Wisden delivers beamer, cricket bosses take a glancing blow

PLUS: A few rugby bits and pieces, including a short diatribe on why The Bounce didn't enjoy the Blues-Crusaders clash as much as others might have.

It might have been designed on the ‘back of a fag packet’, but you’re not taking our WTC win away. Getty Images

It turns out that it was the venerable Wisden Almanack that scratched its mark at the top of its run-up and delivered the most lethal beamer of the year.

Standing just 22 yards away was cricket’s establishment, the International Cricket Council and its three dominant constituents, India (BCCI), Australia (CA) and England (ECB).

To recap, Wisden editor Lawrence Booth believes the unfettered ascension of Jay Shah, the general secretary of the BCCI and an acolyte of India’s nationalist PM Narendra Modi, to the role of ICC chair, replacing New Zealand’s Greg Barclay, “confirmed a sorry truth”.

He wrote:

2024 was the year cricket gave up any claim to being properly administered, with checks, balances, and governance for the many, not the few. India already had the monopoly: now they had hotels on Park Lane and Mayfair….

England and Australia, the only other countries with a hint of clout, acquiesced with barely a squeak. Shah’s coronation – uncontested, naturally – was in no small part a consequence of their refusal to hold India to account. A decade or so earlier, the talk had been of a Big Three takeover. Now, cricket has handed over the only key not already in India’s possession. All hail the Big One.

Wisden’s two biggest bugbears were India being allowed to disrupt Pakistan’s hosting of the Champions League by staging all their matches, including the semifinal and final, in Dubai, and the World Test Championship format, which it likened to being drawn up on the “back of a fag packet”.

As for the former, it said that the ICC, which is now primarily an events holding company, couldn’t even do that properly with the “craven” reorganisation of the itinerary and schedule to allow India to play in “neutral” territory.

A staunch upholder of the game’s traditions, if not necessarily its trends, Wisden said 2024 showed test cricket was in rude health and that calls for a two-tiered system were facile. It essentially said the only thing getting in the way of cricket being great was cricket’s administrators.

Test cricket is more competitive than proponents of a two-tier system believe. West Indies prevailed at the Gabba, Sri Lanka at the Oval. Bangladesh won in Pakistan, who came from behind to beat England, who won in New Zealand, who had just won 3-0 in India, who won the first test in Australia, who won three of the next four. Early in 2025, West Indies squared a series in Pakistan. Unpredictability is the essence of sport.

The response to all this must not be to insist on more, more, more – diluting the marquee series until they lose what makes them special. It must be to resist two divisions, and to invest in test cricket everywhere, creating a more attractive proposition for the broadcasters. ICC insiders fear they will get nothing like their £2.4 billion TV deal that runs out in 2027, with potentially damaging consequences for many test nations. It’s in everyone’s interests to share the love.

What Booth has railed at is exactly the reason Wisden’s beamer will hit with a glancing blow rather than a thud.

If this had dropped while the game was being run out of London, you wouldn’t have been able to rid the carpets of the smell of juniper berries for all the gin being spilt in horror. However, as pertinent as some of the points made are, they’re not going to resound in Mumbai or Kolkata, not in the midst of a tournament that is literally making billions upon billions of rupees for the world’s most powerful cricket nation.

Case in point: while Wisden’s words created headlines in all the big British broadsheets, it had not caused a ripple on the Bengaluru-headquartered Cricinfo and Cricbuzz, the two most visited sports websites in the world.