away from the right-handed batsman, both in the air and off the pitch. He bowls a fuller length than most fast men – a deliberate change of method in 1991 – which is why some 70 per cent of his wickets were either bowled, lbw or caught at the wicket. Occasional losses of rhythm, with their subsequent diminution of effectiveness, occurred less frequently last summer, and Donald’s ability to cope with the pressure of international cricket brought him instant success in South Africa’s historic week in India in November.

Bowlers capable of genuine speed rarely sustain fitness and form for more than a decade, and Donald is now halfway through that period. The best is yet to come; the question is, for how long? His physique and action should carry him through another five years – always provided that his commitments to Warwickshire, Orange Free State and now South Africa are treated sensibly by all parties.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2011 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Richie Richardson – Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1992

Published in the 1992 Wisden Almanack

For the West Indies on their 1991 tour of England, the satisfactions were not so numerous as usual. Carl Hooper developed a measure of consistency, and Curtly Ambrose was as accurate as fast hostility can be, but nobody made a great leap forward – nobody, that is, except their No. 3 batsman, Richie Richardson. As the season went on, and he finally adapted to English conditions, the Antiguan in a maroon sunhat progressed from cold to hot like the summer itself. And in the autumn Richardson’s career could also be said to have reached fruition, when he was appointed to succeed Viv Richards as captain of West Indies.

Richardson arrived in England in May with two distinct reputations. One was for being the most brilliant hard-wicket batsman of the moment. Against Australia in the immediately preceding series, he had scored 182 at Bourda in Guyana during only 70 overs at the wicket. After Australia had been dismissed for a fairly safe total of 348 on the second afternoon, Richardson blazed away at a match-winning rate until the athleticism of Australia’s fielders counted for nothing, and he continued the next morning. “It was like being in a trance,” Richardson recalled, “and it was one of those rare occasions when it carried on overnight.” Whatever it felt like, the innings not only won the match but also, by demoralising his opponents, the series.

On the other hand was Richardson’s second reputation, for being no sort of soft-wicket player. He had never done anything of note in England; and until he had done something, he was going to be denied the accolade of world-class batsman. His chances were understandably few on his first tour in 1984, for Larry Gomes was preferred for his solidity and his experience of English conditions. But in 1988, even after several seasons in English and Welsh leagues, Richardson again had a lean time, before injury cost him his place in the last two Tests. In the thoughtful, open, yet undemonstrative way that is his style, he admits that he listened to too many people advising him to push forward to stifle seam movement. By last summer he had worked out that he could still play his blazing, bottom-handed square-drives and slashes, so long as he was patient and waited for the ball to reach him. The result was that he became the leading run-maker on either side in the series and emerged as a world-class batsman, the heir to Weekes, Worrell, Walcott, Kanhai, Sobers and Richards himself as a strokeplayer of the highest quality and entertainment.

Richardson’s scores through the summer tell of his advance. He made 3, 13 and 41 in the one-day internationals. In the Tests he scored 29 (run out) and 68 (top score of the innings) at Headingley; 57 and 1 at Lord’s; 43 and 52 not out in the nine-wicket victory at Trent Bridge; 104 and 0 in the seven-wicket victory at Edgbaston; and 20 and 121 at The Oval. Both of his centuries were of the grafting type, though in the fifth Test he did spurt from 85 to 99 off four balls from David Lawrence. In fact, England had to be grateful that Richardson was never offered a match situation in which he could blaze away without restraint. The failure of Phil Simmons meant that the No. 3 never had the platforms which Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes had customarily given him, and this made his advance the more creditable.

Bowlers who have been ferociously square-driven – according to Ian Chappell, Richardson at Bourda gave the finest exhibition of square-driving since Everton Weekes – might be surprised to learn that Richardson was a defensive batsman as a schoolboy. Born in Five Islands, Antigua, on January 12, 1962, Richard Benjamin Richardson grew to be the captain of the first team at Ottos Comprehensive School, batted at No. 4 and never made a century. The circumstances, however, explain a lot: school matches in Antigua consisted of one day’s play and two innings per side. In any event, he was noted by the coach, Guy Yearwood, who worked on further tightening his defence.

The strokes – those uninhibited strokes, in which he seems to throw the kitchen sink as well as everything else at the ball – were developed in the nets and in the middle, when Richardson, initially an opening batsman for the Leeward Islands, found that a succession of fast bowlers gave him few chances to score conventionally. He learnt to use the hook as a most productive stroke, especially on West Indian grounds with their short boundaries, but circumspectly. Yet he has never worn a helmet or a chest protector to date, like his strokeplaying predecessors of yore, but like Viv Richards alone among contemporary Test players.

However, there has been another quality in Richardson’s cricket, in addition to his batting and the excitement which it can generate. On his Test début, against India in 1983, he hit his second ball into his pad, and after an orchestrated appeal by the close fielders, supported by much of Bombay, he was given out leg-before. It was a forlorn figure who walked back to the pavilion, not a petulant one; and ever after Richardson has been as sportsmanlike as any of his peers. While batting, or in the slips, he has not indulged in those marginal practices which have made a code of conduct necessary. “Fairness comes from within,” says Richardson, whose upbringing was informed with his family’s Christianity, and so far he has suited the action to the word.

When Richards broke a finger on the first day of the 1989/90 domestic season, Richardson took over the captaincy of the Leeward Islands until Richards’s return, for the final game. By then, winning their first four matches, the Leewards has already claimed their first title in the history of the Red Stripe Cup, or the Shell Shield as it had previously been. Enjoying the responsibility after early nerves, Richardson was the leading runscorer in the competition, with an aggregate of 421 runs at 70.16. And while he was fortunate to have two experienced bowlers in Ambrose (his roommate on West Indian tours) and Eldine Baptiste, Leeward islands teams had boasted greater talents in the past without translating their potential into victory.

It might have been politically expedient if Desmond Haynes, as a Barbadian, had taken over from Richards as the West Indian captain, if only as an interregnum between the two Antiguans. But the West Indian Board was sufficiently impressed by Richardson’s attributes to invest in him, just as he has prudently invested for the future in a duty-free shop and a sports store in the Antiguan capital of St John’s. By the age of 29 the man in the maroon sunhat had become an outstanding batsman. He also had it in him to become an outstanding leader.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2011 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Martin Crowe – Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1985

Published in the 1985 Wisden Almanack

At the age of 21, Martin David Crowe, who was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on September 22, 1962, achieved in his first season of county cricket what most cricketers would have considered impossible. In terms of cricket, the esteem of colleagues and public respect, he managed to fill, with poise and dignity, the enormous gap left in Somerset’s ranks by the absence of Vivian Richards, who was touring with the West Indians. In any context this was a remarkable achievement. Set against the background of a broken thumb and food poisoning, suffered on the New Zealand tour of Sri Lanka, the anxiety to do well in a strange environment, home-sickness and a most depressing first month, it was astonishing.

The last week in May, played out on awkward pitches, brought the nadir of his fortunes. He was dismissed for single figures in five consecutive innings. Then the character of the man, the utterly correct, old-fashioned batting technique, and the innate self-examination unusual in one so young, shone through into four centuries in successive Championship games, a golden June of 719 runs at an average of 143.8, and, overall, a superb season. Some 2,600 runs, 1,870 of them first-class, 44 first-class wickets, and numerous one-day triumphs which brought two match awards, plus some brilliant fielding, rounded things off splendidly.

The day after the season ended with that momentous Championship-decider against Nottinghamshire at Taunton, Martin looked back over it all. ”I’ve enjoyed it immensely, more than I thought I would,” he said. “I probably learned more in six months than in six years before, and developed a greater awareness of everything that goes on in the middle. I seem to be able to understand the game more now. I’ve been prepared to accept everything that’s gone on, and analysed why things have happened, and I’ve now got a lot of answers that I probably didn’t have before. I found it very much harder than I expected, day in, day out, with all the distractions of one-day cricket, the John Player, the travelling, and all the different types of situations. There were times when I wondered if it was all worth it. For a while, these counter-balanced what success I had.”

One turning-point was the match against Leicestershire – then Championship leaders – at Taunton in late June. On a fresh pitch, Somerset were in trouble against a fit and hostile Andy Roberts. Crowe reckoned his 70 not out was “the gutsiest innings I played. I was up against a guy in form, and it was a fantastic experience in the sense that it frightened the death out of me. All of a sudden I would forget about technique, or just batting. It was total instinct, like fighting blow for blow. Looking back, it upset me that I lost control; at the same time, I had the technique and ability to get through it while I was taking blows and giving a few back. I’ll need that experience again one day, especially against West Indies.”

In the second innings he made 190, which was generally assessed as a brilliant effort. It also gave him a very high regard for his partner, Peter Roebuck, whose 128 helped to give Somerset an almost incredible victory. Needing 341 to win in 87 overs, Somerset were 3-2 when they started their record stand of 319. “That was a steady, controlled sort of innings,” Crowe said, based on the fact that Somerset were looking just to survive and play out the day. Then they turned round and had a good last session.

