by John Wisden
There is hope – but only a little. If India’s bookmakers were legalised, they would have to operate exactly like Ladbrokes or William Hill. That would mean an end to the credit system, where bookies accept customers on trust. Instead, they would need money in their account to wager. And to have an account, they would have to hand over their personal details. When accounts are kept and verified, you have a paper trail. If you have a paper trail, you have no rogue punters setting up fixes with their friends in cricket teams. At a stroke, the potential for corruption would be reduced by half.
Vinay is not convinced: “People say: ‘Legalise betting in India and fixing will stop.’ Yes. We are ready to pay tax. I’m tired of paying off the police. But it will not stop fixing. Never.”
Ed Hawkins is the author of Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: a journey to the corrupt heart of cricket’s underworld. It is Wisden’s Book of the Year for 2013.
WISDEN WRITING COMPETITION WINNER, 2012
South African Time
BRIAN CARPENTER
It is a warm evening in south London, with just a hint of the hazy stickiness that infuses the capital’s air when the temperature and humidity climb. It is July 2012 and the sunshine comes as welcome relief after weeks of sullen skies and intense rain.
The Oval is tense as Kevin Pietersen searches for the fluency and restless innovation which are the leitmotifs of his best batting. The South African attack is fast, skilful and persistently accurate. On 14, Pietersen is dropped at second slip by Jacques Kallis. It is an illusory release of pressure.
He has added only two runs before his stumps are shattered by Morne Morkel, a gangling young Afrikaner with gentle features which contrast sharply with the coltish aggression of his bowling, where pace and bounce are all. Pietersen, with his proud, upright bearing and composed demeanour, leaves the field. The mood is heavy with the scent of unburdened emotion and thwarted ambition.
One of the South African team is Hashim Mahomed Amla, a 29-year-old from Durban who is now among the world’s greatest batsmen. He has met Pietersen before. In 1999, Amla and Pietersen played for KwaZulu-Natal against England. Pietersen saw himself as a shackled, repressed talent, forced to bowl off-spin while dreaming of a better life abroad; Amla was 16, saturnine and clean-shaven, yet to become the wearer of the second-most-celebrated beard in cricket history.
A few months later, Pietersen left South Africa. Amla stayed, endured dark times and eventually flourished. His batting is a potent amalgam of technical precision, fluid timing and understated power. In 2012, in England, this is as good as the batsman’s art can get.
The history of South African Test cricket is weighed down by unfulfilled expectations and denied promise. Great, great players – Pollock, Procter, Richards, van der Bijl – went to their cricketing graves without an extended opportunity to display their talents on the widest stage. But this is to say nothing of the legions of cricketers who, because of their race, were denied the chance to stand even on the rung below.
Once upon a time, Amla would have been the player required to leave his homeland to realise his potential and live out his dreams. It would have been the destiny of Pietersen, with his expensive Pietermaritzburg education and his apparently inviolable sense of self-certainty, to wear the national cap.
Amla is a modest, reserved, devout man. He wastes little emotion but, as he leaves the field at the close of a day on which he has completed the highest individual score by a South African Test batsman, he exudes calm satisfaction. His place in history is secure.
Cricket is a game of conjunctions, of ironies, of veiled resonances. When Hashim Amla was a boy, his country didn’t have an international team. Now, for him and his nation, the feeling of belonging is sweet.
This is their time.
Brian Carpenter grew up watching Middlesex and England in the 1970s and 1980s. He is now often to be found on Gimblett’s Hill at Taunton or in the Warner Stand at Lord’s. He blogs at differentshadesofgreen.blogspot.com
THE COMPETITION – THIS YEAR AND NEXT
Wisden received more than 100 entries for its first writing competition. They arrived from all corners of the globe, all ages, and both genders. The standard was almost invariably high, and the business of judging tricky. In the end, though, the editorial team were at one in selecting Brian Carpenter as the first winner of what is intended to become an annual award. The prize is publication, adulation, and an invitation to the launch dinner.
