The Nightwatchman
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SAMPLE EDITION WINTER24 2018 THE NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY SAMPLER THE NIGHTWATCHMAN THE ISSUE 24 – WINTER 2018 NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Matt Thacker introduces issue 24 of the Nightwatchman Cricket’s past has been enriched by great writing and Wisden is making sure its future will be too. The Nightwatchman is a quarterly collection of essays and long-form articles and Robert Stanier elegises on Championship and church is available in print and e-book formats. Geoff Lemon gets under the skin of David Warner Co-edited by Anjali Doshi and Tanya Aldred, with Matt Thacker as managing editor, The Stephen Bates digs behind the shame of workhouse cricketers Nightwatchman features an array of authors from around the world, writing beautifully and at length about the game and its myriad offshoots. Contributors are given free rein over Scott Oliver on the parable of the Balham tube kebab subject matter and length, escaping the pressures of next-day deadlines and the despair Gary Cox explores the birth of cricket ball of cramming heart and soul into a few paragraphs. Patrick Ferriday goes behind the scenes at the World XI Tests There are several different ways to get hold of and enjoy The Nightwatchman. You can subscribe to the print version and get a free digital copy for when you’re travelling light. Luke Alfred – Procter and Sobers, a friendship If you don’t have enough room on your book case, you can always take out a digital-only subscription. Or if you’d just like to buy a single issue – in print, digital or both – you can Peter Mason on the crumbling of Bourda do that too. Take a look at the options below and decide which is best for you. Jackie Litherland The Bride, A Sense of Bereavement Revolution Images of women’s cricket through the ages Daniel Rey finds San Francisco’s parakeet paradise WINTER24 2018 SPRING5 2014 SPRING5 2014SPRING5 2014 Full subscription Digital subscription NightwatchmanNightwatchmanNightwatchman Annual e-book only Stephen Gregory – Sir Roger’s Revenge, a short story THE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Annual print NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKETTHE WISDENTHE QUARTERLY WISDEN CRICKET CRICKET QUARTERLY QUARTERLY subscription (with subscription free e-book versions) £15 Huw Richards traces the rise and rise of Bradman’s 99.94 £27 (+P&P) Click to Buy Tam Watson walks in the footsteps of Whispering Death Click to Buy Raf Nicholson on the battle for power in women’s cricket Dave Edmundson finds EW Swanton at Sandwich station Simon Barnes opens his scrapbook and dives in Steven Lynch on Paul Crump, the one-armed wonder-cricketer WINTER24 2018 Digital single copy Single copy NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Single issue Single issue (with (e-book only) free with free £4 e-book version) £10 (+P&P) Click to Buy Click to Buy THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET FEATURE TITLE THE NIGHTWATCHMAN political commentator Paul Kelly doesn’t go that far, merely to Watkins argued that it “equates with the prime at silly mid off. No run, still 117 for 1. Two ministership and the great Australian slips, a silly mid off and a forward short novel in the Antipodean cultural leg close to him. Hollies pitches the imagination”. The decimal point is ball up slowly… and he’s bowled… silent, but the reference evident, in the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Bradman, bowled Hollies, nought. PO Box 9994. And what do you say under these circumstances? I wonder if you see • • • the ball very clearly, on your last Test in England, on a ground where you’ve “That must have caused a fuss,” was played some of your biggest cricket of 99.94: THE INEXORABLE the reaction of a Sports Journalism your life and where the opposing team student when told of Bradman’s duck have stood around and given you three and its statistical consequences nearly cheers and the crowd has clapped you RISE OF SIR DONALD’S 70 years later in a lecture room a mile all the way to the wicket. I wonder if DUCK from The Oval. you see the ball at all. It did, but not in the terms we Not a mention of career aggregates Huw Richards on the game’s iconic number – and how hardly anyone understand now. The pathos of the or batting averages. This is of course noticed it at the time duck and its incongruity with the Arlott the poet, more interested rest of Bradman’s career were well in humanity than numbers, and understood. But this was not a world grasping Bradman’s state of mind. When Alastair Cook, on 75 in his He needed only to score those four in which career milestones were Bradman himself later