Sport runs deep in the Crowe family, with Martin’s elder brother, Jeff, a Test player, his father a first-class cricketer, and his mother probably the country’s best all-round sportsman. Martin was a rugby man at school, and now enjoys squash, tennis and golf with the rest of the family. He went through the whole cricket system, eventually becoming the youngest first-class débutant. “Dad’s got to take all the credit for that,” he said. In due course came his first experiences in England, with a scholarship to the Lord’s groundstaff in 1981, league cricket with Bradford in 1982, and the New Zealand tour to England, combined with the World Cup, in 1983.

Though he had his early heroes in Garry Sobers, Mark Burgess and Glenn Turner, he never modelled his cricket on any one individual. Giving a glimpse of the own-man attitude which quietly adorns a determined character, he was, he guessed, “too busy playing my own little game.” Reminded of Greg Chappell’s early days with Somerset, he commented: “It’d be nice to score half his runs.”

Somerset’s team injuries in 1984 led to much more use than expected being made of his lively in-swingers, with some good results. Although he saw himself as a bits and pieces bowler in the line-up he enjoyed it and was always observing and analysing in search of improvement.

His great contribution on the field did not stop there. He made some excellent friends among all his teammates. They all made contributions that were valuable. “I don’t really look at statistics. The friendships I made were probably most important.” Perceptively observing that some of the younger players needed more purpose and pride in their jobs, he formed the Young Nags Club (uncapped players only, wearing ties and jackets; capped players by invitation). It was a great success. They met regularly at the Nag’s Head, a pub near Taunton, to discuss problems, have a meal, levy fines for misconduct on and off the field, and enjoy themselves in a purposeful way. The theme of maturity was maintained inasmuch as Crowe was by no means the oldest.

Certainly Martin Crowe made an indelible impact in one season, and Somerset will greatly welcome his decision to keep in touch – on a part-time basis over the next two years, during some strenuous New Zealand tours. The question of his long-term plans he will have to leave until the end of New Zealand’s tour to England in 1986. Whatever he decides, the warmest of welcomes will always await him in Somerset.

The 2005 Ashes will not rank as one of Punter’s fonder memories, but despite relinquishing the urn he cemented his reputation as the best Aussie batsman since Bradman with one of the great rearguard innings. 

Ricky Ponting – Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 2006

Published in the 2006 Wisden Almanack

After that most delirious of summers, now destined to bore countless thousands of unborn grandchildren, it might seem perverse-to-absurd to include in this annual salute to excellence a batsman whose Test average dipped, who made arguably the worst decision by an Australian captain in 30 years, who was fined for what might be called excessive surliness and lost the Ashes.

Yet Ricky Ponting joins this unique roll-call for any number of reasons, some of which approach the abstract; not least, for example, is the one that it takes two to tango. Without Ponting’s own particular persona combating Michael Vaughan’s very different one, the chemical formulae that exploded into the 2005 Ashes would not have reacted as spectacularly as they did. Ponting’s flaws and strengths were all part of the magic mix.

His strengths included one of the great matchsaving innings – by far the most consequential batting performance by an Australian all summer: the 156 at Old Trafford, when he stood between Australia and total Ashes meltdown. It was his 23rd Test century, made in circumstances far rougher than most of the others.

Ponting’s greatness as a batsman has never been in dispute, nor his place in the Wisden pantheon. In 2004, he was the first recipient, by acclamation rather than vote, of the almanack’s newest award, the Leading Cricketer in the World. That came after a 2003 when he led Australia to victory in the World Cup, scored 11 international centuries in the calendar year and unleashed two successive double-centuries against India, the series that until last year stood as Australia’s most eventful and competitive of recent times.

In 2005, there was a strong argument that, as commanding officer, he was responsible for the warship losing its teeth. The questions over his tactical captaincy, the nuts-and-bolts everyday stuff of field placings and just when to turn the screw, persisted until the last day of the fifth Test. But Ponting’s defenders went to The Oval noting that with just a couple of drops of luck Australia could have been leading the series 3-0. And the failure of so many of his teammates to reach their normal heights was not his fault.

Javed Miandad – Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1982

Published in the 1982 Wisden Almanack

It is evident after watching Javed Miandad face no more than a ball or two that he is a natural sportsman of rare talent. His relaxed but commanding attitude is immediately convincing. Extraordinarily nimble on his feet and with a superb eye, Javed in 1981 gave the Welsh cricketing public something to cheer about in what, for Glamorgan, was a moderate season.

The early part of the summer being cruelly wet, it was hardly surprising that even Javed found the pitches difficult to adjust to. However, he announced himself at Leicester on June 14, with an unbeaten Sunday League hundred, and followed this with 105 on an unpredictable pitch in Glamorgan’s next Championship match, against Warwickshire at Cardiff. Ten days later, against Somerset at Swansea, he scored a century in each innings. And so it went on. In the return match against Somerset, at Taunton this time, he scored 200 not out – on Royal Wedding day.

But perhaps his finest innings of the summer was against Essex at Colchester, on September 1. Set to score 325 to win, on a dusty, difficult pitch, Glamorgan lost their first four wickets for 44 runs. An early finish was visualised – until Javed took charge. When, finally, he ran out of partners, he had recorded his second double-hundred of the season, and Glamorgan had lost by only 13 runs. The Essex players were adamant that this was the best piece of batting they had ever seen. By the time the campaign ended, Javed had surpassed Gilbert Parkhouse’s record of seven hundreds in a season for Glamorgan, as well as Parkhouse’s 1959 aggregate of 2,071 runs, also, until then, a county record.

Javed Miandad Khan was born in Karachi on June 12, 1957, one of seven children. Cricket was the family game, his only two brothers also being destined to play top-class cricket in Pakistan. Javed made his first-class début at the age of 16 years and five months, for Karachi Whites, and he was still only 17 when chosen for the Pakistan Prudential World Cup squad in 1975. On the recommendation of Sadiq Mohammad he was invited by Tony Greig, when the World Cup was over, to play a few matches for Sussex second eleven with a view to qualifying. Sussex were sufficiently impressed to ask him to return in 1976, when, although he appeared in only five matches, he easily headed the Sussex batting averages with 523 runs, an average of 58, and a top score of 162 against Kent at Canterbury.

At home that winter he made his Test début, scoring 163 on his first appearance – against New Zealand at Lahore. He followed this with 206 and 85 in the third and final Test at Karachi, so becoming, at 19 years and four months, the youngest player ever to hit a Test double-hundred. Although he had a somewhat disappointing tour of the West Indies in 1976-77, playing in only one Test match, he was already a rising star.

In 1977, despite being at times the victim of his impetuosity, he made the No.4 spot his own in the Sussex side, scoring more runs than any other player and being awarded his county cap. His fielding was also a joy to watch, leaving its mark on, among others, the up-and-coming Paul Parker. By now, though, it was becoming increasingly apparent that when Keppler Wessels returned from military service in South Africa, Sussex would have a selection problem. With Imran already assured of a Sussex place, as a world-class allrounder, Miandad and Wessels would be competing for the remaining overseas position.

In 1978 a depleted Pakistan side came to England for three Test matches. Without their Packer players, they relied heavily upon Javed and Haroon Rashid, and they were roundly defeated. The tour over, Javed rejoined Sussex, playing in eight first-class matches and again topping the county’s batting averages. That winter, when he signed for World Series Cricket, he made an immediate impression in Australia, but, suffering perhaps from a surfeit of cricket, he had a depressing season for Sussex in 1979. Unable to command a regular place in the side, as had been foreshadowed two years before, he had the frustration of playing a lot of second team cricket. Clearly he had an important decision to make regarding his future – whether or not to look for another county. In the event, with just a little persuasion, he signed a three-year contract with Glamorgan in 1980, a choice he has not regretted.

He arrived at Sofia Gardens, Cardiff, on April 25, 1980, having just led Pakistan for the first time – in a home series against Australia. The Glamorgan staff had already been training and practising for three weeks when Javed, without any kit or clothes of his own, took guard in a practice game and despatched all and sundry to various parts of the ground. His first innings for his new county was against Essex at Swansea where, on a rain-affected pitch, he tore the formidable Essex attack to ribbons, scoring 140 not out. The daring of his stroke-play and the brilliance of his improvisation were a revelation to anyone watching him for the first time.

Despite what for him was an ordinary series against West Indies in Pakistan in 1980/81, when he was again captain, he took an exceptional Test record to Australia at the end of last year, having scored seven hundreds and 15 half-centuries in his first 34 matches for Pakistan.

Without doubt Javed is one of the best and most exciting players in the world today – and one of the most instantly recognisable, his mop of dark hair seldom being hidden from view by a helmet. Besides batting so well for Glamorgan, he has been a great help and encouragement to the county’s younger players. He has also been known to bowl legbreaks at almost breakneck speed. Still only in his middle 20s, he should have many years left of delighting cricket-lovers from Cardiff to Karachi.