There are one or two minor changes of housekeeping for the 2013 competition, and the basic rules are given below. Anyone who has not been commissioned for Wisden before can take part. Entries, which should not have been submitted before and are restricted to a maximum of two per person, must be:
1. the entrant’s own work;
2. unpublished in any medium;
3. received by November 30, 2013;
4. between 480 and 520 words (excluding the title);
5. neither libellous nor offensive;
6. related to cricket, but not a match report.
Articles should be emailed to [email protected], with “Writing Competition” as the subject line. Alternatively, they can be posted to: Writing Competition, John Wisden & Co, 13 Old Aylesfield, Golden Pot, Alton, Hampshire GU34 4BY. Please provide your name, address and telephone number. Bloomsbury staff and those who, in the editor’s opinion, have a working relationship with Wisden are ineligible. The editor’s decision is final. Once again, we look forward to reading your contributions.
THE 2012 ENTRANTS
Brian Baker; Andrew Bloxham; Keith Booth; Geoffrey Brooks; Michael Burnett; Malcolm Burr; Gordon Campbell; Jonathan Campion; Brian Carpenter; Paul Caswell; Jeff Chandler; Matthew Cheadle; Simon Cleverley; Terry Coffey; David Cohen; Angus Cooper; Gerry Cotter; Terry D’Arcy; Martin Davies; Tim Day; Ewan Day-Collins; Viraj R. Deshpande; Aditya Deuskar; Ethan Dwinger; Phillip Edwards; Simeon Edwards; Giles Falconer; Keith Feaver; Alex Fein; Stewart Francis; David Fraser; Allan Garley; Stephen Gibbs; Tony Giles; Yaron Gottlieb; Ian Gray; James Greenbury; Rory Gribbell; Jon Guard; P. J. Hadcock; Mike Harfield; Brian Harwood; Mike Hill; M. J. Holmes; Irfan Nazir; Georgia Isaac; Nilesh Jain; Steve Jennings; Philip Jones; Shyam Krishnan; James Lawrence; Roger Lewis; Amy Lofthouse; Howell Lovell; Michael Mackenzie; Edmund Martin; David Matthews; Neil Matthews; Paul Mercer; Keith Miller; Peter Miller; Greg Morrissey; David Moyes; Nayeem Islam; John Newth; Murrell Osborne; Ken Payne; David Pennington; Lionel Pike; David Potter; Samanta Priyanka; Ravi Kumar Putcha; Satish Kumar Putcha; Partab Ramchand; Keith Riches; Chris Rigby; Martin Roe; Mark Sanderson; Apurv Sardeshmukh; Christopher Sharp; C. J. A. Slater; Alan Smith; Chris Smith; Stuart Smith; Joshua Spink; Michael Strong; Tom Stuttard; S. B. Tang; James Thomson; Fergal Tobin; Denis Vaz; Malcolm Watson; John West; Robert West; Alan White; Reg White; Simon White; Trevor Woolley; Peter Yarlett; Zeeshan Mahmud.
FIVE CRICKETERS OF THE YEAR
The Five Cricketers of the Year represent a tradition that dates back in Wisden to 1889, making this the oldest individual award in cricket. The Five are picked by the editor, and the selection is based, primarily but not exclusively, on the players’ influence on the previous English season. No one can be chosen more than once. A list of past Cricketers of the Year can be found at www.wisden.com
Hashim Amla
NEIL MANTHORP
Hashim Amla enjoyed one of the most productive tours of England ever seen. In all three formats he was prolific, top-scoring in eight of his 11 international innings. His triple-century in the First Test at The Oval was as career-defining as it was nation-defining: he was the first South African to reach the landmark. It was an epic, and the fact that it laid the platform for a famous series win marked it out for eternal fame. By the time he added another century, in the Third Test at Lord’s, he had edged past even Jacques Kallis as the wicket England craved most.
Amla produced yet another hundred in the one-day series, at Southampton, prompting coach Gary Kirsten to purr: “The pitch was extremely awk
ward, the bowling very good. To make 150 out of 287 rates it very highly, probably in the top three one-day innings for South Africa.” Accolades kept coming his way as the year progressed; by the end, he had scored 1,950 runs in all internationals, at an average of nearly 63.
