For the true cricket fan Wisden Cricketers' Almanack is the bible. It is the ultimate cricket book with everything you would ever need or want to now about cricket. The 1998 version, which I own, was the 135th version of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack and is surely the biggest selling cricket book of all time.
If you are reading this then it probably means that you are a cricket fan and know everything there is to know about this book, so won’t bother reading this – but just in case you clicked on this by mistake (in which case you would have clicked on the back button on the toolbar, leaving me with no readers at this point) I will tell you all about Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.
The book has a selection of 5 articles from the world of cricket followed by information about Wisden’s 5 cricketers of the year. It lists every player to have ever played Test Cricket – I bet you didn’t know (or care) that FGJ Ford played 5 Test Matches for England against Australia in 1894. This is followed by births and deaths of cricketers and then you can find out who were the previous winners of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year, dating back to 1889.
Part 3 lists Test Match and First-Class records, while part 4 devotes 635 pages to the English cricket season including an extremely useful account of an Eton v Harrow school match. Overseas cricket, however, only gets less than 400 pages, the laws of the game less than 50 pages and the final section, “Miscellaneous” just 100!
A lot of people will laugh at how people, like me, find a 1472 page book of statistics so interesting. But, if you love cricket it is very unlikely that you will get through the England v Pakistan 2nd Test Match without needing to know England’s highest seventh-wicket partnership against Pakistan at Faisalabad.