confirmed that final Test innings, edged through runs to keep that average above 100, a transmitted to spectators within he might not have been seeing with midwicket for a single, the electronic record never achieved before or since.” seconds; in which cricket fans around his usual clarity. scoreboard at The Oval sprang into the world could know, as they did in action, informing spectators that this Of course Bradman was bowled second 2007, that Inzamam-ul-Haq needed There was a 40-second pause between made him the fifth-highest run-scorer ball for nought by veteran leggie Eric 20 runs in his final Test to equal “and he’s bowled…” and “Bradman, in Test history, triggering yet another Hollies, leaving him forever four runs Javed Miandad as Pakistan’s all-time bowled Hollies, nought” which was filled of the day’s many ovations. It was the short, his batting average 99.94. highest run-scorer – and then be with the initial roar and then applause latest in The Oval’s litany of farewells, informed almost instantly via a mass from the crowd. Arlott, even without accompaniment to its traditional Sir Donald’s duck is the most recalled of multimedia when he fell three short. pictures and in only his third year of role as host to the last Test of the moment of that relentlessly achieving radio commentary, knew the rule lost English summer, inevitably provoking 20-year Test career, the number it Perhaps the most evocative account of on many modern commentators (and thoughts of the most famous of all, created invariably cited to illustrate his Bradman’s final innings is John Arlott’s stadium announcers): you say nothing Donald Bradman in 1948. greatness. To Indian sportswriter Ayaz famous commentary for BBC radio: when the story is being told for you. Menon, he was “the only player who We all know that one, and its context, can be defined by a statistic”; to Cricket It’s rather good to be here when Don As well as being adept in the summed up by Charles Williams in Country, simply “the 99.94 dude”. Bradman comes in to bat in his last professional disciplines of the perhaps the best Bradman biography: Test. And now here’s Hollies to bowl to broadcaster, Arlott was too good a “It was not just a matter of farewells. It has no rivals as the most famous him from the Vauxhall End. He bowls, journalist to ignore the story of a great Bradman needed only four more runs number in cricket. “The one batting Bradman goes back across his wicket batsman falling just short of a truly to achieve a total of 7,000 runs in Test average that nobody ever need look and pushes the ball gently in the extraordinary lifetime achievement, cricket. Furthermore his Test average, up,” wrote Gideon Haigh. It reaches direction of the Houses of Parliament had he known. But Arlott did not know. when the last Test started, was 101.39. beyond the game in Australia, where which are out beyond mid off. It Nor did Bradman, nor the England THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET 5 SAMPLER THE NIGHTWATCHMAN team, nor the overwhelming majority Now a stolen single had brought the total 1946 by Walter Hammond with 7,002 334, was comfortably the top-scorer. of the huge crowd. number of runs scored by Middlesex runs at an average of 60.88, followed The main 31-page section remained that season up to exactly 5,500. This by Hobbs with 5,410 at 56.94 and then as before, with no aggregated Test This was not a world unaware of, sent the crowd perfectly delirious. Bradman on 5,093 runs at 97.94. career records. or lacking an appetite for, cricket statistics. Records are, as historian Not a single point escaped the boy at One reason for this “connected There were references to Bradman’s Allen Guttmann argued in From Ritual my side. Every one escaped me. By story” taking so long to tell was that Test average in the pocket annuals to Record, part of what separates lunchtime he had become so patronising statisticians had none of the electronic which appeared on the eve of his modern sport from its predecessors. that he was explaining to me exactly resources now taken for granted. final summer as a Test cricketer. In The Greeks kept lists of champions, what was meant by a recurring decimal. Scores had to be transcribed and Playfair Roy Webber gave his current but were not terribly concerned totalled up manually from Wisden, record as 6,488 runs at 102.93, while whether the winner of the javelin had There were others who felt the same. newspaper reports or scorebooks. the News Chronicle Annual agreed on thrown further than his predecessors. Readers of the 1949 Playfair Cricket runs but miscalculated the average Modern sport, and its fans, wants to Annual were treated to vintage Another may have been the extremely as 104.64.