Aravinda de Silva – Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1996

Published in the 1996 Wisden Almanack 

It was the biting southeaster that so discomforted him at the start of last summer. The layers of thermal garments and sweaters reached right down to Aravinda de Silva’s bandy legs as he ruminated at third man over whether a season of county cricket was really for him. He spoke, when he arrived, of the need for adrenalin in his game. A one-day final at Lord’s, he felt, would be his ideal stage.

Indeed it was. His 112 off 95 balls in the Benson & Hedges final was arguably the finest innings played in England last summer. De Silva demonstrated all too vividly that top-class batsmen need not be constricted by the artificiality of one-day cricket. Even when the asking rate was reaching absurd proportions, he did not have to resort to slogging. This was as felicitous a piece of batting seen in a limited-overs final since Asif Iqbal made 89 for the same county, Kent, against the same opposition, Lancashire, in 1971. Neither of these innings could have been played by an Englishman, for the ball was feathered, not bludgeoned, persuaded, not carved. Throughout the season, De Silva batted in this manner. In the first-class game, he scored 1,781 runs at an average of 59.36. Around him nothing was happening and Kent finished bottom of the County Championship table. But his standards never wavered.

De Silva took to Lord’s early in his career. He was 18 when he made his Test debut there, going in at No. 7. He did not have particular cause to remember his own contribution – 19 runs in two innings – but this was Sri Lanka’ s inaugural Test at Lord’s and they marked the occasion by comprehensively out-batting England. Three of De Silva’s colleagues made centuries and the whole side won over a predominantly English gathering.

And yet, 11 years on, there was to be no Test at Lord’s or anywhere else in England for him and his country. De Silva, by now regarded as a world-class batsman, unashamedly used his innings in the Benson & Hedges final as a platform to air his grievances. “Since 1984 Sri Lanka has always played a one-off Test against England after each West Indian tour, but in 1995 we were dropped. It is disappointing because we won the last time we played England, we feel we deserve a three-Test series and, given the opportunity, we would prove good value,” he said. After the way De Silva batted when the two countries last met – his innings of 80 was an important factor in Sri Lanka’s victory in Colombo in 1992-93 – the marketing men ought to think likewise.

Pinnaduwage Aravinda de Silva was born in Colombo on October 17, 1965, and, in spite of his size (5ft 3½in) was soon demonstrating that he possessed an exceptional talent. Like many small men, he learned to cut and hook proficiently. He started attacking the ball while playing weekend club cricket that scarcely differed in approach from the Sunday League in England. Hence De Silva’s fondness for the one-day game (it was no coincidence that Kent won the League during his one season with them) and his desire early in his career not to let anything go by outside off stump.

As a 19-year-old, he took part in his country’s first victory, against India in Colombo, making 75 in the second innings. A decade later, he was part of the side that beat New Zealand in Napier, Sri Lanka’s first victory outside their own country. It might conceivably have come earlier had England not deigned to play Sri Lanka only five times since they achieved Test status in 1981. Other issues have affected De Silva’s motivation and concentration: “When the troubles were at their height in my country, the game did well just to survive. I lost my best years. It was not easy to remain motivated, training all year to play, perhaps, in just one Test.”

Yet De Silva would seem to have had little difficulty in playing the long innings. At the age of 30 and after more than 50 Tests, he has a batting average that has not veered much from 40, the bench-mark of the very good batsman. His highest score, 267, was made against New Zealand in 1990/91. In addition to these accomplishments, he bowls passable offspin that can be effective in the one-day game. His failings, indeed, have less to do with technique and character than cakes (in England) and fast cars (at home) both of which, of course, are an integral part of the game.

De Silva did not want his season with Kent to end. He would have preferred to have seen their triumph in the Sunday League through to completion rather than leave England a few days before the end of the season to rejoin Sri Lanka for the last two Tests of their series in Pakistan. “I cannot believe any player, anywhere, has been so popular,” said Graham Cowdrey, his county colleague. “Ari was an inspiration to me and the whole side felt the same. When he packed his bags, he hugged each of us and I have never known a professional sports team so close to tears.”

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2011 edition of the Wisden Almanack

To celebrate that fact, we’ve put our heads together and come up with a list of our 50 most loved cricketers, which we’ll be running down over the next 50 weeks. We’ll be recalling the heyday of each of our chosen few with the help of the Wisden Almanack by reminiscing over the year they were named Wisden Cricketer of the Year.

To kick things off, we’ve picked out the finest gloveman of his generation and one of the game’s great characters.

Jack Russell – Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1990

Published in the 1990 Wisden Almanack

At the beginning of 1989, Jack Russell had played only one Test for England and was not considered a good enough batsman to merit a place in the one-day squad to face the Australians. By the end of the year he was the only Englishman who could justifiably expect a place in anyone’s World XI.

In the course of a summer of England mediocrity on the field, and damaging South African recruitment off it, Russell sailed serenely through the storm, proving he could reproduce his supreme wicketkeeping performances for Gloucestershire in the intensity of Test cricket. He was one of only two ever-presents in the England side (the other was the captain, David Gower), and when he went to India for the Nehru Cup in October – now as one of the old hands in the new-look squad – Russell was outstanding. In the most demanding of conditions, he demonstrated that in one-day cricket as much as in Test cricket, a team needs its best gloveman behind the stumps. Russell was in a class of his own in the six-nation tournament, and in the space of six months he had, quite simply, established himself as the best wicketkeeper in the world.

Yet, as is often the case with the best – and Russell is, believe many experts, in the Knott/Taylor class – his work goes unnoticed until the rare fumble. The irony of Russell’s year was that it was his batting, a weakness which had delayed his England selection by at least a year, that brought England’s supporters to their feet during a summer when they spent most of the time sat glumly with not even a rain-cloud to provide relief. They did not have many opportunities to feel pride, but Russell the batsman produced at least a few.

Early arrivals on the first day of the second Test at Lord’s might have noticed a curious sight at the Nursery End nets. A group of MCC groundstaff boys were hurling scarlet plastic balls at an England cricketer from 15 yards. For 20 minutes, Russell did not play a shot. He simply ducked and swerved, avoiding each delivery. The Australians had decided in the first Test that the left-handed Russell was vulnerable – plain scared, if you like – to anything bowled short and fast at the body. Russell, with Alan Knott as his adviser, was determined to work it out, and subjected himself to a trial by teenagers which many of his colleagues would have found demeaning.

He also decided that the best response to the verbal bouncers he was getting from the Australian close-fielders while he batted was to answer back in good, old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon. Jack, 5ft 8in and 9st 8lb with his boots on, gave the startled Aussies an earful as well as his best shots. And in the process he salvaged England’s first innings with an undefeated 64. “That day I played the most important innings of my career. I crossed a mental bridge,” says Russell. “They tried the short-pitched bowling and I coped, they tried all the verbals and I had a go back. You know, they didn’t say another word to me out in the middle all series.”

Russell gripped on to his advantage like a terrier with a bone. In the next Test, at Edgbaston, he was the second-highest scorer in England’s first innings with 42, and then up at Old Trafford for the fourth Test came his greatest moment – on a day that became known as Ash Tuesday for English cricket. England were in the throes of surrendering the Ashes amid the turmoil caused by the announcement of Mike Gatting’s rebel party for South Africa, three of whom were sitting in the England dressing-room at the time.

Russell had gone to the crease the previous day with the scoreboard reading 38-5 and an innings defeat looking a certainty. It seemed hopeless, but Russell played one of the gutsiest innings you are likely to see. For almost six hours he held up Australia’s celebrations by scoring 128 not out, his maiden century, not only in Test cricket but in all cricket. It was an achievement matched by only one other Englishman this century, Billy Griffith against West Indies in 1947/48; it was a great, and almost matchsaving, achievement. And yet it scarcely received the acknowledgement it deserved amid the rest of the day’s news. To Jack, however, it meant the earth.

He had come so close to his maiden century on his Test début 11 months earlier when he went in as night-watchman against a Sri Lankan bowling attack that was not up to county standard. He edged to 94, and when he got himself out he thought then that his chance of a Test hundred would forever elude him. When he reached 94 again at Manchester, he seized up with nerves. “Those six runs seemed to take six hours. I didn’t know what was going on around me, he recalls. I didn’t care about South Africa or the Ashes for a while, I had tunnel vision. Afterwards, the disappointment of losing another Test and the Ashes outweighed any personal satisfaction, and I don’t think my achievement sunk in until a couple of days later when I walked out for a match at Jesmond and the crowd gave me a standing ovation and started to cheer.” Russell finished the Ashes series as England’s third most successful batsman with 314 runs and an average of 39.25.

