Joe Root has been named Wisden’s Leading Cricketer in the World for the first time following his sensational batting exploits in 2021, his final year as England captain.
The 159th edition Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2022 is released on Thursday, with Root decorated as the leading male player and South Africa’s Lizelle Lee the Leading Woman Cricketer in the World.
Wisden editor Lawrence Booth also named his five Cricketers of the Year, an award based on the English summer that a player can only win once. These awards have been handed out since 1889 and are the oldest individual award in cricket.
Reflecting a poor summer for the England men’s team, just one of the five is English, Ollie Robinson, who overcame a tumultuous Test debut in which offensive tweets were revealed to take 37 wickets in his first year as an international.
Instead, touring players are celebrated, with Devon Conway rewarded for a double-century on Test debut at Lord’s and being part of New Zealand’s World Test Championship-winning side.
Rohit Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah also win the award for their outstanding contributions to India’s dominance of their unfinished Test series against England.
Dane van Niekerk, the South Africa captain, wins the award for her role in the inaugural edition of the Women’s Hundred. She led Oval Invincibles to the title, was the leading run scorer and Most Valuable Player in the tournament.
Root’s award comes five days after he resigned as England captain after five years in the job. In 2021, he made 1,708 Test runs, including six centuries, despite his side struggling, especially with the bat.
“Root rose above the struggles of England’s Test side to produce one of the all-time great performances in a calendar year,” says Booth. “His 1,708 runs have been beaten only by Mohammad Yousuf in 2006 and Viv Richards in 1976, and included six hundreds. And he scored his runs in his fifth year as England captain, at which point many of his predecessors had already called it a day.”
Ben Stokes, who is likely to succeed Root as Test captain, won the award in 2019 and 2020.
This year’s other award winners include England U19 star Jacob Bethell, who is Wisden Schools Cricketer of the Year, and Mohammad Rizwan, who takes The Leading Twenty20 Cricketer in the World.
The Almanack reports extensively on the state of the game and, certainly through an English lens, this is one of the gloomier editions in recent times, following the racism scandal that rocked the game (Azeem Rafiq writes about his experience), the further impact of Covid-19, the lavish bonuses awarded to ECB executives, and the downturn in fortunes of the “delusional” England men’s team across the year.
Booth tackles all these issues in his notes, describing it as an “annus horribilis” and calling on CEO Tom Harrison to hand back his bonus.
“Can there ever have been a bigger gap between what English cricket hoped to be, and what it was – between reality and fantasy?” Booth wrote. “Early in 2022, a long-planned assault on the Ashes ended with all-out surrender… Before that, a racism scandal brought to light by the courage of Azeem Raï¬q made the game look unwelcoming, and worse. There was little to cherish.”
