Cricket’s past has been enriched by great writing and Wisden is making sure its future will be too. The Nightwatchman is a quarterly collection of essays and long-form articles debuting in March 2013 and available in print and e-book formats.

Co-edited by Osman Samiuddin and Tanya Aldred, with Matt Thacker as managing editor, The Nightwatchman features an array of authors from around the world, writing beautifully and at length about the game and its myriad offshoots. Contributors are given free rein over subject matter and length, escaping the pressures of next-day deadlines and the despair of cramming heart and soul into a few paragraphs.

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Issue 1, out in early March, will feature:

Jon Hotten getting inside the mind of the nightwatchman

Dileep Premachandran chronicling India’s Golden Age

Tanya Aldred going on a very personal Fred Trueman adventure

Osman Samiuddin discovering why it sometimes just clicks for Pakistan

Rob Smyth delighting in the perverse joy of England batting collapses

Vaneisa Baksh going back to the roots of West Indies cricket

Andy Wilson showing it’s possible to combine cricket and birdwatching

James Holland tracking down the spot on which Hedley Verity was killed

Bob Kaplan musing on why we play

Anand Vasu investigating the lot of a modern-day cricketer

Daniel Norcross searching for Surrey’s least successful captain, Major NH Bennett

Patrick Neate reflecting on the game as a revealer of character

Firdose Moonda reporting on the current state of cricket in South Africa

Rob Steen charting Wally Hammond’s Bradman complex

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan remembering when Sachin’s bat was sponsor-free

Tom Holland imagining KP as Achilles

Jarrod Kimber marvelling at the Michael Clarke make-over

Amol Rajan regretting the demise of medium-pace spinners

On the following pages you’ll find an article by Christian Ryan reflecting on the genius of Chanderpaul, as well as extracts from the other 18 pieces from the first edition.

GONE CRABBING

Christian Ryan peels back the complexities of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, a man whose unique batting style still has bowlers befuddled

Pleasure slices open the fan in one of three ways. Your team winning, the sight of a thrilling and/or close match, and that frozen moment of someone doing something with a blissful, hyper-natural radiance – that's pleasure. The third pleasure is loosely termed style. Because one player's failed attempt at style can dent his 10 annoyed teammates' hopes of winning, this third pleasure is sometimes at cross-purposes with the first pleasure. Pleasure is a noun almost no one hooked up to a near-daily TV drip feed of hit-and-giggle has ever heard used in conjunction with Shivnarine Chanderpaul. The word they hear used is crab.

The Providence Stadium cricket pitch looks a straw-coloured place of peace in a field of lushest green, a half-hour's ride from sub-sea level Georgetown, in Chanderpaul's native Guyana. It's the first one-dayer in a soon-to-be-forgotten series of five, West Indies playing England, and right on five o'clock on a Friday afternoon, 20 March 2009, Chanders welcomes a ball outside his off stump with a calming tap straight to a fielder. Twenty minutes later he receives a ball in a good-as-identical spot. We're late in the run-chase. This ball is coming at 82.9 mph, pitching about three-quarter-length and it is, I repeat, outside off stump, only this time Chanders does a lightning feet-off-the-ground skip sideways followed by a slow backward slide – so leisurely it's almost taunting – of his down-tilting left leg, on to which his body then sinks, his front foot acting as the anchor, the pivot, while his left knee takes his body weight and his bat becomes a sort of high-tech egg-lifter, the bat-face pointing up, not side-on, when it intercepts the ball and his wrists tensing then relaxing as they – and if we're to call this a sweep shot let's all take to our coaching manuals with cigarette lighters right now – caress the ball deftly round the corner and up, up. And David Gower, who once was to batting artistry what Emmanuelle Béart is to the smouldering lazy-gaze cross a late-night Parisian jazz club, is slow-motion commentating – "Well, he's, uhhh… played that… with extraordinary flair." And up, up it keeps going. Monitoring the ball's arc on our screens, our eyes can see sugarcane fields, and that looks like savannah country over there, till finally the ball peaks, and dips, bouncing to the right of a wheeled carry-case belonging to one of three men, each of the men swaying away, like poplars, for fear of impalement, as the ball spirals past them and crashes into a wall beneath a maroon staircase. The innocent bowler, Steve Harmison, who's been watching as well, blows a short (disbelieving, I'm guessing) puff of wind through his bearded lips. Not one of the nearby thousands looking on from a grassy mound is still sitting. In the grandstand, a black boy in a red mobile-phone company T-shirt is dancing an uncontrollable jig, alone. His eyes are shut but the eyeballs, you can tell, are moonwalking underneath.