Robert Charles (Jack) Russell was born in Stroud on August 15, 1963. He played cricket for his local comprehensive school and at Stroud Cricket Club with his father, John. As captain of the boys’ team, young Jack – he has always been Jack – gave himself the honour of opening the batting and bowling. Then, two days before his 14th birthday, he saw a catch on television that changed his life. “McCosker … caught Knott … bowled Greig, Headingley ’77.” He reels it off as if it were yesterday. “Low down, one handed, across first slip. Brilliant. I thought then that I would like to be able to do that. That’s where it started, that was the inspiration.”

Russell was soon a boy among men in Stroud’s first team alongside his father, and within four years he was keeping wicket for Gloucestershire’s first team. Derbyshire’s England wicketkeeper of the time, Bob Taylor, soon saw a like spirit and talent in the quiet, slight lad with the West Country accent and gave Russell all the help he could. More recently Knott had turned from being boyhood hero to friend and adviser, helping Russell toughen his mental approach for the five-day game, whether keeping or batting.

Like Knott, Russell, in his floppy white hat and taped-up pads, looks as dishevelled as a truant schoolboy behind the stumps, but he is immaculate in his preparation and work. He has the fitness of a jump jockey and the finesse of a fencer. And like most wicketkeepers – as with goalkeepers in soccer – he is cheerfully self-contained: an independent spirit in a team game. He eats nothing but steak and chips on tour – not always easy in the likes of Nagpur and Gwalior – and when he wants to relax, it is not with the headphones and lager can to which most of his colleagues turn. Rather it is an adventure out into the local surroundings, whether that be the tranquil banks of the Severn in Worcester or the teeming shanty towns of Bombay, sketchbook, pencil and camera in hand.

Russell had discovered a penchant for drawing, and the hobby he took up to pass the time on rain-affected English summer afternoons has become a second profession. His work has created such an impression that he has had books published and his work exhibited in a London gallery. Jack Russell, the ‘keeper with drawing power.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2011 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Wasim Akram drove Salisbury through the covers at 6.40 on Sunday evening to give Pakistan a one-match lead in the series and conclude an astonishing day of Test cricket. Seventeen wickets tumbled and the close-to-capacity crowd could be forgiven for thinking this was a one-day final. Pakistan saw near-certain victory evaporate into near-certain defeat before Wasim and Waqar Younis – as a batting partnership for once – defied England’s depleted and tiring attack for the final nerve-racking hour. That last boundary ended England’s brave fightback, and provoked some of the most emotional scenes ever seen at Lord’s as the Pakistan touring party raced on to the playing surface in celebration.

Wasim’s elegant drive also saved the Test and County Cricket Board from facing the wrath of a frustrated crowd for the second successive Test. Had Salisbury bowled a maiden, proceedings for the day would have been concluded. The battle would have resumed on Monday morning with England needing two wickets to tie the Test and Pakistan wanting one run to win. In fact, it would not have been the TCCB’s fault: the Pakistanis had rejected the customary provision for an extra half-hour before the tour began. It was not a great Test match, but Sunday was a great Test day, and it would have been dreadful if this ding-dong battle had not been resolved there and then because of a technicality.

The influence of Pakistan’s heroes, Wasim and Waqar – with ball and bat – was all the more remarkable because there were serious doubts over both a few weeks earlier. Wasim missed the first Test because of shin trouble, while Waqar used Edgbaston for little more than a trial run after the stress fracture which kept him out of the World Cup. Less than a fortnight later, they put Pakistan in command of this Test with 13 wickets, and then held their nerves for a famous victory. Wasim had proved his fitness by taking 16 wickets in the conclusive victories over Nottinghamshire and Northamptonshire between the Tests. His return in place of Ata-ur-Rehman was Pakistan’s only change from Edgbaston.

England’s bowling had been much criticised for its lack of variety, but their only alternation to the 13-man squad was Malcolm for Ramprakash. Malcolm had been out of the side, after playing 17 consecutive Tests, since the Lord’s Test a year before, and was selected after England team manager Micky Stewart spent two days watching him at Harrogate, where he failed to add to his season’s tally of 12 first-class wickets. Stewart and Gooch were passed fit after minor worries, as was Botham who was troubled by a groin strain. England left out Munton, again, and Pringle, allowing Salisbury, England’s first specialist legspinner for 21 years, to make his début a fortnight later than expected.

Gooch won the toss, and with Stewart put on 123 for the first wicket at almost a run a minute as Pakistan failed to utilise the new ball, the overcast conditions and poor light. The England captain passed W. R. Hammond’s Test aggregate of 7,249 runs when he reached 53, and looked in no trouble until he edged Wasim onto his stumps. But England lost their way from the moment Hick lobbed an ambitious pull to mid on. Smith became Wasim’s 150th Test victim and Stewart was removed in the last over before tea, after which Waqar cleaned up with a devastating spell of four for 17 in 40 deliveries. Waqar showed no signs of his recent back problem as he claimed his eighth five-wicket haul in his 16th Test, but England contributed to their own downfall. Several were guilty of loose shots and only Russell offered any sensible resistance at the end.

Pakistan’s first innings stretched beyond tea on Saturday, mainly because the second and third sessions on Friday were wiped out by rain. They faced only five overs from Botham, all on Saturday, after he aggravated his groin by slipping over on Thursday night. It did not prevent him catching Javed Miandad at first slip, to give Salisbury his first Test wicket, and following up with a brilliant diving catch to remove Moin Khan and equal M. C. Cowdrey’s England record of 120 Test catches. But England’s hero on Saturday was Malcolm. Pakistan were well set at 228 for three when he halted their charge by removing Asif Mujtaba, Inzamam-ul-Haq and Salim Malik in 13 balls.

England did well to restrict Pakistan to a lead of 38. They pulled in front in the 18 overs negotiated on Saturday night, though Gooch was a casualty. Nightwatchman Salisbury proved a stubborn obstacle on Sunday morning for half-an-hour; but his fellow legspinner, Mushtaq Ahmed, instigated England’s collapse, dismissing Hick, Smith and Lamb in 22 deliveries. Any hope of setting Pakistan a stiff target was destroyed by Wasim, who took the final three wickets in four deliveries. Stewart, alone, stood defiant. He became the sixth Englishman to carry his bat in a Test, and the first at Lord’s. It was a responsible and mature innings, confirming his recent progress.

The day’s events had already been dramatic, but the climactic act was about to unfold. Pakistan needed 138 for victory, with nine hours remaining. They were soon 18 for three, as Lewis found the edge of the bats of Ramiz Raja, Asif Mujtaba and Miandad, all for ducks, in a high-quality spell. And when Salisbury had Malik caught with his fifth delivery, England had the sniff of victory. Gooch had two problems, however, Botham, still troubled by his groin, had been hit on the toe, and DeFreitas had strained his groin, too; neither could bowl. But Salisbury refused to be overawed by the occasion and, with the help of a foolish run-out and another neat catch by Hick at second slip off Malcolm, Pakistan were reduced to 95 for eight.

But the injuries told against England. Gooch had no one to administer the coup de grâce; Lewis, who had bowled his best spell in Test cricket, was running on empty. What England’s captain needed was an over from Wasim or Waqar. But they were batting for the other side and, slowly but surely, they took Pakistan to victory. Rarely can a Test crowd have been through so many emotions in a single day’s play.

England’s players were fined £330 each by referee Bob Cowper for their slow over-rate; it could have been £1,210, more than half their match fee, had he not allowed for interruptions and the long walk from the Lord’s dressing-rooms to the pitch. During the match, Cornhill announced an extension to their sponsorship of English Test cricket, paying £3.2 million for the privilege in 1993 and 1994. But, like the lucky 26,000 spectators, Cornhill will never get better value for their money than they did on this Sunday at Lord’s.

Man of the Match: Wasim Akram.

Attendance: 96,576; receipts £1,797,204.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2011 edition of the Wisden Almanack

“Bollyline” in Sydney will go down in history as a kind of cricketing sixday war. It was all too real and nasty while it was happening, but it was over almost as soon as it had begun. By the start of the next Test in Perth 10 days later, there was such peace and harmony on the surface it was as if nothing had ever happened.

As in real wars, circumstances conspired fatefully. Questionable sportsmanship, poor umpiring and alleged racism set the second Test at Sydney on a daily more precipitous edge, and tipped it over as Australia pursued a record-equalling 16th successive win on the last day in typically relentless fashion. They did snatch improbable victory from the jaws of stalemate, but it seemed to be made Pyrrhic in its moment by the engulfing firestorm.

There were casualties, not least among them the game’s dignity. Harbhajan Singh was given a three-Test ban (later rescinded). Posturing Indian authorities threatened to abandon the tour. Commentator Peter Roebuck called for the sacking of Ricky Ponting. Steve Bucknor lost his umpiring commission, and seemed unlikely ever to regain it. India’s captain Anil Kumble dramatically invoked the spirit of a previous cricket war when he declared that “Only one team was playing in the spirit of the game.”

