Bound for posterity: Angus Fraser and Dominic Cork, two of the Five Cricketers of the Year, received their leather-bound copies of the Almanack at the annual launch dinner

 IN A WORLD mad for novelty, only the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack (John Wisden & co., 1440pp; £24.50) stays the same. It is commonly referred to as the cricketer's `bible' (i.e. – it is very famous and no-one reads it). But every spring these sturdy annuals sprout on the bookshelves like fat butter-cups. To some they symbolise the joy of cricket: beautiful statistics are rolled across clean acres of freshly mown papers in a labour of love that narrates (through the refined algebra of the scorecard) a thousand stories of games won and lost. To others, they stand as a shopworn emblem for all that's wrong with English cricket – nostalgic, snooty, and gloomily in thrall to facts, figures, births and deaths. How can so spectacular a game be boiled down to such a deadly ledger of credits and debits in, of all things, an `Almanack'? What is this – an annual report? A tide-chart?

It is greatly to Wisden's credit that it can accommodate such contrary views. In recent years it has become simultaneously fusty and caustic – no mean feat. The annual `Notes by the Editor' are a well-established platform for tart remarks about the state of the national game, and Matthew Engel does not waste the chance. He deals briskly with Ray Illingworth's managerial skills (`woeful'), ridicules the embarrassing no-women policy of MCC (`makes not just them but the whole game look stupid'), and is scornful of the latest attempts to regulate pitch-preparation (`I suppose it could take as long as three seconds for the averagely intelligent person to realise the unworkability of this scheme'). There is a muscle-bound attempt to pour oil on the troubled waters raised in this magazine by Robert Henderson, whose article about the alleged half-heartedness of certain foreign-born England players (`The Henderson thesis is, in essence, piffle') has already received more careful consideration than it deserves. But even Wisden has it sore points.

It can't be easy to prepare so bulky a volume and still be newsworthy, but Engel has read the runes cleverly. There is a topical survey about what's wrong with English cricket (though this is a topical subject almost every year), a handy report on the game's failure to face up to the implications of the Australia- Pakistan bribery row, and an account of pyjama cricket for schoolboys which is guaranteed to make the gin-swilling element of Wisden's readership tremble. But the keenest pleasures are, as usual, in the smallest print. In a way, the tone of the preface – testy, pressed for time – is at odds with the vast, unhurried database that follows. But this is where the real jewels are. In the match report on Yorkshire v Durham, for instance, we read: `The game attracted very large crowds, with gate receipts of £8000,' This is Wisden, so it can't be a misprint, but … very large crowds? £8000? There could hardly be a clearer sign that the county game has given up the commercial ghost.

There isn't really a limit to the number of semi-intriguing facts: there is enough ammo here to keep cricket-club bores in sharp form for the whole season. Did you know that six out of the top 10 batsmen in England in 1995 were left-handers?

In his notes, Engel is a bit disdainful about the World Cup, but even he must have hugged himself for picking Aravinda de Silva, Sri Lanka's hero in Lahore, as one of his Five cricketers of the year (along with Cork, Fraser, Kumble and Reeve). Perhaps, at Wisden, they believe that De Silva's great feats were inspired by this accolade. What a pity the same wasn't true for Reeve and Cork.

Even the back-of-the-book marginalia are suggestive. The `Cricket Round the World' section, a recent innovation, is a grand tribute to the way the game is seeping into new regions. Couched in the rather pompous officialese that people feel compelled to offer to so prestigious a journal, it can be comic –`This was another significant year for cricket in Israel.' But here's a telling line: `Barcelona scored 507 for 2, 97 runs coming in the last five overs. Nadeem Sarwar scored 203 not out and Zafar Ahmed 195.' You don't have to speak Spanish to know that these glorious-sounding batsmen are not exactly Basque nationalists.

It is a sign, perhaps, that the future of cricket is in the Asian hands. England spread the game through the Empire; now it is expatriates from the subcontinent who are taking it to further fields. The Austrian League, we learn, was won by Pakistan CC. And guess who won the under-11 Wrigley Softball Cup: Headfield Junior School in Dewsbury. It was a team entirely composed of young Yorkshiremen – Akber Valli, Zahir Asmal, Nabeel Hafeez, Murtaza Husein, Suhail Ibrahim, Zubar Patel, Fida Zafir and so on. In this context it is not a surprise to find what might, one day, turn out to be an historic sentence: `The Laws of cricket have now been translated into Chinese.'

It is nice – reading the reports of cricket in Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Germany – to think that one day England might start touring nearaway places such as these. Dominic Cork could open the bowling from, say, the Casino end in Monaco. Illingworth could explain, with a blokeish cackle, that when you can see the Alps it's snowing, and when you can't, it's about to. And this, in the end, is the point of Wisden: it allows us to fantasise freely about the game, and thoughtfully provides us with the facts to support our fancies.

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