Watching Chanders bat invites the fan, in a strange way, to peer inside their own self, and ask questions. Like: why play this shot, why not that? And, is there a place for style in cricket?

Two more Chanderpaul scenes…

Antigua: he's 19, short sleeves and a helmet, armguard on, Angus Fraser comes clumping in over the wicket and Chanders drives him left of mid-on.

Dhaka: late afternoon, last November, Chanders is helmeted and short-sleeved, he's 38 years old, 72 not out, armguard on, Rubel Hossain bowls around the wicket and Chanders drives to mid-on's right.

Watch them slow. Wrists like horse muscle – the key both times. Freeze the footage two frames after impact. Chanders' feet have landed way outside off stump, left foot twisting behind right foot… head position, bat angle, elbow pointiness… same perfect finish. It is the getting there that has changed. As young Rubel gallops in, his footsteps leaving no imprint on the hard imitation space-turf of Bangladesh's Shere Bangla National Stadium, Chanders' own feet and toes are 90 degrees forward of every published recommendation of where they should be. Ninety degrees, do the maths: they are twinkling straight at Rubel. This has one far-reaching repercussion (which we'll get to: it's big) plus various smaller spin-off oddities, these including Chanders' right shoulder, which is aiming westwards when it is supposed to be facing south, and Chanders' bat, which appears to be eagerly anticipating the square-leg umpire's next delivery. Disconcerting to bowl at; funny-looking on TV. Yet by the time the ball's arrived and he's hitting it normal transmission has resumed, all appendages and accoutrements present and correct, courtesy of a neither airborne nor strictly earthbound step-hover-squirm manoeuvre.

Just like a crab, says the critic to the fan.

Chanders explains it like this – he developed his way of batting in Unity Village, a fishing town, where his father Kemraj, nickname of "Cow-Fly", was sometimes away for days, at work, on a boat, fishing for bottlefish, for crab. The boy Chanders began cricket when he was eight, though cricket was beseeching him nine years before that. "When he in his mother's belly," Kemraj once said, "she bowl to me." With balls made of concrete or rubber, they practised on the community hall's hard floor for bounce and on the sand beside the ocean's edge for pace. Villagers joined in. Often their challenge was to hit the boy. "No crying here," Kemraj would say. Thus did Chanders' makeshift floating fortress of a batting stance allegedly evolve. It enabled him, Chanders has explained, to hurry his bat and hands in front of his face in self-protection – an amazing story, romantic, the sort of set piece the sportswriter can pull out three times, five even, over and over anew, a fresh and touching lilt to it for every occasion. Crab man grooms crab boy.

Facts are that by 19, and all through his promising maiden series against England, Chanders' batting stance resembled a kindergarten child's back-to-front 7. That is, his stance was the stance of the normal left-hand batsman. Nearly, anyway: on debut in Georgetown, March 1994, he had a mild hunchback aura and his feet were tipping 20 degrees forward of normal. By series end he had tidied that to 15 degrees, and seemed taller. Come Sydney, late 1996, he rose upright and at zero degrees, a touch of the peacock. One prancing off-drive off Shane Warne tricked the close-in Australians into emitting an audible admiring moan. With the same zero-degrees classic stance came his first Test hundred, against India. In January 1999 he hit South Africa for 150 sporting a semi-discernible five-degrees pose, had reverted to near-enough zero degrees during an 11 not out in Dublin mid-year, and was still standing zero at Lord's the summer after that. Over in Georgetown again, April 2003, we glimpsed Chanders in transition. Entering on a shambolic first morning, with the Australian chinaman bowler Brad Hogg on a hat-trick, Chanders struck a 69-ball ton – a feat beyond most mortals or geniuses, and previously, and largely since, reckoned to be miles beyond Chanders' means, yet Chanders did it with orthodox cricketing strokes of deepest purity, each shot a just-right reaction to the ball just bowled. More interesting than the sight of the regularly disappearing ball is to watch, knowing what we know now, Chanders' feet: ten degrees forward of normal against Andy Bichel, alternately five or zero degrees against Hogg, zero degrees against everyone else. In common against whoever's bowling is this – Chanders is wandering, virtually loping, across his crease, so that he ends up in something approaching the 90-degree position we now know to be his ultimate aspiration. His bat is raised and fluttering, casually, above his head. He is still recognisably "batting" as we know batting to be. But by the middle of the 2004 English summer he made for a curious sight: spinner Ashley Giles bowling, Chanders bullied back deep in his crease, feet pointing 50 degrees south of normality. That was on August 1st. On September 25th he hit 47 in the Champions Trophy final with his feet at 80 degrees and his bat's fluttering baseball-style aloftness at its zenith of weirdness. In his next international match, an MCG day-nighter the following January, a big house of 51,000 saw a man strange yet strangely familiar plant his feet at 88 degrees with the bat facing square leg (cripes!), although he'd then jettison the square-leg bit early to re-assume the baseball hitter's dangle. Finally the South Africans arrived in the Caribbean in late March 2005. Waiting for them was the full-blown, unmistakable and pretty much inimitable except in a poking-fun sort of way – Chanders!