But the least-expected damage was collateral. Up and down the country, there was an outpouring of anger at the disposition of the Australian side. Roebuck’s controversial call for the captain’s head polarised the public in a way that shocked the team. More broadly, this war deepened unresolved tensions between Australia and India, cricket’s on-field superpower and its financial powerhouse. Their scramble for the high moral ground made for an unedifying spectacle.

An animus had been brewing for months, since the World Twenty20 championship in South Africa. Some of the Australians thought India’s victory celebrations in that tournament were disproportionate to the achievement: Andrew Symonds was one who said so publicly. During a subsequent one-day series in India, the crowds taunted the distinctively daubed and dreadlocked Symonds with monkey chants, perhaps imitating the European soccer many of them now watch on pay TV, prompting a clampdown by the authorities. Later, the Australians alleged that Harbhajan also taunted Symonds on the field. Publicly, Harbhajan said the Australians were in no position to complain; they were as vulgar as ever. Behind-the-scenes manoeuvres to broker a peace between Symonds and Harbhajan evidently failed. But Symonds seemed unaffected; he played brilliantly in India and was named Man of the Series.

India’s preparation for their tour of Australia was short and rushed, and they were thrashed in the Boxing Day Test at the MCG. But there was little sign of rancour. Some of the tourists remarked on how pleasantly surprised they had been by their warm reception in Melbourne, and on the Australian public’s deep affection for Sachin Tendulkar. The spirit between the teams appeared passably good. Kumble was the first visiting captain to accept Ponting’s standing proposal that the teams should take each other’s word about low catches, since technology had shown itself to be manifestly inadequate.

Outwardly, the humour remained intact as the teams moved on to Sydney for the New Year Test. In its unfolding, it was a classic, with a century every day – including a gem from Tendulkar – and a breathtaking denouement, with occasional spinner Michael Clarke taking the last three wickets in five balls when all seemed drawn.

But at another level the match was slowly deteriorating. A series of shocking decisions by umpires Bucknor and Mark Benson had an unsettling effect. It began on the first day when Ponting was wrongly given not out and then wrongly given out, to Harbhajan, his bête noire. The Australian captain registered his dismay, which was something of a cheek in the circumstances and an act he said later he regretted. It became item one of the evidence when Australia’s sportsmanship was at issue later in the match and after it.

Later that first day, the impressive teenager Ishant Sharma was denied Symonds’s wicket from an edge so obvious that even Symonds subsequently admitted he had hit it. He was 30 at the time; he made 162 not out. The preponderance of bad decisions was against India, though not all. Tendulkar was haplessly lbw to Clarke when he was 36; he made 154 not out.

More troublesome decisions followed. Partly, the players had only themselves to blame, as much intemperate appealing put pressure on officials already losing confidence. Superficially, the spirit between the sides remained intact. Sharma congratulated Symonds on his innings, Lee congratulated Tendulkar on his, and Ponting refused to claim an apparent catch from Rahul Dravid at second slip because he was unsure whether it was clean.

But there was a quickening undercurrent. As Harbhajan played a defiant hand in support of Tendulkar, which propelled India into a first-innings lead, a slanging match erupted. Principally, it was between Harbhajan and Symonds, whose mutual dislike was now well known. Ponting reported to the umpires that Harbhajan had uttered a racist epithet, perhaps “monkey” or “big monkey”. Some said Ponting acted preciously, even provocatively, given Australia’s history of waging so-called “mental disintegration”. Unsustainably, some even alleged that Ponting seized on the race card in an effort to rid himself of Harbhajan, whose bunny he had become (he fell to him twice more in this match). Others, including Ponting, said he did only what he had been enjoined to do by the ICC in its anti-racism campaign.

A hearing before referee Mike Procter was set down for the end of the match. Tension escalated. The last day was at once ugly and memorable. Ponting extended Australia’s second innings, gaining Mike Hussey another century but seemingly leaving himself too little time to bowl India out again. Playing for time, India used elaborate and cynical ruses to slow the over rate, which would remain problematic throughout the series. Left 72 overs to survive, India faltered, but time was tight, and two dropped catches looked likely to cost Australia dearly. Both sides felt the heat. After tea, Bucknor gave Dravid out caught at the wicket from a ball that plainly brushed only his pad. India were doubly enraged – that there had been an appeal in the first place, and then that it was upheld. Shortly afterwards Clarke, backed by Ponting, claimed a low slip catch from Sourav Ganguly. The batsman stood his ground, but was given out. Later, India would argue that, despite the agreement between the sides about catching, they were under no obligation to take the word of Clarke, who the previous day had refused to walk when cleanly caught at slip first ball.

This contretemps led to another between Ponting and Indian journalists after the match. Victory, gained in long shadows with nine minutes to spare, prompted unbridled jubilation among the Australians, leaving Kumble, who had played a gallant unbeaten innings, to cool his heels. “That’s about as good a win as I’ve been in,” chortled Ponting. But at a press conference soon afterwards, Kumble charged Australia with a lack of sportsmanship as grievous as Douglas Jardine’s in 1932-33. It was an overwrought claim: though Australia had behaved less than nobly, India were also guilty of breaches of the game’s spirit. Indians objected to Australia’s triumphalism at the end, but forgot the exuberance of Harbhajan upon dismissing Ponting in the second innings, when he ran almost to the pavilion and performed two inelegant forward rolls on the turf before teammates caught him.

In the small hours of the next morning, after a long hearing, Procter suspended Harbhajan for three Tests. Meantime, India brought a countercharge against Brad Hogg for referring to them as “bastards”. The next few days were inglorious. India’s authorities claimed, bizarrely, that it was impossible for an Indian to be racist. They threatened to call off the tour unless Harbhajan’s ban was overturned, and the team, instead of travelling to Canberra as scheduled, took refuge in their Sydney hotel. The ICC called in their chief referee Ranjan Madugalle to broker a truce between Ponting and Kumble. They also replaced Bucknor with Billy Bowden for the next Test, saying they were acting in the best interests of the umpire and the game, but –absurdly – denying that they had yielded to pressure from India.

Meantime, Roebuck’s demand for the removal of Ponting reverberated around the country, prompting fulminations on letters pages and websites worldwide. One of the noteworthy aspects of this controversy was the role of the internet in fanning it so widely and quickly. In the cacophony, many ill-considered voices were raised. In his newspaper column, Indian legend and ICC cricket committee chairman Sunil Gavaskar questioned Procter’s role, saying “millions of Indians want to know if it was a white man taking the white man’s word against that of the brown man”. Symonds scarcely helped by saying that a bit of racial teasing between friends was fine, but not between strangers.

A frivolous debate arose about the word “monkey” and whether or not it was a pejorative in India. Protagonists asked us to believe that crowds in India were possibly offering Symonds endearment. The idea that the ill will between the teams was all down to cultural misunderstanding was the greatest nonsense of all. International cricketers travel widely, make friends across team divides, and learn to grasp cultural nuances. Whatever Australia and India said and did to one another in Sydney, they meant it. The “spirit of cricket” is unambiguous in any language.

At length, cooler heads prevailed. Harbhajan was given leave to enter an appeal, which – conveniently – would not be heard until after the series. The Indian board’s threat to abandon the tour had always been fatuous anyway, given the television interests involved. The Indians moved to Canberra for their tour match, then on to Perth. Madugalle met Ponting and Kumble, and negotiated a peace of sorts, each captain declaring that the game was more important than any individual. But, curiously, the pact on low catches was torn up. The Hogg hearing was set for the night before the match, but at the eleventh hour, the Indians withdrew the charge in what was widely praised as a magnanimous gesture.

Still, twists remained. Having been cleared to play, both Harbhajan and Hogg were dropped anyway, not for the sake of goodwill, but because the WACA pitch looked to be back to its fast, bouncy old self, and each side wanted an extra paceman. (Both had been paradoxical performers: Hogg had made a valuable 79 at Sydney, but not taken a wicket on the last day; Harbhajan was good for only three wickets a match but, likely as not, two were Ponting.) The effect was to remove from the game two of the central players in the Sydney drama, and the sacking of Bucknor made it three. Benson, the other umpire, had not been scheduled to stand in Perth anyway. Following the anthem ceremony on the first morning, all the players on both sides shook the hand of every other. So, notionally, did Bollyline finish, 10 days after it began.

The twists were not quite done yet. India won the third Test, the first Asian side ever to win at Perth, snapping Australia’s winning streak at a record-equalling 16. To what extent Australia were distracted by the minicrisis of Sydney was impossible to say; Ponting thought not at all. To what extent India were galvanised was also impossible to say; some of the Indians thought plenty.