Inevitably, there was much talk of his heritage and its historical significance. But Amla, a 30-year-old, third-generation South African, downplays the situation without demeaning it. “The post-apartheid era has been around for a long time, so we are accustomed to seeing people of all races representing South Africa,” he says. “I understand that older generations may find some satisfaction in my achievements, but it is not a factor for me or the team. We were just little boys when Nelson Mandela was released from prison.”
A simple question reveals his essence: does he see himself as a role model? “You are a role model as an international sportsman. The only choice is whether you are a good or a bad one. I would like to be a good one.” And Amla means to be a role model to everyone, irrespective of colour, creed or religion.
On the subject of natural talent, a condition he is accused of possessing with every new example of genius, he smiles knowingly: “There’s no substitute for hard work. Even those players who make it look easy, they all train hard. There’s such a thing as natural talent, and no such thing as natural success.”
Minor frailties in his technique were exposed when he made a false start to his international career back in 2004-05. He played round his front pad, and was dropped after two Tests at home to England amid whispers of tokenism. He also struggled against the short ball, and spent close to 100 hours in Kingsmead’s indoor school facing thousands of bouncers from a bowling machine at full pace. After 15 Tests, he averaged 25 – a figure he has since doubled. That was not, as Amla says, a result of natural talent.
And yet he clearly has something. Whereas others see fielders, Amla sees gaps. It accounts for his occasionally extraordinary shot selection, such as leaping towards cover and flicking decent deliveries through the leg side from outside off stump. “Sometimes you need to hit the ball where the bowler doesn’t want you to,” he says, trying hard not to sound confrontational. “I’m sure it does upset bowlers, but that’s not my aim. I just want to score runs.”
The wrist skills which characterise his run-making are not, in fact, a legacy of his Indian heritage. His grandparents emigrated from Gujarat 60 years ago, but his blood is “South African green”, and his subcontinental batting skills are all self-taught. It is Amla’s ability to manoeuvre himself, at times un-obtrusively, into unorthodox positions that makes his batsmanship appear less outrageous than it really is. Only the most discerning observe his ability to toy with the bowler and create scoring opportunities. The off-stump guard he took to Graeme Swann during the Oval Test was a classic of the genre; by the end of the series, Swann was bowling without a slip.
HASHIM MAHOMED AMLA, born in Durban on March 31, 1983, encounters awe on a regular basis, but he does not encourage it. Awe, he feels, should be reserved for those with a special dispensation in life, not for a cricketer who – like him – happens to lead a simple existence according to the principles of his religion. He does not enjoy the spotlight, nor when his cricket is linked to his Muslim faith. He sees his religion, personality and cricket as existing concurrently, but separately, and finds it peculiar that people should seek a special explanation for his ability to cope with, say, the tension of a Lord’s century or a steepling catch in the deep with a series at stake. Amla’s Twitter lexicon is more Durban hipster than cricketer: were he not a batsman, he’d be a surfer.
His aura and influence within the team are as profound as they are unintended. The way he goes about his daily life has changed the perspective of team-mates. On tour, Morne Morkel has been known to appease his own stresses and strains just by spending time in Amla’s hotel room. An Afrikaner in the room of a Muslim: nothing to them, earthquake to social historians. Even the traditional drinkers in the squad adore Amla for his non-judgmental approach. Despite refusing to wear the logo of the national sponsor – Castle Lager – he thoroughly endorses personal choice. He has gone out of his way to make team-mates aware he is neither disapproving nor uncomfortable when they celebrate victories in the traditional way.
Captaincy is a tricky subject. He’s very good at it, and everyone wants him to do it, but he’s only reluctantly willing, not keen. Amla understands the political expediency and other benefits of occupying a position of national leadership. But he also understands his game well enough to know that the most likely result is fewer runs. He was Under-19 captain when South Africa were beaten by Australia in 2002, and had the captaincy of KwaZulu-Natal thrust upon him at the age of 21. The first worked, the second didn’t.
