Graeme Swann’s grinning reaction was: “What, I don’t have to do anything else?” He had been part of England’s Ashes-winning team of 2009, he had just taken eight wickets to win the decisive Oval Test. But he wanted to be sure his award was in the bag.
I will never forget the joy at the annual dinner when Andy Flower, then England’s batting coach, presented a leatherbound Wisden to Ottis Gibson, then England’s bowling coach, after his superlative last season with Durham. Friendship seldom generates such warmth.
Such moments reminded me of the responsibility in holding the only key to the game’s Hall of Fame, as the decision is the editor’s alone.
But I felt just about qualified after being a cricket correspondent for 30 years — more than half for The Telegraph — and touring all the Test-playing countries, and getting to know the main players, journalists and administrators.
Another delight is the one common to most editing: the commissioning of an article that one wants to read and nurturing it until fruition. The piece in this year’s Wisden about the All-India tour of England 100 years ago — the strangest of all cricket tours – was three years in the making from conception.
It depends entirely on the nature of the piece whether the right author is a journalist, a current cricketer, a former player, an academic or someone else. In general, I tried to invite more players to write for Wisden.
Few former editors of Wisden have played any cricket, although John Woodcock was only prevented from doing so by ill health. But the founder, John Wisden, was one of the best bowlers of his day, and the early almanacks had an understanding of the game — not just what happened and when, but how and why – that had become rather lost.
I like to think Wisden is now what it says on the tin: a cricketers’ almanack — the Cricketers’ Almanack — as well as a cricket-watcher’s.
This year’s edition tells the cricket-watcher about the yips which afflicted Scott Boswell in a domestic cup final, between Leicestershire and Somerset in 2001, and the cricketer about how to go about curing such an attack.
The Guardian commented last week that the change in editorship had been made in ‘ill-explained circumstances’ — and I can only agree. When I was called into the Soho office last October, the then chief executive explained that I had been “a very good editor” but that after four years, my year-by-year consultancy agreement would not be renewed because another editor was wanted to run a new website; then added, “it might be the wrong decision”.
Ah well, the main thing is that the game goes on, and Wisden will be there to record it, although I remain to be convinced — but then I would, wouldn’t I? — that the new arrangements are in the best interests of Wisden, or its readers, or of cricket.
And there are those ‘down’ times in winter, in the demanding build-up to publication, when upholding Wisden’s standards of accuracy for almost 1,700 pages can be a weighty task. Has the umpire for the Test between Bangladesh Under-19s and England Under-19s been spelt the same as in the third one-day international between Bangladesh and New Zealand?
One year, when the typesetting was done in Colchester, and the staff were staying seven miles away near Flatford Mill, I walked there one icy morning across the meadows. It was then I realised the hard work is worthwhile.
Constable’s paintings are a part of English consciousness; and when I look at the photograph of E W Swanton’s battered copy of the 1939 Wisden, which helped to sustain him and not merely hundreds but thousands of other prisoners in Japanese war camps, I appreciate that Wisden is too.
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