Wisdens
Norman Geras has 74; Tim Rice (the lucky beggar) has all 145 of them. I have 64, but then the other two have a few years' head start on me.
I am talking about Wisden Cricketer's Almanacs. The 2008 edition has recently been published, and the new editor Scyld Berry appears to want to focus on the threat, as he sees it, posed by the Indian Cricket League. I will probably post something of that in due course, but for this instance I want to focus on Wisdens.
It seems to non-cricketing fanatics that Wisden is typical of the game's curiosities. In a recent chat with my girlfriend, she asked why there was a need for them to come out every year. After all, not much could have changed in a year, could it? Well, yes and no.
But Wisden is more than just a chronicle of statistics. The best bit about last Christmas was just being immersed in Wisden with a glass of wine. Reading Mike Atherton on Shane Warne, and the notes by the editor, the blow-by-blow account of the county season, finding out that Victor Trumper was out for a duck in his first Test in 1899. I'm a freak, it can't be denied. But then, in this crazy world, cricket is the nearest thing I have to a religion. Which means reading a Wisden is an almost spiritual occasion. This is all pretentious bollocks, of course, but finding solace in a cricket book is cheaper, and better for you, than finding solace in whisky. Or Catholicism.
Cory