But India won the match wholly on their merits. They outplayed Australia in their own conditions. Both sides misread the pitch, which was bouncy but only moderately paced. Shaun Tait, replacing Hogg, proved a liability, and two weeks later announced that he was quitting cricket for the time being. Irfan Pathan, replacing Harbhajan, won the match award. Australia secured victory in the series after a high-scoring draw in the Adelaide Test, Adam Gilchrist’s last. The next day, an independent hearing before New Zealand judge John Hansen downgraded the charge against Harbhajan from racism to abusive language, rescinded the ban, and fined him half his Sydney match fee instead. Justice Hansen said that in such a serious case, a higher standard of proof was necessary: the word of three Australian players was not enough. He made it clear that Symonds had been the provocateur. He also amplified confusion about whether Harbhajan had said “monkey”, “big monkey”, or “teri maki”, words in Hindi that sounded similar.

For the previous week, the former Indian board chairman I. S. Bindra had been in Australia, negotiating with Australian officials. Simultaneously, Indian board vice-president Lalit Modi was reported to have said that, unless Harbhajan was cleared, the tour would be cancelled and India would reconsider future engagements with Australia. He also said that an adverse finding would affect the prospects of Australians in the new Indian Premier League. Australian players muttered anonymously about how India’s money was now ruling the game, which was a bit rich – pun intended – since many of them were greedily eyeing the vast spoils available for the new Twenty20 tournament in India. Justice Hansen indignantly denied media reports about a deal between the two countries, or that he had been under pressure to reprieve Harbhajan for the sake of future series, and rebuked the Indian authorities for even allowing that impression to form. He had, he said, reached his decision independently. But Hansen regretted the ICC’s incomplete data about Harbhajan’s disciplinary record, which might have affected his sentence.

So ended Bollyline – for now. Three things were clear. Hypocrisy still drags the game down. The ICC remains toothless. And India, failing to learn lessons from long periods of powerlessness, are intent on throwing their newly acquired weight around at every opportunity.

© John Wisden & Co

First published in 1864, The Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2011 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Just before half-past twelve on the fifth day of the final Test, Pakistan achieved the greatest moment of their short career as a cricket country by beating England and so sharing the rubber. Their success was well deserved, for they showed great fighting spirit when victory seemed beyond their grasp.

To Fazal Mahmood, the medium-paced bowler, went chief credit, his six wickets in each innings causing the batting failures of England. Others who played leading roles in the triumph were the late batsmen, particularly Zulfiqar Ahmed, Wazir Mohammad, Shuja-ud-Din and Mahmood Hussain.

England did not field their full strength, the selectors deciding that the opportunity of Test match experience should be given to some of the players chosen to tour Australia a few weeks later. Thus two stalwarts, Alec Bedser and Trevor Bailey, were omitted. Tyson and Loader, both fast bowlers, replaced them and they in no way let down the side; but it can fairly be said that the determined batting of Bailey was badly missed and that Bedser might have turned the match on a pitch ideally suited to a bowler of his type. The England “tail” proved far too long for a Test match and at the vital stage this weakness almost certainly meant the difference between victory and defeat.

The events of the first day did not suggest that England were in for such a struggle. Overnight and morning rain prevented a start until half-past two, and Pakistan, who won the toss, soon found themselves in trouble. The pitch did not become difficult, but the ball occasionally did the unexpected. Weak batting mainly accounted for seven wickets falling for 51 runs. The England policy of going into the match with three fast bowlers at first brought reward. Statham dismissed Hanif with the last ball of the opening over and Tyson and Loader carried on the good work. Tyson, after beginning with an erratic over, soon found his length and in his third over he bowled Alim-ud-Din and Maqsood with successive deliveries.

A Pakistan recovery began after tea. Kardar stayed 70 minutes before Evans held his third catch of the innings. The success was the 131st by Evans in Test cricket, a new record beating the 130 of Oldfield, the Australian. The last two wickets added 56, Zulfiqar, Shuja and Mahmood Hussain playing the bowling with surprising ease, Shuja batted almost two hours for 16 not out. Tyson and Loader took seven wickets between them, making satisfactory Test debuts.

Only two overs could be bowled in England’s innings before the close. Next day a cloudburst in the 10 minutes between 11.50 a.m. and noon put the ground under water and prevented cricket. The Oval presented an astonishing sight with miniature lakes and pools over it. Naturally the pitch suffered and next day England underwent a nasty experience. The ball often rose awkwardly from a length and Fazal and Hussain made the most of the conditions. The English batsmen tried unsuccessfully to hit their way out of trouble. Compton made a gallant attempt, staying two hours 20 minutes, but he was missed three times. Pakistan celebrated the seventh anniversary of their Independence Day by gaining a lead of three runs. Fazal bowled throughout the innings and his figures, six for 53, would have been much better but for dropped catches. For all that, every England batsman was caught.

The pitch, drying out, was more in favour of spin when Pakistan went in again, but although Wardle bowled cleverly, McConnon failed to seize his opportunity. Shuja opened the innings with Hanif and again batted steadily, but Pakistan lost four wickets for 63 by the close. The early stages of the fourth day suggested an early victory for England. Pakistan at one stage were 82 for eight, but again they came back strongly. The last two wickets doubled the total, Wazir Mohammad and Zulfiqar adding 58 for the ninth. Wazir, who spent half-an-hour over his first run, played a defiant innings of two and three-quarter hours. Wardle finished with the impressive figures of seven for 56.

England needed 168 to win and appeared keen to get the runs in the two hours 35 minutes available that evening. Simpson and May put on 51 in forty minutes for the second wicket. May batted beautifully for 53 and when he left victory for England seemed near, only 59 runs being needed with seven wickets to fall. Then came a surprising decision, Evans being sent in, presumably to attempt to force a win in the half an hour which remained. Evans failed and so did Graveney, and when Compton fell just before the close, Pakistan were on top. With all the recognised batsmen gone and McConnon having to bat with a dislocated finger – the result of a fielding accident – England began the last day needing 43 to win with four wickets left. In 55 minutes the match was over, the cautious methods of the remaining England batsmen proving of no avail. Fazal, who this time took six wickets for 46, was helped considerably by the safe wicketkeeping of Imtiaz, who held seven catches in the match.

This was the first defeat for England in a home match since South Africa won at Nottingham in June 1951. On the Saturday 16,800 people paid for admission, the second highest number since the war. The total attendance was around 25,000. The crowd on Monday reached about 24,000, and these two splendid gates went a long way towards giving Pakistan their profit on the tour.

© John Wisden & Co

58 years on from Pakistan’s first ever Test win over England, the Wisden Almanack is still recognised throughout the cricket world as the definitive recorder of the game. Click here to buy the 2011 edition of the Wisden Almanack

Touted since his teens as England’s ‘next great batsman’, for so long Ian Bell appeared uncomfortable with the burden of expectation. Not any more. Jo Harman talks to him about growing pains and scoring runs that matter. 

SuperSport Park, Centurion, December 2009. It’s the first Test of England’s tour of South Africa, and Ian Bell is in the depressingly familiar position of having to justify himself as an international batsman. He’s only just clung on to his spot, given the nod over Luke Wright on the morning of the match after a greenish track persuades the tourists to play six batsmen.

What follows is humiliating for Bell. With England striving for parity in the first innings he shoulders arms to a very straight one from the non-tweaking left-arm spinner Paul Harris. The ball crashes in to his middle-stump, halfway up. This is not a slight misjudgment; it’s an abomination. The non-shot of a scrambled mind. He fares no better in the second dig, nicking off for two with his team in freefall. It’s further weight to the claims that this gifted, elusive strokemaker is no man for a crisis.

A defiant fifty at The Oval to help England reclaim the Ashes had kept the press-pack of wolves from the door but now they were back, and even Bell’s most resolute supporters were at a loss to explain his Centurion horror show.

Fortunately for Bell, Andy Flower and Andrew Strauss know their cricket. He was retained for the second Test at Durban, and while some doubted the decision, his fans cracked a smile and settled in to watch the boy’s latest bid for acceptance. Their faith was rewarded. As Bell took a couple of paces down the Kingsmead track and lofted an exquisite on-drive for four to bring up a flawless ton, his doubters were made to a feel a little silly.

He celebrated his century with uncharacteristic emotion and the salute to the dressing room was deliberate and heartfelt. “I felt like I had repaid Straussy and Andy Flower for picking me when they didn’t have to,” Bell told AOC at Edgbaston.

“Even when the first Test in South Africa didn’t go well I had a good chat with Straussy and he gave me a lot of confidence in the way he backed me. Luckily from that Test match onwards things have really taken off.”

A week on from Durban, Bell produced his grittiest performance for England, grafting for almost the entire final day at Cape Town to orchestrate an unlikely draw. For a man so often accused of crumbling under pressure, it marked a watershed of sorts in his Test career.

Ashley Giles, who played alongside Bell for England and Warwickshire and is now director of cricket at Edgbaston, says that he has grown up dramatically over the last 18 months, both on and off the pitch. “A lot of pressure was put on him at a young age because he was such a talented player,” Giles told us. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve reached maturity as a man. I think he certainly has now.”

