Category Archives: Cricket

Wisden Writing Competition: A Reflection on Cricket’s Grassroots Heritage

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The 162nd edition of Wisden Cricketer´s Almanack arrived a couple of months ago. It´s far more expensive here in Spain since Brexit but having the previous 161 editions on the bookshelves acts as a powerful incentive to keep on. The normal approach: start with the Notes by the Editor (good for some controversy), the various and increasing categories of Cricketers of the Year, some of the features and then turn to the Wisden Writing Competition. The competition remains the same: a short essay (480-500 words) on any cricket related topic. The winning entry gets a full page in Wisden.

I knew I had not won this year´s competition (they contact the winner in January) so I read the winning entry. Dan Forman´s third attempt, the first time a winner has been third time lucky, usually it´s first timers! Only 72 entries this year, the lowest since the competition started in 2013. As usual most entries are from first timers. Paul Caswell and David Fraser maintain their ever-present record with four of us on 11 out of 13. Around 80% only enter once. For many I guess the attraction is seeing your name in Wisden. The actual prize is small: a £250 voucher to be used on the excellent www.wisdenauction.com, a key site if you are seeking to add to your collection of Wisdens but of little use otherwise. The parallel photographic competition has a prize of £1,000 and two £400 prizes. It attracts far more entries. Three professional photographers scooped the awards this year.

I´ll come back to his entry but what struck me first was that something has been missing from the Writing Competition: T20. None of the 13 winning entries have rejoiced over a T20 (nor in the last four years over the Hundred). Are they not featuring in the entries or is the Wisden editorial team biased against these “interlopers”? The Hundred was specifically aimed at encouraging new fans: what has been their experience? No parent enthusing about the impact a T20/Hundred had on their children? Or how it is energised women’s cricket? Or how the razzmatazz of the IPL has transformed their cricketing enjoyment?

The privatisation of the Hundred currently floods cricketing social media on BlueSky and Twitter (now X). The new ownership´s demands will prompt a radical change of the English cricket season over the next few years. Wisden 2025 devotes just 23 pages (out of 1584) to the 2024 women´s and men’s tournaments. I wonder if Wisden 2026 will give greater priority to the multi-million product and have the same depth of reports as the county championship matches or continue to bury it around page 730.

Dan Forman´s winning entry takes us a long way from the international entrepreneurs of the Hundred. A warm paean to the intergenerational glue that binds village club teams. Entitled “Alan Bennett´s baton” it draws on some unacknowledged references (Philip Larkin, Mike Brearley and perhaps Shakespeare in Love) without quite falling into John Majorism nostalgia. I liked the reference to “donkey drops”; a rare appearance both in Wisden and coaching manuals. So just what is the appeal of village cricket?

“If there is a secret it might be something to do with the grounds or the teas. It´s definitely something to do with the camaraderie and the captaincy. But ultimately it´s intangible”.

“Intangible”, a simple way of describing the appeal of the game. No need to elaborate, to further define, to become lost in reminisces, in records, in Cardusian flowery phrases. And so I thought of UNESCO; perhaps a strange jump but the global cultural and scientific body organises a list of “intangible heritage.” It runs parallel to the better known World Heritage List of buildings, ancient monuments, landscapes and industrial legacies. The Intangible list includes dances, food, festivals and many other rituals. The aim is to “safeguard our living heritage”. It is often mocked, especially in the right wing media, but the awards demonstrate the diversity of cultural traditions and practices around the world: they all engender a deep attachment. There are already sporting entries, including from Georgia, Kazakhstan and Belgium, under the umbrella category of social practices, rituals and festive events.

And why not add cricket? Not the professional version but the village, recreational, amateur, community version? Wisden rarely covers it but it is the true grassroots of the game. It is the arena of charming, historic, stories from Siegfried Sassoon, Hugh de Sélincourt and L.P Hartley. The past of club cricket was indeed a different country, as Duncan Stone has pointed out but change is happening. According to ECB research, around 30 per cent of recreational cricketers are the new British of South Asian heritage showing how the grassroots game in moving with the times.

Today, social media is the place to go for a dynamic overview of the best, the worst (and the comic) in village matches. There is a regular post asking “what was the most village thing that happened this weekend”. WGRumblePants posts photos of beautiful grounds daily; rural delights. Maybe the Wisden 2026 review of social media could move off the professional gossip and dig into the grassroots.

The grassroots game needs support and encouragement. The number of clubs is declining; many are having difficulty in attracting new opponents, players and grounds. There is hope. The grassroots game is due 10% of the money from the Hundred´s privatisation. Some estimate that this means around £50m. There is no news yet on how or to whom it will be delivered. Let´s hope some of it goes to the type of clubs supported by the Googly Fund (Dan Forman is co-founder and a trustee):

By friendly cricket, we mean cricket that is not being played in a league, and where the main aim of playing is as much social as competitive (though there’s nothing wrong with a bit of friendly rivalry). This might be cricket that is played by Sunday teams of established clubs, or more ad hoc cricket played by work or ‘pub’ teams on a mid-week evening.

The UK finally, and belatedly, ratified the UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in December 2023. The 183rd country to sign up. Later in 2025 DCMS will issue a call for nominations to an inventory of traditions and crafts: sports and games is one of the seven categories. It´s the first step before bidding for thEarly candidates include cask beer!

Here is a definition of intangible heritage:

Intangible Cultural Heritage encompasses the rich tapestry of traditions, expressions, and practices that communities inherit from their ancestors and pass on to future generations.

Dan Forman captured that tapestry. Grassroots village cricket fits the bill. Will anyone prepare and submit a bid to DCMS?