This mapping of the winding road to his final (we presume) incarnation is not some lie-detection exercise disproving the it-was-written-in-the-Unity-Village-sand thesis. Footslogging research reveals a total of two interviews, four summers apart, in which Chanders actually mentions his stance's origins. It's just that the fable gets spun and re-spun.

Chanders is quiet. When sportsmen talk it tends to shrink them. Extraordinariness is made ordinary. Chanders gives us a vacuum. This lets us theorise into it. What's important at this juncture is to separate fact from mis-repetition: just as Chanders may either block or freaky-sweep a fast ball pitching outside off stump, so he chooses to stand how he stands. Forsaking style, he has down-traded his beautiful face to be the ugly guy who gets the girl. In pre-90 degrees days his batting average was 44. Ever since, he's averaged 61, and sustained that 61 average over eight years. Out of such unpromising stuffs – "crab" ranks many hundred rungs below Muhammad Ali's self-bestowed "bee" in the sporting animal hierarchy – Chanders has made himself the epitome of "sound".

(Remember when cricketers used to get praised or soft-damned as being "sound" or "unsound"? Unsound was a non-blame-pointing tentative stab of a word, ripe for a sport where, if batting is your task, so many things so baffling and so sketchily attributable to you can go wrong, and where the punishment for the crime you did not commit is brutal: no love-15, no deuce, simply OUT. There's a lovely, malleable non-specificness to "unsound" that's a pleasure to read. Terence Rattigan, the playwright, was a useful enough batsman to swing himself an obituary in the 1978 Wisden, the last sentence of which – "He was an elegant stroke player, but unsound" – throws open attics in my imagination that would otherwise have remained tragically padlocked. In Australia in 1978, coincidentally, we fielded an entirely unsound top order: Darling the unsound hooker, Wood the unsound runner between wickets, Hughes the unsound [depending on the day of the week] everything, Yallop the unsound throat-ball resistor, Cosier the unsound pickets-clearer, and Toohey, who was unsound in the sense that he seemed like too interesting a guy to squash and reduce himself to being "sound"… Imagination ran six-fold that summer, and it sure smashed the real thing.)

Chanders wears, for protection, two thigh pads instead of one. This tends not to create an impression among people that they are in the presence of batting's new Atlas. Shane Warne, appraising his generation's best players, rated Chanders 64th; journalist and broadcaster Christopher Martin-Jenkins, in his Top 100 Cricketers of All Time, rated Chanders not at all.

(The late Martin-Jenkins – CMJ – painted precise word pictures over radio airwaves. How many millimetres a ball deviated, did it swing, did it cut, the location of the batsman's hands, also his feet, any facial/bodily reactions of note, which way the captain is pointing, the sun's height in the sky, the ebb, the flow. His voice was posh, stern, considered, unhurried. "Unsound" sounded like nectar out of CMJ's mouth: as if he had pored over a chap's shortcomings, deemed it premature to pronounce judgment, so for now he was going with "unsound". CMJ steered clear of inexactitude, dodgy analogies ["like a crab", "sounded like nectar"] and the lazy commentator shorthand that assumes a person listening to the radio probably also owns a TV so to blazes with describing the finer details, they can see those for themselves. TV was no match for CMJ. To put cricket on TV was to rip wings off a butterfly. TV limited you to what your eyes saw: it pinned cricket down. CMJ made minds fly. The listener's mind worked constantly in tandem with CMJ's, absorbing his words, re-imagining them, turning them into pictures of their own, and meanwhile a firestorm of interconnected thoughts and images would be cross-exploding simultaneously, no horizons. The more exact the raw word pictures CMJ fed the listener, the wilder and more fabulous the listener's trip. In this way, CMJ "got" Ernest J. Radio's brilliant invention better, surely, than nearly any broadcaster [shocking inexactitude: CMJ would not approve] working in any field of human endeavour. What CMJ got was that a game which unfolds in the head is the grandest and greatest game there is.)

