Late March’s balmy sunshine turned to sleet and snow last week, a sure sign that the English county cricket season is about to start. Another is the thunk of The Cricketers’ Who’s Who hitting the doormat. The annual tome of player profiles, stats and anecdotes pored over by fans and players alike is now on its 43rd edition.
The book provides a “unique insight” into the minds of those who will grace the grounds up and down the country for the next six months, from St Lawrence to Sedbergh, Edgbaston to Aigburth.
More than 400 (nearly but not quite all) players who make up the 18-county system, as well as all the contracted women’s players, have answered questions ranging from the thorny (“Which bowler would you least like to face?” Answer: invariably Darren Stevens) to the deep (“What gives you joy?”) and the downright disconcerting (“What’s the strangest object to be found in your house?”).
The foreword this year comes from Tim Murtagh (his guilty pleasure? bubble baths), about to embark on his 23rd season around the county traps.
“When I first went into a professional dressing room there was always a Cricketers’ Who’s Who in someone’s locker,” writes Murtagh. “There’s a lot of time to talk during matches, and we’d often play ‘guess the cricketer’: “This guy’s 40 years old, he averages 24 with the ball, his highest score is 74 not out and his lookalike is Frank Lampard. Who is he?” Or we’d open it just to see who’s had the dodgiest haircut or to read out some of the amusing comments.”
Murtagh joins an esteemed rollcall of names who have written an introduction to the book. His fellow stalwart Stevens confessed to owning every copy of CWW since he turned professional in 1997, likewise Marcus Trescothick mentioned in the 2017 foreword that he had used the “iconic” book as a vital dossier in which to look up his opponents over the years. Katherine Brunt wrote movingly in the 2020 edition about her experiences of coming out: “You shouldn’t have to live your life behind closed doors because you are ashamed of who you are.”
Among the profiles and statistics can be found essays and think-pieces on the issues of the day. The 2020 edition also contains a piece on wicketkeeping by the writer William Fiennes that is just about the finest love letter to cricket you could wish to read. Then again, Alastair Cook does mention in the 2013 foreword that CWW has been a key source for Graeme Swann’s sledges and dressing room “bants” over the years, so maybe it does have some things to answer for.
Since 2016 CWW has been overseen by editor Benj Moorehead. He describes the process as: “Basically a case of consistent/artful nagging of media managers in the hope that they’ll sting the players into action. Continually shaking the apple tree until all the fruit has fallen, [although] it rarely does.”
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Back in 1980 the Conservative MP Iain Sproat had the same problem when he compiled and edited the first edition of CWW, although there were no media managers around then to do his bidding. Sproat was a man of many passions; he organised the translation of Alexander Pushkin’s complete works into English and wrote an in-depth study of PG Wodehouse. In 1983 Sproat also committed what Tam Dalyell described as “one of the most spectacular political boobs of all time” by leaving his Aberdeen South seat for a supposedly safer constituency, which he lost. The move was disastrous for Sproat, pushing him into the political wilderness for the next nine years, but did at least mean he could concentrate on CWW.
In an early preface he thanked a “Mr Bill Smith FRPS” for personally taking nearly all the photographs. Murtagh and his Middlesex teammates would no doubt have a chuckle at the assortment of perms, combovers and luxuriously meaty sideburns on offer in the early 1980s editions. Those early volumes contain things that the modern world, cricketing or otherwise, would blanch at now. Not only are players’ heights listed (as they are in current editions) but weight too; some of the less lissom no doubt rounding down their stats before sending them to Sproat. Marital status, qualifications and parents names are all dutifully listed.
As are “second jobs”. The professional contracts at the time not stretching to 12 months, all but the most well-off or successful players had to find winter employment. Jonathan Agnew proudly displays his status as a “Lorry driver for SBA (Asbestos), Leicester” and Kim Barnett his time as a bank clerk. There are insurance salesmen, builders, farmers, teachers, waiters, Harrods stock-takers, plasterers and even a gravedigger. You wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that Mike Hendrick put his long seamer’s fingers to candlestick making come November (close … he did in fact work for the electricity board).
Incredibly, most players even listed their personal address and landline number, in case, say, a fan in the shires wanted to ring up their county captain and enquire as to why they weren’t picking their frontline spinner.
Yet despite this, and the anachronistic sponsors of the day’s big tournaments – John Player, Benson & Hedges (don’t mention KP Nuts) some aspects of the county game seem destined to remain the same.
“As I travel the country I come across an older generation who assure me the game isn’t what it was,” wrote Botham in 1981, a few months before he went on to make that summer his own. The all-rounder touches on the impact of limited-overs cricket, the need to look at the structure of county cricket as well as pay, and the pros and cons of overseas players. He also writes that there “is a case for arguing we play too many matches” that could result in a “real danger of players not enjoying their role”. Familiar feelings for the county game more than 40 years later, then.
As the game’s professionals embark on another domestic summer, plenty will have a copy of CWW in their kitbag. To them it will be a familiar source of information and laughs, intentional or not. To others the book will provide heart and soul and colour to the black and white names on the scorecard.
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Over the years, players used to fill in forms for each other with predictable results – local libraries must have forever been running low on the Kama Sutra if the answers to “What’s your favourite book?” were to be taken seriously.
Scott Borthwick you ask? He’s a fan of The Girl on the Train, though he didn’t think the film adaptation was up to much. Dom Sibley lists The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho as his favourite, a book that was written in just two weeks. It would be unfair to suggest that’s about the same length of time it takes Sibley to scratch his way to 28, wouldn’t it?
Flicking through CWW you do find the odd gem – Stuart Broad claims he often dreams in French. No doubt recent slumbers have seen him as Robespierre enacting a Terror on Sir Andrew Strauss and the selectors. The Warwickshire bowler Olly Stone proudly states that his grandfather invented the Twix chocolate bar, while Jimmy Anderson, England’s highest ever Test wicket-taker, brags that he can peel a potato in 2.4 seconds.
There’s room for poignancy, too. Asked how to go about dismissing Steve Smith, Jack Leach responds simply: “Keep my foot behind the line.” Or try to keep a dry eye upon reading which animal Mason Crane would choose to be: “A tortoise, because they are always home.”
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