Cricket

Quite a few games in the County Championship start today and it being a typical day in April where there's plenty of cloud cover, every team that has won the toss has decided to field. Expect loads of falling timber this morning..

 

Mental, absolutely mental..

 

The rain is bailing Warwickshire out at Edgbaston. Early lunch taken with Notts needing to knock of the last four Bears' wickets, weather permitting..

 

Wisden hits the shelves this week and, as well as unveiling its latest batch of award winners, it has trained its sights on the International Cricket Council. The World Test Championship, the book argues, is a “shambles masquerading as a showpiece”.

The publication of the sport’s annual bible is timely, with the future of the WTC discussed recently at ICC meetings in Zimbabwe. In typically opaque fashion, the sport’s governing body is yet to announce the outcome of the debate.

Sources suggest the 2025-27 WTC is likely to remain the same, with nine teams and an asymmetrical two‑year fixture list producing two finalists. Writing in his notes the Wisden editor, Lawrence Booth, has made the case for a four-year all‑play‑all format, highlighting South Africa’s spot in the final at Lord’s this summer despite a paltry diet of two-match series and having faced neither England nor Australia en route.

“Among the first items in [the ICC chair Jay] Shah’s in-tray ought to be the World Test Championship, a shambles masquerading as a showpiece,” Booth writes. “This is not South Africa’s fault. It may even be to their benefit, if the path from laughing stocks to Lord’s persuades their board that Test cricket is worth saving.

“The ICC cannot allow the championship to continue as if designed on the back of a fag packet. Double its length to four years, like football and rugby, and ensure the top nine in the rankings all play each other, home and away, over series of at least three Tests.”

The catch, as ever, is India’s ongoing refusal to play in Pakistan on geopolitical grounds – something that came to a head during the recent Champions Trophy when Rohit Sharma’s eventual winners were based in Dubai for the entire tournament. This in turn highlighted India’s dominance at board level, with Shah having switched from secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India to ICC chair last December while the issue was being debated.

Booth writes: “The communal shrug [that met Shah’s appointment] confirmed a sorry truth: 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.”

Elsewhere Wisden features moving first-person tributes to Graham Thorpe by Alec Stewart and Thorpe’s wife, Amanda, with the latter keen to raise awareness and understanding of the depression and anxiety that led the former England batter to take his own life last August. “Some people say suicide is selfish,” Amanda Thorpe writes. “But I have so much compassion for what he went through. He didn’t deserve it. No one does.”

This year’s five Wisden cricketers of the year – the award that can be won only once and recognises performances during the previous English summer – includes three Surrey players in Jamie Smith, Gus Atkinson and Dan Worrall, as well as Liam Dawson and Sophie Ecclestone. Jasprit Bumrah is the leading men’s cricketer in the world, with compatriot Smriti Mandhana claiming the equivalent women’s award.

Wisden calls World Test Championship a ‘shambles’ and makes case for reform

 

I'm still trying to get my head around what this boy has just achieved. I mean, it's not like he hit those runs against a weak bowling attack, he was facing Siraj, Ishant, Washington and Rashid Khan FFS!

 

After the Lord Mayor's show and all that..

Vaibhav Suryavanshi, 14, crashes back to earth as IPL wonderkid follows ton with duck

 

Great result by Warwickshire in the CC, beating a star studded Yorkshire inside three days at Headingley. The home side fielded Joe Root, Harry Brook and YJB but to no avail, and to make things worse Yorkshire will be docked points for a slow over rate..