Time and its passing are disorientating beasts.  The Covid-19 pandemic has simultaneously lengthened and foreshortened memory, so that things which happened in 2019 seem to belong to another universe, while daily events rush at you like asteroids. 

So it is with cricket.  While the English season saw the start of The Hundred, a glowing if truncated Test series and the fall of Yorkshire, the year’s early months also resonated.

India recovered from the Adelaide 36 to win in Australia, and Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, at 81 All Out (81allout.com), wrote of falling in love, ‘the elasticity of a Test match’ and the dreamy quality of one of the year’s outstanding cricketers, Rishabh Pant.  Venkatraman Ganesan, at Blogternator (blogternator.com) deconstructed Pant’s reverse sweep off Jimmy Anderson during his century in India’s fourth Test against England at Ahmedabad and paid tribute to Pant’s irreverence: ‘This is the irreverence that instils hope when one is down in the depths of despair. This is the irreverence that is revered by so many ordinary mortals’.

Pant also had his part to play in England, but the bowling of Jasprit Bumrah and his compatriots on the last afternoon at Lord’s led Vaidyanathan to write of ‘something visceral yet cerebral, raw yet refined. A spectacle but also an art form.  Thrilling to watch yet difficult to explain…a bowling performance for the ages’.

After a gestation which spanned two British Prime Ministers, two Presidents of the United States and the biggest pandemic for a century, The Hundred finally took physical form.   After seemingly everyone had given their views on how it would look and what it might mean, it was something of a relief to find that when the women’s teams of the Manchester Originals and the Oval Invincibles took the field at the Oval in late July the world didn’t stop turning.  As so often, the blog which both reflected and stimulated the myriad controversial debates in English cricket was Being Outside Cricket (beingoutsidecricket.com).  Chris Crampton saluted veterans and paid homage to the peerless Joe Root, Danny Frankland skewered the ECB media machine with inspired satirical hoaxes, and Dmitri Old ranted as only he can.  The most splenetic of Old’s pieces was, as usual, framed by a song lyric, which spoke of ‘lies and deceit’ gaining ‘a little more power’.  It is impossible to distil the breadth of Old’s disdain into a few quotations, but he cares deeply, he speaks for many and he needs to be read.

It may seem a tasteless observation, especially during a pandemic, but the retirement of cricketers has sometimes been viewed as analogous to death; an unwelcome confirmation that their youth, their hopes and their dreams are at an end.  John Rigg, at An Ordinary Spectator (anordinaryspectator.com), focused perceptively on the fact that the absence of spectators at virtually all cricket in 2020 and early 2021 deprived many storied performers of the farewells they deserved:  ‘…When we…enter the post-restrictive “new normal” of watching live sport, a number of constituents of that universe will have been permanently removed.  There will be a new “now” which will be devoid of some of the participants of the previous “then”, whose departures we will only be able to mark long after they occurred’.

For the second year running the future lay shrouded in uncertainty, but cricket’s endless propensity for regeneration and controversy ensured that, for the present, its ability to inspire fine writing would endure.

Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, 2022