THE 2024 Wisden features some of the finest writers on cricket. The socialist Hilary Beckles sits alongside Gideon Haigh, Michael Collins, Sharda Ugra, and Jonathan Liew among others pontificating on the state of the game.

And what a state! The World Cup, held in India, “had often felt like a celebration of their superpower status.” An international tournament hosted few overseas fans, on pitches that were changed at the last minute without the consent of the International Cricket Council (ICC), the organisation responsible for running the show.

Jingoism was the nature of the day and trumpeted the governing Bharatiya Janata Party’s pet tropes: hyper-nationalism, and anti-Pakistan/Muslim sentiment.

TV commentators became nationalist mouthpieces and journalists told they could only report on the cricket. Sharda Ugra notes that the tournament presented the opportunity to display a new assertive Indianness — not to the cricketing world, but to a domestic electorate and wider diaspora.

Satyam Viswanathan of the Hindustan Times concluded that the World Cup had been “marred by religious nationalism, politics, mismatched teams, and … a largely graceless atmosphere.”

Indian Cricket Board secretary Jay Shah is the son of the Home Minister Amit Shah. The final, played in a stadium named after the current prime minister, turned into a de facto election rally, and then the ICC suspended Sri Lanka because of government interference.

Another feature of the World Cup was pollution. Joe Root complained that, in England's match against South Africa, he had never played in such poor conditions: “You couldn’t get your breath. It was like you were eating the air.”

Many felt that Sri Lanka’s match against India should have been called off. While they closed the schools because of pollution levels, they expected cricketers to play on.

“They were doing that for commercial gain,” claimed Rob Lynch of the Professional Cricketers Association. “That can’t be sugar-coated.”

Yet a main sponsor of the tournament was Aramco — Saudi Arabia’s state oil company. Tanya Aldred notes that the World Health Organisation links air pollution with seven million premature deaths a year, over half of those linked to fossil fuels.

Johnny Bairstow’s run out by Alex Carey at Lord’s last summer features in several articles. Emma John even claimed that if you stopped five strangers in the street, not one of them could have told you who won the Hundred, but at least one would have an opinion on whether Bairstow should have been out stumped.

This is because it questioned the spirit of cricket. England captain Heather Knight depicts this spirit as “wishy-washy,” but the Indian broadcaster Harsha Bhogle is most apposite when describing a romantic and fragile idea that is culture specific.

“Sometimes,” he argues, “playing by the Laws may appear to be trickery … and, as we know, empires have been built on trickery.”

Australia proved themselves to be the finest international side, providing some of the year’s best players, and some of the more politically astute.

Ashleigh Gardner is not only one of the Five Cricketers of the Year, but the third known indigenous player to represent Australia. She spoke out against staging a match verses Pakistan on Australia Day, which marks the establishment of European settlement, as it represented “the beginning of genocide, massacre and dispossession.”

Another celebrant of the prestigious award, Usman Khawaja, was censored when challenging the same abominations through the adornment of a dove on his boot to show his solidarity with the people of Gaza.

Pat Cummins, the leading cricketer in the world, faced criticism of his concern about the impact of global warming and reluctance to appear in advertisements for an energy-company sponsor.

In Britain, the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report showed that racism had inhibited the development of a wealth of talent. Much of that talent would have come from working-class backgrounds. The fact that Lord’s could not find time for the England women to play a Test, yet accommodated Eton v Harrow and Oxford v Cambridge, represented the worst vestiges of elitism.

Michael Collins noted how class shaped reactions to the report. For many who live in relative comfort, the findings were difficult to comprehend. The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer, for instance, claimed that the report “has dragged cricket into the culture wars,” while Lord Botham denounced the document without reading it or engaging in the process.

Yet of the 4,000 submissions (80 per cent of whom described themselves as white British), 50 per cent said they had experienced discrimination of some kind.

Hilary Beckles commemorates the centenary of the birth of Frank Worrell, who was the focus of the independence movement’s campaign for a black captain of the West Indies.

He was born on August 1, the anniversary of emancipation from British enslavement, and a day recognised as the beginning of black liberation. Worrell was seen as “the inspirational symbol of the emerging West Indian identity,” for cricket was “at the heart of political conversation and consciousness.”

No Jewish man is known to have played for England (though Micky Stewart had a Polish-Jewish great-grandparent). There is an argument that Percy Fender was denied the England captaincy because he was erroneously considered to be Jewish. His grandson disputes this and claims that the Establishment rejected him more for his radical socialist politics.

South Africa produced more Jewish cricketers than any other nation, with googly bowler Reggie Schwarz, the only one to be one of Wisden’s Five.

The wonderfully named Ivanhoe Mordecai Barrow is the only Jew with a Test century, scoring 105 for the West Indies against England in 1933. On the 1939 tour to England, Barrow wanted to write an article expressing his solidarity with Europe’s Jews, but was forbidden by team management.

So, issues of racism, sexism, inequality, the climate crisis, and imperialism all make for a fascinating read. Tucked away in all this is some cricket, including a Bazball Ashes, England Women’s centenary Test and a report on how unlikely Leicestershire won the 50-overs tournament. What’s not to like?