A glorious 2012 has left him thinking of nothing but the next innings. “Things have a way of sorting themselves out. For now I am simply loving the game. This Wisden honour is very, very special. I do not regard myself in the same company as many previous winners.” The modesty would have England’s bowlers ruefully shaking their heads.
Nick Compton
RICHARD LATHAM
When Somerset declared on 512 for nine against Worcestershire on the penultimate day of the County Championship, Nick Compton was on 155 and six runs adrift of a first-class average of 100. This was a feat only four men had achieved in an English summer since the war (five, if you include Australian tailender Bill Johnston, who was dismissed once in 17 innings in 1953). In the event, he ended up settling for a first-class average of 99.60 and – in case sceptics wondered whether his stats had been misleadingly massaged by a huge 236 against Cardiff MCCU at the start of April – a Championship figure of 99.25. Among batsmen who had played at least ten innings, that average placed him 26 runs ahead of the next best. His first-class tally of 1,494 runs was 280 more than second-placed James Hildreth, a Somerset team-mate – despite Compton missing three matches with a back injury.
It was a gargantuan effort in a summer which, certainly in the matches played before the break for Twenty20 cricket in mid-June, was tailor-made for seam bowling. The fact that he had missed out on another statistical landmark earlier in the season barely seemed to matter. Compton had been robbed by rain of the chance to become the first player since Graeme Hick in 1988 to score 1,000 runs before the end of May, having chalked off nine of the 59 needed against Worcestershire at New Road when the heavens opened on May 31. On June 1, he was finally out for 108.
His early-season performances, which included 99 against Middlesex, 133 against Worcestershire and an unbeaten 204 against Nottinghamshire, had made their impression. In September, Compton’s immense powers of concentration and exemplary technique won him the reward he most coveted: a place in England’s Test squad for the tour to India, where he was an able lieutenant as Alastair Cook’s opening partner, even if the big score he craved eluded him.
NICHOLAS RICHARD DENIS COMPTON was born in Durban, South Africa, on June 26, 1983. His parents Richard – who played first-class cricket for Natal and was the son of England’s Denis – and Zimbabwean mother Glynis had backgrounds in public relations and journalism. Early education was at Clifton Preparatory School, Durban, and Compton made his first cricketing trip to England on a school tour aged 12. After periods at Hilton College and Durban High School, where he played under Hashim Amla, the opportunity arose to study at Harrow on a sports scholarship. He immediately helped secure a first victory in 25 years over Eton at Lord’s – “a magical day” – and by his third year he was captain, while also securing a contract with Middlesex. He began a social science degree at Durham University, but a persistent groin problem, which eventually led to surgery, curtailed his cricket; he never completed the course.
Once fully fit, Compton took well to county cricket, and was a three-times winner of Middlesex’s Young Player of the Year award – named after his grandfather. In 2006, he scored 1,313 first-class runs and was selected for the England A tour to India and Bangladesh, working under Andy Flower �
�� then a batting coach – at Loughborough. In Bangladesh, he topped the averages, and his career appeared to be blossoming. But a shock was around the corner. The following season he managed only 385 Championship runs, and was dropped by Middlesex.
“It was a shattering experience,” he says. “I felt I was close to playing for England at the start of the summer, and being left out by Middlesex – unjustly, in my opinion – hit me hard. The next 14 months were really tough.” After only three Championship appearances in 2008, Compton decided to head to Australia during the winter to try to regain his confidence.
In the summer of 2009 Compton regained a regular first-team place. It was then that Somerset stepped in. “Even though I had enjoyed a better season with Middlesex, I felt the time was right to cut my ties,” he says. “I wanted to push myself and play in the first division of the Championship.”
Leaving London for the quiet of the West Country proved more taxing than Compton had expected. He struggled to fit into an established batting line-up, and found socialising difficult, admitting to feeling “pretty lonely at times”. Asked to be the rock which would allow more free-scoring players like Marcus Trescothick, Hildreth, Craig Kieswetter and Peter Trego to play their shots, he lost sight of natural strengths.