The Wisden Writing Competition 2024

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Another year, another entry, another fail. I’ve reached double figures! It’s the tenth time I’ve failed to win the Wisden Writing Competition. Only three others have failed more often. Not even a lucky loser. Clearly I am failing to hit a soft spot in the anonymous judging panel. Perhaps indicating the Editor might use AI for his Notes was a little over the top. Will I try again for the 2025 edition? Why not?

First a word of congratulations to the 2024 winner, Sohan Maheshwar. In keeping with tradition (after 12 editions the competition surely can have traditions; after 20 it acquires heritage status) it was his debut entry. That´s 10 out of 12 first time winners. It´s also the third winner with a touching father/son memory but the piece does break two new grounds. The first by a winner based in EU27 (Amsterdam) and the first to mention women´s cricket (the 2017 World Cup final at Lord´s).

The game itself is in turmoil. Long standing rhythms are being upended especially in England. The sudden rise (by cricketing standards) of franchised T20 tournaments around the world, many backed by billionaire businesses from India, are eating into the very fabric of the warm beer and village greens of nostalgic memory. The upcoming privatization of the new “Hundred” competition in England is causing explosions of angst amongst many county members (well at least those on social media if not attending actual meetings) to match those potential investors rubbing their hands with glee. Even MCC, that bastion of privilege and conformity is seriously thinking of having a franchised team. As an aside its Annual Report is far more informative than county reports; its long list of obituaries of members illustrates just how privileged the club is.

The 161st edition of Wisden reflects many of these changes. This year the focus is on the politicisation of Indian cricket, “bazball”, and the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket. A fascinating survey of Jewish cricketers around the world stops short of discussing why none has appeared for England men´s team or if any are currently in county cricket.

The Writing Competition tends to avoid this turmoil. Last year’s winner, a polemic against Melbourne Cricket Ground, recognised change but hopes that this was the start of a trend are on hold. It remains a haven of normality, of cricket lovers remembering those cherished moments cricket brings them. Will I enter for the 2025 edition? I suppose a piece less than fondly recalling a day spent under an umbrella, dodging showers, paying for over-priced and under-tasted burgers and chips and seeing ten overs in the day´s play might be in order. Or perhaps the most blatant breaches of the “spirit of cricket” seen in a local village cricket match. Or jumping between tabs on YouTube watching county and Caribbean cricket streams. As a wild card, perhaps a full throated shout out for the T20 format and welcoming the gradual demise of interminable low attendance red ball county cricket (but KP has already bagged that one).

Returning to the 2024 competition, a quick review, my fifth. Only 81 entrants this time around, the lowest of the 12 editions. A long way down from the 2021 peak of 193. A wide global distribution it seems but still a low entry from women (less than 10 I guess).

Now onwards to the 2025 entry.

Sportswashing: the Wisden writing competition gets serious

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Wisden Cricketers´ Almanack has made its annual appearance, number 160. 1616 pages, ultra small print, thin paper and the familiar yellow dust jacket. The Writing Competition is now in its 11th appearance and the winning entry is a new departure. Previous winners have focused on reflections of the past, sometimes nostalgic, occasionally humorous. A Duncan Hamilton approach. It´s taken an Australian (predictably?) to buck the trend. Dan Crowley (tweets at @dancrowley99) goes behind the scenes and brings some ethical thoughts into the global game:

Gone are the days when sport ads target actual consumers, flogging products we can buy at a shop. Now it´s an exercise in sportswashing, using the exposure of a major sporting event to target abstract concepts such as legitimacy, authenticity and trust.

His particular gripe is with Aramco, the Saudi Arabian fossil fuel company (as well as alcohol and betting companies), a sponsor of the ICC and IPL. He applauds Pat Cummins´ refusal to take part in ads for Atlinta, a major carbon emitter and sponsor of Australia’s Test shirts, as it conflicted with his activism on climate change. Crowley concludes:

Hopefully this is the way of the future, and more players, fans and administrators will have the courage to call out cricket´s unethical sponsorship deals.

This is the first time the competition winner has tackled a current topic. He certainly hit a nerve. Lawrence Booth (@BoothCricket) in his Editors´ Notes writes ” Despite its monstrous carbon footprint, international cricket has behaved as if the climate emergency is someone else´s problem“. Tanja Aldred has a full article on cricket and the environment (predictably the Daily Torygraph dismisses this: “if you crave the woke, about the game and climate change”). Crowley would have written before the competition closing date of October 2022: He was not to foresee the news (and neither did Booth or Aldred) that Saudi Arabia is bringing its sportswashing to cricket nor that Yorkshire is seeking Saudi money to stave off bankruptcy (or even worse the return of Graves).

As an aside it looks like the majority of first class counties in England and Wales have local shirt sponsors with only one stand out (Gloucestershire have the Cayman Islands). And England have a used car company.

As for the competition itself, Crowley wins with his debut entry. That makes 9 out of 11 first-time winners. Nonetheless some doggedly plough on. The three “always present” entrants remain: Paul Caswell, David Fraser and David Potter. Five more have tried unsuccessfully 9 or more times. This year 109 entered with 8 using the full allowance of two entries.Two-thirds are first timers. The entry level is down on the bumper (COVID) year of 2020 with 193 entries. Only three first timers from that year have played every time since.

The competition still attracts fewer entries than the parallel photographic competition (almost 500 entries). But its first prize of £1,000 is financially more attractive. The writing competition now offers a credit of £250 to spend at www.wisdenauction.com. Crowley´s winning entry this year opens the doors for more to tackle contemporary topics, perhaps even controversial. You have until the end of October 2023 to send in your 480 words!