Chanders wears two thigh pads because – I presume – his two thighs are exposed to the bowler as a result of the peculiarities of his stance.

When Chanders – Georgetown, 1994 – was still 70 degrees north-east of the batting exotica he would become, Phil Tufnell made England teammates laugh with his dressing-room Chanders impersonations. Warne favoured bowling full and wide and inviting Chanders to miscue or edge. Allan Donald, frightening and devious, thought early lbws were a chance because Chanders' feet stayed back. Warne concurred: that could work too. Glenn McGrath, normally unflappable, found bowling to Chanders off-putting. Those men are gone now. Chanders' curse these days is to play the match-saving-in-vain role in a feeble team, rendering plans against West Indies a superfluous luxury. All the same, it is striking that among bowlers today no agreed-upon plan exists to beat Chanders.

One far-reaching, big repercussion of the Chanderpaul batting stance, as promised: he sees the ball, and bowler, with two eyes.

It's an advantage, no? Every other batsman on the planet (sounds like a generalisation but there lives nobody who bats like Chanders) stands basically side-on to the bowler. One eye has a clear view and the other eye is straining to circumnavigate a small, invisible traffic roundabout. Even the non-squinty eyeball is never totally relaxed: the angle is not totally straight on. Also, the neck is twisted, which you get used to, but… Try to conjure up what it must be like to bat from a place with no inconveniences to accustom oneself to, no roundabouts to peer round – a pure place, with a gunbarrel view.

The rest of Chanders' repertoire of tics and movements obeys the textbook. His head stays still. His feet are in a state of suspended liquidity, ready to pounce. At the base of small hands are wrists supple and powerful enough to strangle a would-be mugger. (Bizarre happenstance: Chanders once shot a policeman in the hand thinking the policeman was a mugger.) We might now be witnessing Autumn Stage Chanderpaul – the golden phase when technical dilemmas and life insecurities flake away and the old athlete peaks, surprising everyone – and we might also be seeing a kink in evolution, revolution indeed, only we are asleep to it, a period when children laugh at a funny-looking way of batting that one day will be taught to them.

The times conspire to help Chanders, in certain ways. His deep-crease vulnerability to the late inswinging ball, which Donald and Warne talked about, is offset by this being the age of the speed gun with swing bowling a neglected craft. 21st-century batsmen wear helmets. Once, the rear of his skull having been ring-a-ding-dinged by Brett Lee in Jamaica, Chanders fell, then took 40 seconds to move anything more than a curled left finger – making Lee worry he'd killed Chanders – and another 12 seconds to get up, at which point he sipped on some water and progressed his score from 86 to 118.

Chanders' helmet is maroon-coloured with three horizontal bars. He takes it off on 100, 150, 200. You can see his eyes, blinking, adjusting to the subtly changed light, little eyes they are, and whatever he is feeling is written on them, with black anti-glare eye stickers underneath – the "Mueller" logo in white – like bruises, and every time, this past week of watching him, I notice the helmet come off I am reminded of a sub-sentence of WG Sebald's:

... until well into the 19th century a few drops of liquid distilled from belladonna, a plant of the nightshade family, used to be applied to the retinas of operatic divas before they went on stage, and those of young women about to be introduced to a suitor, with the result that their eyes shone with a rapt and almost supernatural radiance, but they themselves could see almost nothing.

On reaching 100 Chanders always, once the helmet is lifted, lowers his body down flat and kisses the pitch.

"A bit ridiculous," thought Jason Gillespie of the Australians when first he observed this.

"This is ridiculous," said David Warner, also Australian, when he and Chanders were Durham clubmates and Chanders faced a bowling machine for six hours.

"A really great batsman," wrote CLR James, "is to me as strange a human being as a man seven feet tall or a man I once heard of who could not read but spoke six languages."

