India’s favourite spectator sport is also the world’s most anxious. Hardly a quarter-year goes by without everyone going into a collective paroxysm about the end of the world as it has been. And to follow cricket in the 21st century is to subscribe to the conviction that this is a sport whose most genuine format — the five-day international Test match — is not going to be around very long. That perhaps explains what appears to be a surprisingly relaxed reaction to the first day-night Test, between Australia and New Zealand, taking place this weekend. Pink-ball cricket, so called for the pink ball adopted for better visibility under floodlights to men attired in white, gives us hope that cricket’s five-day game will finally be stirred out of its cosy consistencies and begin experimenting as its abbreviated versions keep doing.
Second XI: Cricket in its Outposts , by Tim Wigmore and Peter Miller. When the history of cricket is written, will 2015 be a year whose significance most of us will recognise only in hindsight. For me, it really mattered little who finally won the World Cup this year, because the most exciting moments related to the ascent of the so-called Associates, those international cricket teams who are not part of the Test-playing elite. Ireland, who had already shown promise four years previously, charmed once again. Afghanistan announced their arrival, and their fairytale spin continued after the tournament. There used to be a time when cricket strove to spread geographically, but now it looks like the Big Three are leading the effort to draw the circle closers around established cricket-playing nations. Second XI shows why that’s so wrong.
Penguins Stopped Play: Eleven Village Cricketers Take on the World , by Harry Thomson.
A tour diary, of sorts, of cricket on every continent is a book I’d take to a deserted island, to remember it’s the small encounters that keep a sport honest, and life going, and for a ton of laughs.