Self-indulgence Special: What Writing For Wisden Means To Me

As I write this my tux is hanging up in the spare room, all dry-cleaned and spruce. It takes a lot to get me into a tux (and from trying it on I can safely say there’s also now a lot of me to get into a tux) but tomorrow night I’ll be in London wearing the soup and fish on one of the proudest days of my life.

On the bookshelves behind me are three rows of little yellow books. All have the same spine; the only difference is that the year and the edition number rise as you browse from left to right.

I received my first Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack on my thirteenth birthday: on the day I became a teenager I took ownership of my first Wisden. For a cricket mad kid it was like being admitted to the best club in the world. My cricketing exploits would never make its pages - on the not unreasonable grounds that I was crap - but owning a Wisden made you feel like you really belonged to something; that you had a stake in the game.

Wisden is the world’s most famous sports book. Since 1864 it has been the main resource for cricket statistics and the source of some of the best cricket writing around. While moving with the times – Wisden is even on Twitter now – the little yellow book has always stuck to its founding principles and maintained a gravitas and respect that are rare in the modern world.

My Wisden collection now parallels my life: I have one for every year since I was born. The steady progress of yellow spines along the shelves is a useful reminder of one’s mortality; the yellow brick road of existence creeping slowly and inexorably along the shelf of life. Or, you know, something.

There’s currently a space next to the 2010 edition because this year’s Wisden is not published until tomorrow. This is always a time of great anticipation for the cricket fan, but for me the most notable aspect of the 2011 Wisden is that I’ll be in it.

Me.

In Wisden.

At the end of last year the editor Scyld Berry e-mailed me out of the blue and asked me to write a piece for the 2011 Almanack. I’ve written a lot of stuff over the years for all sorts of publications and formats and have loved pretty much all of it, but this invitation knocked me, well, for six (apologies, I’m still too overawed to weed out clichés however appropriate they might be).

I replied to Scyld saying yes within around a quarter of a second of his e-mail hitting my inbox, gave out an almost canine yelp of delight, ran to my shelves, started pulling out random editions and leafed frantically through them, briefly examining Sheffield Shield matches from the late seventies and obituaries of men whose entire lives are summed up in a single sentence detailing their three appearances for Northamptonshire in 1954 in which they scored 21 runs and took two catches, and thinking I’m going to be in there, me, I’m going to be in Wisden, until I was sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by thick little yellow bricks as if a small yellow house had just collapsed around me.

I can safely say that writing for Wisden is by far the proudest achievement of what I laughably call my career. It doesn’t get better than this. Part of me won’t believe the piece is actually in there until I see it for myself (and even then I still might take a bit of convincing) but tomorrow night I’ll be asphyxiating slowly in a bow tie, spilling gravy down my dress shirt and using all the wrong cutlery at the publication dinner in the legendary Long Room at Lord’s Cricket Ground. The bible of cricket, the holy of cricketing holies and, well, me.

I am not a religious man, but there’s every chance you’ll catch me tomorrow night genuflecting in front of the bust of W.G. Grace.

Why?

Because I have a piece in Wisden.

"Charge him, sah!" Ireland's first Wisden Cricketer of the Year

At midnight last night Wisden announced its Five Cricketers Of The Year, an annual tradition dragged into the 21st century by the fact that this year there are only four - the fifth would have been one of the Pakistani cricketers banned for spot-fixing cricket matches last summer.

One of the lucky quartet to make the cut is Eoin Morgan, the Irish batsman who has become a key part of the England set-up. However, Morgan is not – as many including me initially suspected - the first Irishman to be selected as one of the cricket bible’s players of the year. In fact he’s not even the first Dubliner. That particular honour goes to the remarkable and eccentric figure of Robert Montagu Poore, one of Wisden’s cricketers of the year in 1900.

Born at Carysfort House in Blackrock, Dublin, on 20 March 1866, Poore showed no interest in cricket until well into his twenties; taking up the game after being posted to India in the army (he would serve in the Boer War and the First World War, eventually becoming a Brigadier-General).

He learned the game by watching matches and studying the Badminton Book “as thoroughly as though he had had to get it up for an examination” according to an interview he gave Cricket magazine, but took to it so well that when stationed in South Africa in 1896 he was selected for the South African team to play against England, appearing in three Test matches.

It wasn’t until he was posted to Britain in 1898 that Poore played in England, but it was the 1899 season that was to make his name and earn him the Wisden accolade. He scored 1,551 runs for Hampshire at an average of 91.23 - including a triple hundred against Somerset – an average not bettered in England until Don Bradman in 1930.

The outbreak of the Boer War curtailed his season and would keep him militarily occupied for the next three years. A badly broken arm in 1902 meant that Poore would not play serious cricket again until 1904 but he would never approached the giddy heights of 1899.

Cricket was just one of his sporting dalliances however: he was one of the finest swordsmen in the army, a gifted polo player and was the West of India tennis champion.

At 6’ 4” Poore certainly stood out, while his insistence on wearing a pith helmet while fielding was just one factor in him being described thus by one cricket writer: "of all the people in the history of the game he seems to stand for the Eccentric Ideal.”

He remained robust and opinionated well into his retirement: when a few years before Poore’s death in 1938 a young cricketer solicited his advice on the best way to face the fearsome pace of Harold Larwood, Poore bellowed, “Charge him, sah! Fix your bayonet and charge him!”