Chanders, it is very apparent, seems a man from out of this time, and not totally of this sport. If you wish to bat six hours he believes you should first practise batting six hours. An innings begins with him removing the leg bail, bending, hammering with his bat's handle the bail into the pitch, putting the bail back. His concentration, which is a thing of legend, is a gift from Shiva. He, a Hindu, carries an altar on his travels, prays when he wakes, knows "it's only you and God out there" during the day, meditates at night. If pork or beef is on the ground's lunch menu he must keep going on rice and bread. He tries to not hit balls in the air, which was the philosophy of Don Bradman, circa 1928. Thirty-seven per cent of his runs since 2009 have come in fours and sixes – two per cent lower than the fours-and-sixes rate of the olde worlde's batsmen, calendar year 1921.

Helmets halve the fear of getting out or getting hit to the fear only of dismissal. Gum-trunk bats turn mis-hits to six-hits.

This, then, is now-cricket, but it is not end-cricket, and we know this through Chanders, who deflects balls into gaps. In an increasingly power-based sport he dominates by being smart. He left school at 13; watching him, his smartness makes us feel smarter. The rituals with the bail, and the pitch kiss, and the bowling machine hint at a partial machine-ness to his own personality – the bowling machine especially, which stays by his side whether he's on tour or in Florida, where he lives with Amy, who's Guyanese, and whose father's garden he used to walk past, and when one day he saw Amy in the garden he would walk past it more often.

Where it matters, in the heart, and head, he is the unprogrammable man. In his hotel room before batting he bats each ball in his head. After batting he often does not look at the tape. Yet he still watches the replay – in his head. Sportspeople sometimes claim they do this. Chanders honestly does it, every ball. Studying the tape would seek to make explicable, predictable, repeatable, something that should, morally, be left mysterious and free-floating, inside our heads – cricket – so that to see Chanders batting, though it may not involve notions like sexy, is to dream possibility, and be lifted out of our selves, by the simple act of watching.

EXTRACTS

Jon Hotten

The use of the nightwatchman is one of cricket’s implacable enigmas, a tactic that has been employed almost since the game began. Its effectiveness has always been disputed and never been proved. Nonetheless it persists and probably will as long as matches are played over successive days. It is a notion based on human fallibility, a defence of position, a counter-intuitive decision to place a player of lesser ability into a parlous situation that others are better equipped to handle. Beyond that, it is an identifier of the game’s greatest single divide: that between batsmen and bowlers, men whose professional lives are consumed by thoughts of how to overcome one another. The very act of needing a nightwatchman, when wickets are falling at the end of a day, is indicative of failure: batsmen who have lounged in the field for hours have been unable to survive at the crease for a few minutes; bowlers who have trooped exhausted from the same arena are now expected to clean up after them. It has a sacrificial element to it. It tells one member of a team that they are more expendable than another, that their abilities are more lightly regarded. It is about rank and position. In a game so finely attuned to psychology, the nightwatchman taunts a player with his mental frailty and displays it to the world and, when it is over for the day, the batsman who has declined to go in must change in the same room as the bowler he has required to do so. Some captains have banned the idea; others have exempted themselves from responsibility for it. In an age where the prevailing mindset is aggression, the nightwatchman is a laying-down of arms, a brief if temporary surrendering of the initiative. It’s a move that piles pressure not onto the opposition, but onto the team employing it. And yet it lives.

Tom Holland

Coming to England, and committing himself to a new country, his status as an outsider was only reinforced. Even today, in the ruthlessly meritocratic set-up that the national team has become, the influence of the past on English cricket continues to weigh. County loyalties and class tensions remain – as they have always been – a key part of the swirl of attitudes in the professional game. To Pietersen, though, they mean nothing. Brought to Nottinghamshire in 2000, he had not the slightest hesitation three years later, when the county was relegated, in demanding a release from his contract. His captain saw this as treachery; Pietersen saw it as common sense. Similarly, the old divide between gentlemen and players, which has survived in ghostly form into the 21st century thanks to the reliance of English cricket on the public school system, casts not a shadow on KP. Unlike Strauss or Flintoff, Cook or Bresnan, he is resolutely classless. It gives to him that aura of strangeness, of not quite belonging, for which some England fans still cannot wholly forgive him, but which in truth is the hallmark of his distinctive genius. There truly is only one KP.