And how does the Bell we see now compare to the panic-stricken 23-year-old Giles played alongside in the 2005 Ashes? “The similarity is they are both very, very good players but this one is far more mature. Something that has been levelled at Belly in the past is that he’s a pretty-looking player. I think he’s a very effective player now who is far more willing to express himself.”

Ian Bell’s story could still go either way. We could look back in 10 years on a Test career that was acceptable if unfulfilled for arguably the most talented English technician of his generation. But at 28 he should be approaching his prime as a batsman. Bell comes across as a man more at ease with the world, and more comfortable with his place within it. Now, as he prepares for his fourth, pivotal Ashes series, the results are beginning to show on the pitch…

Nasser Hussain said that he’s seen you mature from a boy into a man over the past 18 months. Is that a fair assessment?
I do believe that. I changed when I got left out of the side in the West Indies [in spring 2009]. I really had to go back to the drawing board. It wasn’t about changing my technique but there were a lot of others things I had to work on. I got myself physically in good shape, which also helped with the mental side of my game, and then I had to go back to Warwickshire and learn how to score hundreds again.

Did it ever cross your mind that you could have played your last game for England?
It could have gone one of two ways. I might never have played again but it was up to me. I could have given up and played county cricket for the rest of my career but I was desperate to get another opportunity and obviously that came in the Ashes. There’s no better feeling than putting that shirt on and walking out there and when it’s taken away you realise that when you get another opportunity you can never take it for granted.

You appear more confident than you used to. Have you changed outside the game as well?
I’m getting married as soon as we get back from Australia and that kind of stuff does have a knock-on effect. I’ve matured in all departments really and learnt from my mistakes. One of the hardest things about getting a chance for England when you’re a young player is that when you make mistakes you make them in big situations. It’s not like making your debut at 27 or 28 when you’ve made those mistakes in county cricket and people don’t see them. I learnt that it’s a hard game.

In retrospect did the 2005 Ashes come too soon for you?
Yes, in hindsight it probably did. It was my fourth Test match and to jump in and play against Australia is never particularly easy but it gave me a platform and an understanding of where I was in my game. I knew I was not even near to becoming a top Test cricketer and it made me go away and work hard. I had made a lot of runs in the build-up for Warwickshire but looking back I wasn’t ready as a Test match cricketer.

In an interview with AOC last year Jim Troughton described you as a practical joker in the dressing room. That’s a side of you we perhaps don’t see in the media. Do you have a different persona outside the game?
I’m probably quite a shy person generally and like to keep myself to myself. Within a dressing room environment I like to have a laugh and a joke and get involved in all that stuff but in terms of my personal life I’m pretty quiet.

What does life look like outside of cricket?
As soon as there’s no cricket I try and get on a golf course. I play off a nine or 10, so I’m not too bad. I also try and get down to Villa Park as much as possible. Aston Vila were fantastic to me when I broke my foot. Martin O’Neill invited me to the training ground to get some rehab and use the facilities because what I had was more of a football injury. They got me back on the field probably two weeks quicker so I owe them a big thanks.

That would have been around the time Martin O’Neill resigned. It must have testing times down at the Villa?
It was. I know James Milner quite well and he was obviously going to Manchester City and it looked like Martin might be off as well. It was quite a difficult time, so I was just trying to keep my head down…

England had an Ashes series to forget four years ago but personally you had some success. Is that something you can take heart from this winter?
I got a few fifties [four half-centuries in five matches] but I never went on and got a massive hundred, which was a big disappointment. I enjoyed batting on those wickets and knowing I’ve scored runs out there will give me confidence. The three warm-up games are massively important and hopefully I can hit the ground running and get myself into some form.

England seem to play their best cricket against the Aussies when they play aggressively and take the game to them.
In the last 12-18 months it’s been a target of the group to play positive, aggressive cricket. In the two Ashes series we’ve won we’ve had an aggressive mindset and it’s certainly benefited us. Probably the last time we were over there we didn’t play as positively as we did in 2005.

Australia is a long and gruelling tour. Is it possible to take your mind off the cricket when you’re over there?
Yes, definitely. It’s a fantastic place to go and you have the opportunity to do all sorts of things. The first month we’re out there the cricket will take the main focus but as the tour goes on we’ll be encouraged to have downtime as well. It’s important at this level to balance the time when you’re really focused with relaxation.

Tell us about the pitches in Australia…
We got told last time there was going to be lots of pace and bounce, and Brisbane certainly did, but I was a little bit surprised that as the tour went on the surfaces weren’t as quick and bouncy as I thought they would be. They were just fantastic batting wickets. The great thing is that in Graeme Swann we now have a match-winning spinner so if the pitches do take spin, which Sydney and Adelaide do, we’ve got a guy who can take wickets to win games. I think at Brisbane the seamers will do the majority of the work and as the series goes on we’ll see Swanny come into his own.

Earlier this summer you were the sole centurion in an England innings for the first time. Was it a relief to get rid of that hoodoo?
Of course, but the biggest thing for me was to make sure I started scoring runs when it mattered for the team. In Cape Town and Bangladesh I scored runs when the team needed it and that was more important than being the only player to score a hundred.

But it had started to become a stat that was churned out to show you weren’t at your best when the chips we down…
Stats don’t lie but the important thing was making sure that people saw me in a different way, as a tough cricketer. To achieve what I did in Cape Town, in the way that Colly has done for us so many times, was really satisfying. Hopefully I repaid a bit of faith and I just want to be able to dig in and do it again. I knew I had the shots and the ability but now I’ve turned a corner and started to put together innings when the team needs it most.

Do you read what people say about you in the press?
Nowhere near as I much as I used to as a youngster. In my early Twenties I was desperately searching for people to think I was a great player. Now it’s more important to me to put in performances for the lads. Hopefully I’ve gone a bit of the way to changing opinions but the older you get you realise you can’t make everyone like you.

This century’s most beguiling and charismatic cricketer is on the verge of greatness, halfway towards the 10,000 Test runs that will secure his legend. So why does he always feel he has a point to prove?

Kevin Pietersen shuffles in to a box in the Lord’s Media Centre dressed in a white adidas jumper and dark blue jeans. The hair’s humbly cropped these days, mere specks of grey appearing at the sides, those famous hairdos of legend now distant memories. He shakes AOC’s hand, flashes that Jack Nicholson grin, and asks how the magazine is doing. Hard rain crashes against the window. His gaze drifts out towards the drenched outfield, to the scene of old triumphs.

It was on this ground four years ago that Pietersen made his Test debut. 17 wickets fell on that first day of Ashes 2005, although Pietersen’s wasn’t one of them. Striding forward out of his crease, playing with hard hands and great conviction, he survived the onslaught from Glenn McGrath as his new teammates flailed. The following morning he hit McGrath into the Lord’s pavilion. No one had seen McGrath treated like that before. It just wasn’t the done thing.

Two months later, and this wasn’t the done thing either, Pietersen hit seven sixes at The Oval to secure the Ashes for his team and their mesmerised public. In the maelstrom that followed, Pietersen could generally be located with his arms around Andrew Flintoff, in the gossip pages of The Sun, or announcing to anyone who would listen – and that meant all of us – exactly how it felt to realise one’s dream. The natural bombast and, drunk on success, unapologetic hollering established a new superstar in England’s sporting firmament. And something else was established. This one wasn’t like the others.

So four tumultuous years down the line, is Pietersen still living that dream, or has he woken up? “[I’m living it] one hundred per cent,” he says without hesitation. And then: “There’s not a lot that could take me away from my love of cricket, or my love of playing for England.”

But although ‘not a lot’ is not much, it’s still more than nothing. Six months ago Pietersen resigned the England captaincy just five months into the job after an unseemly public row with his employers regarding Peter Moores’ credentials as England coach. Pietersen was said to be “hurt and disappointed” by the outcome. The turmoil must have contributed to an interview given during last spring’s tour of West Indies, when he confessed to a Daily Mail journalist that he was desperate to return home. In the stands English supporters, fed that line, were up in arms. In the press, opinions ranged wildly. Some felt Pietersen should have kept his mouth shut and shown more flexibility with his personal working relations; others thought he’d been unfairly hung out to dry for telling his version of the truth. One thing was generally agreed on: Pietersen was not cut out for politics.

On the captaincy issue Pietersen won’t play a shot. Still burning with a sense of injustice? Angry still? He’s not saying. And why should he? “It was five months ago. It’s gone. Done. Done.” Pietersen feels that he has been stung by the media before, so the old easy way with a quote has given way to a more guarded, less demonstrative media personality. Shame. English cricket’s eras live on through their characters, and more than any other player from today’s cash-rich six-hitting experiment, it is Pietersen who best embodies what the modern game looks like. If he is more wary than before, it means that Pietersen – an independent spirit – has had to forsake some of the unchecked flair for speaking his mind which makes him so interesting, and which infuses this batsman (if, indeed, batting is an extension of one’s personality) with a singular brilliance.

