SAMPLE EDITION SUMMER34 2021 THE NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY SAMPLER THE NIGHTWATCHMAN THE NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Cricket’s past has been enriched by great writing and Wisden is making sure its future ISSUE 34 – SUMMER 2021 will be too. The Nightwatchman is a quarterly collection of essays and long-form articles and is available in print and e-book formats. Co-edited by Anjali Doshi and Tanya Aldred, with Matt Thacker as managing editor, The Matt Thacker introduces issue 34 of the Nightwatchman 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 Wisden shorts – presenting the best of the Almanack’s 2020 writing competition subject matter and length, escaping the pressures of next-day deadlines and the despair on one man’s extraordinary discovery and his dogged pursuit of the truth of cramming heart and soul into a few paragraphs. Jon Hotten Stephen Chalke recalls the most improbable tale of them all 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. Sharda Ugra puts Sourav Ganguly’s BCCI presidency under the microscope 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 Dylan Cleaver looks back in admiration as Ross Taylor tours the UK for the last time do that too. Take a look at the options below and decide which is best for you. Cressida McDermott finds herself in some corner of a foreign field Simon Barnes on the essence of magic SUMMER34 2021 SPRING5 2014 SPRING5 2014SPRING5 2014 Full subscription Digital subscription The MCC cricket photo of the year competition NightwatchmanNightwatchmanNightwatchman THE WISDENTHE WISDEN CRICKET CRICKET QUARTERLY QUARTERLY Annual e-book only NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKETTHE QUARTERLY WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Annual print subscription (with subscription Barney Spender on cricket’s debt to Adam and Eve free e-book versions) £15 £29.95 (+P&P) Click to Buy Paul Brown recounts the case of the dressing-room pickpocket Click to Buy Giles Wilcock on a bold 19th-century venture which mixed theatre with sport Scott Oliver deconstructs Chris Martin in boundaries David Windram laments the cult of the prodigy Stephen Bates looks back a century to a slew of harrowing Ashes defeats SUMMER34 2021 Steve Kersley on a forgotten sporting icon Digital single copy Single copy NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Single issue Single issue (with Trevor Auger goes on the trail of a one-Test wonder (e-book only) free with free e-book version) £4 Isabelle Westbury on the pressures of social media on women £10 (+P&P) Click to Buy Click to Buy THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET 2 SAMPLER THE NIGHTWATCHMAN Take my hand, I’m a stranger in hen-pecked bank clerk in a farce”. paradise, Yet those appearances deceived. He worked tirelessly throughout the year All lost in a wonderland, a stranger in to keep the club from bankruptcy, he paradise. was always in charge on the field, and he contributed much-needed runs – Saturday, 21 May 1955. It was a dull, some 10,000 in his first six summers overcast day, with a north-east wind – and, with his medium-pace bowling, blowing across the Grace Road some useful wickets. field. Owned by the city’s education authority, the ground was not one of That Saturday there was a certain county cricket’s more popular venues. inevitability about the first two sessions A STRANGER IN PARADISE The exposed five-acre playing area of play. Leicestershire, after a bright was much too large, with several parts opening stand of 68, succumbed to Stephen Chalke recalls the most improbable tale of them all of the outfield rough from schoolboys’ the all-conquering Surrey spinners, football, and the old Victorian pavilion Laker and Lock, and were all out for with its ancient baths in the basement 114. At tea Surrey had reached 42 for Stokes and Leach at Headingley, time, the first in a run of 18 successive had splinters everywhere. According 1, with Peter May, the best batsman in Carlos Brathwaite’s last-over sixes in victories that remains even now the to Trevor Bailey, when the Essex the country, on 28 not out and looking the World T20 final – or the day back record in first-class cricket. They were team jokingly discussed suitable ominously set for a big score. Already in 1969 when the touring West Indians the greatest county side of all time, and punishments for the most heinous Leicestershire’s two finger spinners travelled to Northern Ireland and were they were at the height of their