Andy Wilson

Following cricket tours abroad involves visiting some beautiful places with exotic new species to match. I’m writing this piece from Fort Kochi in Kerala, the venue for the second game in England’s five-match one-day series in India, after a pre-breakfast wander that revealed new species – or life ticks, in bird-speak – in rufous woodpecker and common tailorbird, as well as cracking views of green bee-eater, Western reef egret and brown-headed barbet. The first match of the series was hundreds of miles further up India’s west coast in Rajkot, on the surface a teeming, grimy, dusty and generally unattractive Gujarati city. After waking up far too early on my first morning, I risked a rickshaw ride to a lake on the outskirts of town. It was absolutely stunning, with thousands of waterbirds – ducks, waders, egrets, cormorants, gulls and pelicans – completely oblivious to the local people going about their morning tasks as the sun rose (and, therefore, to me). It was only looking for birds that gave me that window on real life in the Rajkot suburbs; most of the other journalists covering the tour were still in bed and only left the city centre to attend practice and then the match at the Saurashtra Stadium.

Vaneisa Baksh

Of all the writing cricketers, only Sir Learie Constantine and Sir Vivian Richards make explicit connections between their heritage and their pride. Only these two constantly invoked a sense of lineage and carried that consciousness as sword and shield. Constantine had been right there at the birth of a West Indies Test team in 1928. Richards was there up to the end of its prime as a champion team in the early 1990s. Constantine and Richards, the alpha and the omega of a distinct era in West Indies cricket; what has happened since has been the consequence of a massive rupture.

At the end of the Richards epoch, the fractures began breaking apart. West Indies cricket, which should have celebrated and recognised its unique nature, never quite grasped its elements, and so there was no foundation of understanding to help it dig its heels in under pressure. After Richards it simply staggered forward, reeling from crisis to crisis and acting as punch-drunk as it looked. Various entities in the cricket world faced similar situations at one time or the other. How they responded made the difference. West Indies cricket was not dealing with one upheaval at a time – no one does because life never conducts itself in such a polite and orderly fashion. The events have been varied and the conditions diverse.

Tanya Aldred

But it never was quite the young boy’s dream. Waters describes an awkward bugger, thrust into the Yorkshire and England teams at a time when class and seniority had a huge bearing on the way that you were supposed to behave. There were some difficult men around, and just about the worst man-management of a young, extremely talented, eager, if uncouth and socially all-at-sea young bowler it is possible to imagine. Patronised, ignored, fobbed off, laughed at – Trueman never forgave Yorkshire for their behaviour, which culminated in them asking him to pay £120 towards the cost of his own retirement present: a £220 silver cruet. They didn’t even manage to engrave it.

James Holland

Nor was this hell-journey over. From Naples he was taken by truck to the Italian military hospital at Caserta. There Corporal Henty, another wounded Yorkshireman, recognised him. Word soon spread amongst the wounded British troops that the great English bowler was there with them. Verity talked to Henty, showing him photographs of his wife and sons, Douglas and Wilfred. He was in increasingly terrible pain; the wound was festering badly, and part of a rib was broken and pressing against his lung. Eventually, three days later, on 31 July, he was operated on again, and had part of his rib removed. Only a local anaesthetic was used.

Daniel Norcross

Nowadays the chances of two Major Bennetts turning up at The Oval may not seem huge (it’s around 1:14,376), but in 1946 there were a lot more majors knocking around. Bennett is a pretty common name and anyone with the barest thirst for cricket had experienced a seven-year drought. What would it have taken to amble over to the waiting Major in his overcoat and ask a few questions? Again, we must be mindful of the times. Perhaps it was considered a trifle de trop to ask a returning soldier too many personal questions. There was a lot of post-traumatic stress sloshing around, and an overly stringent interrogation could bring back alarming memories. Add in the chairman’s exalted status at the club and presumed unwillingness to talk too readily with mere players, and you have the perfect admixture required to nurture misunderstanding. And besides, it was probably a touch too chilly in February to leave the committee room.

It takes two to tango, however. What on earth possessed Major Nigel to accept on the spot? What manner of delusion could have gripped the man for him genuinely to believe that Surrey wanted him to be their captain? He – with no experience of playing first-class cricket, let alone captaining a side containing some of the former and future greats of English cricketing history – must have smelled a rat, surely?