He shrugs. This is where we are now. “Some days you say things which on a good day you might not have said, [but] on a bad day you tend to say them. Like everyone does. But I’ve got to live with that fact and realise that what I say also makes headlines, which I’ve realised in the last couple of months again. I have to keep telling myself because I think I’m just a cricketer playing cricket, living an amazing, enjoyable life playing for England. Sometimes I have to think, ‘Watch what you do’, or ‘Watch what you say’. Which is hard and I don’t like that.”

He’s so imposing on the pitch, but today the baggy sweater and soft Zen-like utterances has the effect of cutting him down to a more manageable size. This is the new Pietersen interview technique, but it’s not the tone we’ve come to expect from the modern era’s most bombastic cricketer. He is quick to bring the conversation back to his quiet lifestyle, and to the small clique of select family and friends that he can trust. “I try not to give away too much to others,” he explains.

Does he even recognise the KP of media legend? “It’s a tricky one. Because people who know me know exactly what I’m like. And it’s quite difficult, because you look at the stuff that’s written or the stuff that’s said, and people who don’t know me come to their own conclusions. But at the end of the day, people write what they want to write; what really matters to me is what my wife and my close friends and family think. In answer to the question: I don’t think I’m that person.”

I wonder to myself if the upheaval from the captaincy – and the general whirlwind that seems to blow around him whenever he lets his guard drop – has left Pietersen more confused and insecure than he could have ever imagined. “Believe me,” he says, “I am a very warm-hearted, kind, polite person who does what he does to the best of his ability.”

Pietersen is the best English batsman many of us have ever seen. Extreme hand-eye talent, guts, grit, and supreme belief in his method, combined with a fierce work ethic, all melds together to produce a cricketer destined to be one of the true greats. A famous tinkerer with technique – when AOC spoke to him last summer he was obsessing over his hands getting outside his eyeline – he is working on something specific at the moment, but won’t divulge trade secrets. The eternal puzzle of batsmanship intrigues him.

When pressed on the question of his greatness, he pats it back down the pitch, leaving us to speculate. But if there is a fear from an infatuated public that Pietersen – an early IPL advocate and recent $1.5m acquisition for Bangalore Royal Challengers – could retire prematurely from international competition to become a freelance cricketer, he throws his hands at the wide one and connects sweetly: “I’m not 23 anymore, I’m 29 and probably got five, maybe six years left playing for England. I’ve got goals in Test match cricket. I want to try to score 10,000 Test-match runs. I’m playing in a happy dressing room, a winning dressing room, playing with a winning combination.

“I’m 5,400 runs away from 10,000 runs so unless I score that in the next year or two… It’s a long way away. It’s a long-term goal that I’ve set myself. I’d like to achieve it but if it doesn’t happen then I will never ever wake up at the end of my career and think ‘What if’, or ‘Why didn’t I do this’. I would have done everything that I wanted to do and lived my dream.”

If Pietersen achieves the 10K mark it will make him the most prolific batsman England has ever produced. To get there he will have to trust himself and take a thousand risks to claim his reward. But as we have all seen, taking risks is not something Pietersen has ever struggled with. Last season he attracted criticism for losing his wicket on 94 against South Africa, trying to clear the man at deep mid-on posted specifically for the big shot. As ever with Pietersen, opinions were split. He was either a foolhardy sucker or an audacious thrillseeker with an average of 50 who entertains like no other. Pietersen finds the criticism tiresome.

“I’m a calculated risk taker,” he says. “I’m a positive player who has to take criticism. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t – that’s life. “ So it’s a case of take it or leave it – that’s the way you play?  “Yes. That’s the way I play. I know there is a lot of criticism that comes with that but there’s a lot of good stuff that goes with that as well. I wouldn’t get to 94 or 97 blocking it. You’ve got to try to score runs.”

He cites an example: “The other day [against West Indies at Riverside] I got out on 49. I had an offside field, I could have easily just knocked it there for one. But the team decision after lunch was to get on with it. When I saw the ball in my area I wasn’t worried about how many runs I had. I could have been selfish and gone ‘bang’ for one run and ‘oh yes there’s another 50’. I decided my headset after lunch was to be positive and to be super aggressive to get us to a total so we could bowl West Indies out twice. So I saw a ball, tried to hit it, got out – tough luck. I was trying to do it for the team and that’s the way it is.”

But is it also the case that Pietersen has a tendency to get bored in a way that perhaps a more mechanical batsman wouldn’t? He’s bristling again: “Double hundreds are hard to get you know. I’m flattered when people say ‘you should have more double hundreds’ because it’s a really nice thing for people to say, it’s a great compliment, but they’re hard to get. There’s no way somebody can turn up and just change a hundred into a two-hundred. It’s not that easy. When people say I should have done – how many double hundreds have they scored? Crikey, it’s not easy to do. It really isn’t easy to do.”

This summer it’s the Ashes. You may have noticed. Pietersen is locked in. Already people are stopping him in the street: “Everybody you talk to – they don’t care what happened against the West Indies, they don’t really care what we do at the Twenty20 World Cup. All they’re worried about is Australia.”

And if it’s not folks on the street, it’s cabbies chewing his ear off. “They love it,” he says, the naturalised Londoner coming out. “It’s great getting into a London cab. Their cockney accents, you’ve got to punch details in as you go along.” So is this your city now? “I said to my wife last night ‘Jeez, I love this city’. We went into town yesterday to meet my brother and best mate for dinner. I just sat down at the restaurant and said ‘Jeez, I love this place’. It’s a great city and we’re very lucky and fortunate enough to live here.”

With the buzz around the grounds reaching fever pitch, who’s going to do the business on the turf itself? Pietersen’s answer is immediate and emphatic. He’s thought long and hard about this; he sounds like a captain. “Anderson, Broad, Matt Prior and Ravi Bopara.”

Of Bopara, Pietersen has always been a fan. During this year’s IPL Pietersen nominated him as a superstar in the making. What is it about his game that impresses him? “His positiveness, no fear of failure, the way he is, the questions he asks, he’s keen to learn, he loves his cricket and he’s got this never-say-die attitude.”

So you see a bit of yourself in him, then… “To be honest with you,” he continues, reluctant to go there but unable to resist, “I’m not blowing my own trumpet by any stretch of the imagination… but I see a very positive way about Ravi. It’s very pleasing to know that you’ve got a guy in the dressing room, or guys coming into the dressing room who are so positive, not scared of things and not worried about failure.” Pietersen will be the key man, of course. The kingpin. He has made 16 Test centuries from 52 matches at 50.49. He has unleashed a fusillade on Australia’s finest before, so they know what’s coming.

Finally, I ask him for his standout innings from the past 12 months. Cricketers usually enjoy answering this one. “If I can say three, I’d say the one against South Africa here – my first Test innings against South Africa at Lord’s. The 150 here was hugely satisfying. The Test hundred I scored the day I got the captaincy [100 at The Oval also against South Africa]. I really enjoyed that because people thought the captaincy may have a negative effect on my batting. Then the 97 I scored in Jamaica after everything that happened in January [with the captaincy resignation]. I was bitterly disappointed not to get to three-figures but to get the runs that I actually got there was so, so satisfying.”

I offer what I think sounds like praise, acknowledging that these were runs made under real pressure – tough runs in tough circumstances – and all achieved when Pietersen felt he had a point to prove. I mean it as a compliment – this being the true test of a player’s worth – but instead he takes it as further evidence that his essential decency and commitment to the cause is being brought into question.

“I find that strange,” he says. “I don’t really understand it, because there are not too many other cricketers who always have points to prove. I realise that I’m South African playing for England and all the connotations that go with it, but I find it so difficult that I’ve always got to prove things to people. That’s one of the hardest things that I face in my career. Three times in the last 12 months it’s happened.” He shrugs again.

Our time is up. Back comes the Nicholson grin, and the handshake. Again he wishes AOC well, and then he is off to prove another point to another journalist. For the first time, it occurs to me that Kevin Pietersen may be tiring of having to talk about himself, which is unfortunate for the rest of us, because we’re as fascinated as ever.

Maybe he doesn’t realise how fond we are of him and what he’s done for cricket in this country. Maybe he’s just forgotten – maybe 2005 was just too magical to be held up as a true reflection of where he was in the world, and what we thought when we saw him standing there. English cricket is eternally thankful that this remarkable man interloped from Natal to Nottingham a decade ago, to follow that dream to make him complete. What Kevin Pietersen needs is a summer of peaceful runmaking, leading England to Ashes victory. And he could do with a standing ovation or two from a public that, although fickle (this is sport after all), still holds him in the highest regard. And then, after returning that urn to its rightful place, preferably at The Oval on the last day, he can go out somewhere nice and quiet for a meal with the missus.