powers. cricket crimes, they reckoned one of were in action, the left-arm Vic Munden bowled out for 25. Oh the joy of such the worst “would be to sentence the and the right-arm Vic Jackson, but unlikely moments! How they enrich the May 1955. Another world. Television guilty party to playing all his cricket at they were not getting the help from the folklore of the game! was in its infancy, with just one Grace Road”. pitch that their counterparts had done. channel broadcasting for limited Yet, for sheer crazy improbability, none hours, and even that was a worry for Through the 1950s, on and off the field, During the tea break the spinners of these can match what occurred on the Leicester Chronicle’s TV critic. the threadbare Leicestershire club pointed out that they were bowling a Saturday in May 1955, in a routine “The real trouble with television,” she was in the hands of Charles Palmer, at the wrong ends. “Fine, I’ll alter you county fixture at Grace Road, Leicester. wrote that Saturday, “is that there is a former schoolmaster who had been round,” Palmer replied cheerfully but, The sparse morning crowd had grown too much of it, and it is catering for recruited from Worcester to double up as the club’s secretary, he had plenty to 4,000 by late afternoon, and what too large an audience.” Yet perhaps as both secretary and captain. “Why to attend to during the interval, and it they witnessed must rank as the most it was not so different a world. The on earth are you going there?” the went out of his mind till he was leading extraordinary bowling spell in the long country was in the grip of an epidemic Worcestershire secretary asked him. his team back onto the field. “Oh heck,” history of the first-class game. of polio, with hopes resting on a new “They’ve got no money, no side, no he suddenly thought, “I’ve got to get vaccine. Amid the standard insults of ground.” But Palmer was feeling the someone to bowl one over.” Leicestershire versus Surrey. It was a General Election, a Conservative MP claustrophobia of his schoolmaster’s David versus Goliath. The cash- was crudely capturing the headlines by life, and he took up the challenge. The easiest thing was to do it himself strapped Midland county, more likening his government to a vaccine – except that his back had been often than not near the bottom of against the crippling polio-like effects He had neither the physique nor the playing up and his doctor had given the Championship table, against a of socialism. bearing of a top sportsman. A slightly- him instructions not to bowl, not even Surrey side in the fourth summer of built, bespectacled man, with a soft in the nets. However, he had tried a an unparalleled seven-year reign as Offering relief from such worries, Tony voice and an engaging line in self- couple of tentative overs in the first champions. The previous August, when Bennett was top of the hit parade deprecating humour, he was once match of the season and had come to Surrey had visited Grace Road, they with “Stranger in Paradise”, a romantic described by Trevor Bailey, rather no harm. “Oh well,” he thought, “one had steamrollered their hosts in quick ballad from the musical Kismet: unkindly, as “a natural for the role of over won’t hurt me.” THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET 5 SAMPLER THE NIGHTWATCHMAN He marked his run-up from the Pavilion had been watching bemused from the made it to the ground. And Nadkarni bowling spell in the history of first- End as Peter May walked past him. non-striker’s end, and in his sixth he did not take a wicket. class cricket. The story goes that he put “Look, be a good chap,” Palmer said, bowled Ronnie Pratt. Six overs, five his head around the Surrey dressing- summoning up all his charm. “Don’t hit wickets and not a run scored off him. Charles Palmer had taken eight wickets room door and said: “Gentlemen, I do me for six fours. Keep it friendly.” for no runs, and in Wisden’s table of beg your pardon.” “He just treated it as a joke,” Spencer “Extraordinary Analyses” his figures Then it happened. With his second ball recalled. “After each wicket he would were set to take pride of place among At close of play, when the local reporter he tried an off-cutter, delivered from say: ‘I suppose I’d better have another those with eight wickets, overtaking pushed into the pavilion, he found the wide of the crease, and, to everybody’s over now.’” Jim Laker’s 8 for 2 in the 1950 Test trial place swarming with excited cricketers astonishment, it went through May’s at Bradford.