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan

In his pomp Tendulkar was a horizontal bat anarchist. He pulled (off both front and back foot), slashed, late-cut and flat-batted forehands down the ground. There was puckishness to these shots. His violent pulls – when the ball threatened to crash into his face – and back-foot square cuts – often lashed off tiptoe – accentuated his littleness. Still a few years adrift of a serious back injury, he explored his range with aplomb.

Never before had India seen such a technically correct batsman dismantle bowlers with such a vast repertoire of strokeplay. Here was a classical dancer swinging to hip-hop, infusing the new art form with a correctness associated with the old. This was beautiful, racy

and intoxicating.

Patrick Neate

All sport is narrative: its central appeal to spectators being the highs and lows, the struggles overcome, that signify a story. But most sports are plot-driven pulp, built on archetypes of heroism and villainy with little of the nuance of truly great storytelling. I don’t think it’s any coincidence, for example, that football lasts 90 minutes (or 120, with extra time). After all, between 90 and 120 minutes demarcates the ideal Hollywood structure: a formula in which the surprises are necessarily unsurprising since the key purpose of the medium is to reaffirm and reassure. Of course, Bradford City occasionally beat Arsenal and Verbal may or may not be Keyser Söze. But these are the exceptions that confirm the core principles of a limited-narrative medium.

Cricket is, I think, different. If most sport is driven by plot, cricket is driven by character, and the nuances to be found therein are, if not limitless, as diverse as humanity itself. This idea fascinates me.

Jarrod Kimber

For his activities outside cricket, Shane Warne had lost the vice-captaincy, but never the public’s love. Michael Clarke just lost the public’s love.

Women’s magazines had pictures of them walking down hip high streets, posing for energy drinks together, wearing designer outfits and in Bondi cafés having brunch.

I don’t know where Steve Waugh liked to brunch. It is possible that Steve Waugh didn’t brunch at all. It’s more than possible, in the minds of most Australian fans, that Steve Waugh was the most Australian person ever, and that he’d never even said the word brunch.

Steve Waugh was the Australia that Australians wanted. Michael Clarke was very much the new Australia, and Australia didn’t like it.

Amol Rajan

And yet, as he brought his arm over, Barnes gave the ball an almighty rip. I’m not talking here about using seam and swing to extract cut from the pitch. I’m talking full-on spin, with a couple of special attributes. That is why John Arlott could say of Barnes: “He was a right-arm, fast-medium bowler with the accuracy, spin and resource of a slow bowler.” Note that Arlott, who always chose his words carefully, describes Barnes not as medium or even medium-fast, but as fast-medium. And that he was a genuine, even prodigious, spinner of the ball is evidenced by Barnes’ account of an extraordinary meeting with Noble.

Twirlymen constitute a special breed within cricket, a fraternity that bestows special privileges on its members, and through the ages spinners have met with each other to pass on the wisdom they have gleaned. Shane Warne and Abdul Qadir once sat across a Persian carpet from each other in the latter’s house in Pakistan, spinning oranges hither and thither. Similarly, Barnes said he once asked Noble: “if he would care to tell me how he managed to bring the ball back against the swerve.

“He said it was possible to put two poles down the wicket, one 10 or 11 yards from the bowling crease and another one five or six yards from the batsman, and to bowl a ball outside the first pole and make it swing to the off-side of the other pole and then nip back and hit the wickets. That’s how I learned to spin a ball and make it swing. It is also possible to bowl in between these two poles, pitch the ball outside leg stump and hit the wicket. I spent hours trying all this out in the nets.”

Osman Samiuddin

Pakistan’s 1992 World Cup triumph was soundtracked by the Qawwali of the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The players listened to him obsessively (on a stereo picked up by Ijaz Ahmed in Singapore on the way there) every day during practice, during lunch breaks, after games, before games. The entire tournament was, for Pakistan, like a Qawwali itself; disparate, floating aimlessly initially before suddenly coming together with such force that they became the best in the world.

Mohammad likes cricket and so I put to him that what Pakistan do when they do a Pakistan, when that tamasha erupts, could it be that they have come to haal? “The thing you have said about a team or group spirit, that happens directly, automatically, but not because of them. It happens naturally that they link together as one. You cannot understand how it happens. It happens to you.”

Rob Steen

Just once I’d like him to know how it feels. To be me. To not be him.

Bugger, bugger Bradman.

I loathe that midget bloody dwarf genius. Next to him, Lord buggering bloody Harris was a pussycat. Toss up in a suit? I ask you. If I had a pound for every time he’s stolen my thunder, peered down that bloody apology for a nose, smiled that thin, oh-so-superior lizard of a smile and made me look like a right proper wally, I’d never have had to sell cars for a living. He can’t be human.

Bugger Bradman, bugger Bradman.

I was good. I AM good. Bloody, bloody good. Best English batsman since… no, where did modesty ever get you? Be proud. Stand tall. Better than WG Grace, better than Jack Hobbs. But no, always in his bloody shadow, no matter what I bloody well do. I get 905 runs in a series? He gets bleedin’ 974. I get 231 in Sydney? He gets 270 in Melbourne. I average 60 but he’s averaging a buggering hundred. And they worship him, even blokes from Cheltenham, Cirencester and Clifton. Why don’t they love ME?

Bugger Bradman. Bugger, bugger, BUGGER Bradman.

Rob Smyth

It is one of life’s more perverse pleasures, a dry celebration of your own hopes being crushed in the comedy style. It’s also one of life’s great shared experiences – the guilty pleasure it’s OK to admit, because everyone else is at it. Maybe there’s an element of the support group too: a shambles shared is a shambles halved. You certainly need some coping mechanism. At times it feels like some corner of a foreign field is forever hosting an England batting collapse.

Anand Vasu

When in England, Kartik is well taken care of, a lovely residence his for the season, a top-of-the-line sponsored car his to drive, and yet it’s just not the same. “There was a five-year period when I played the full season at home for Railways and away in England when I kept a record of how many nights I spent in my own bed each year. The scorecard was 22, 27, 23, 24 and 25 across those years. Can you imagine what it’s like only being in your own home for less than a month in the whole year, spread out over three or four trips?”

Dileep Premachandran

By the end of that tour, Chappell was close to throwing up his arms in resignation. Few of his ideas had been taken on board, and the frequent media interactions – Gary Kirsten would barely have any during his three years in charge – had pushed several players to the edge of paranoia.

My last lengthy conversation with Chappell took place the morning that Bob Woolmer died. India had also suffered a shock defeat the previous day, and Chappell was far more candid about the pressures of coaching than he had been earlier. “It’s a stressful job at the best of times,” he said. “There’s a great deal of emotional involvement. You have to be passionate about it if you want to do the job well. The expectations are far higher. But in the light of this tragic event, I think we need to take pause and make sure that we don’t get too stressed about what is, after all, only a game.”

Firdose Moonda

A common modern South African story is that of the black graduate of the mid-2000s. Often that person would be the first in their family with a degree. Their resulting corporate jobs would see them become mass providers, helping a vast extended family. It is not a choice. It is an obligation that many white young people do not have to deal with.

Meeting that responsibility requires black Africans of working age to have stable, even if not particularly high, incomes. Occasional match fees do not amount to that and until a player is contracted that is what he has to put up with. It also means that, while he bides his time before being employed by a cricket board, he cannot get another job. Why, you may ask? It’s simple. Playing cricket at a fairly high level these days is a full-time job. With practices three times a week, first-class matches starting on Thursday and thus requiring two days off during summer months, and various sponsor requirements to meet – which only grow as the game becomes more monetised – no one can hold down a nine-to-five while also playing cricket.

Bob Kaplan

“It’s what we’ve always done, come spring and Sundays,” said Ken (he goes in at seven and holds the line). “Our fathers did it. Our sons will do it. Daughters now too. You’re part of a bigger thing that lasts.”

“I understand!” said the green man. “I saw it last week and talked to the others in white! They said it has been going on since people lived in the woods, and no one knew what the steps meant but performed them faithfully. But where are the bells round your shins and the clay pipes?”

The first edition of The Nightwatchman will be published at the beginning of March 2013 on a limited print run. So subscribe or order now to ensure that you get your copy.

Table of Contents

GONE CRABBING

EXTRACTS

Jon Hotten

Tom Holland

Andy Wilson

Vaneisa Baksh

Tanya Aldred

James Holland

Daniel Norcross

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan

Patrick Neate

Jarrod Kimber

Amol Rajan

Osman Samiuddin

Rob Steen

Rob Smyth

Anand Vasu

Dileep Premachandran

Firdose Moonda

Bob Kaplan