TIM WIGMORE Test Cricket: A history. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress

From the birth of the Ashes to the present day, Tim Wigmore delivers an enthralling and comprehensive survey of Test cricket.

There is always a place for Big History and Tim Wigmore’s Test Cricket: A history distils the essence of the highest form of the game played by 12 countries across 2598 matches over 148 years.

The story begins with the birth of the fabled ‘Ashes’ at London’s Kennington Oval in August 1882, although the now long-recognised starting date is the Ides of March 1877, when James Lillywhite’s England Eleven met a Combined team of Victorian and New South Wales players on equal terms at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Australia and England had the field to themselves for a dozen years until the emergence of whites-only South African sides, which continued to exclude players of any other hue for more than 100 years and refused to play against teams other than those with white skins from England, Australia and New Zealand.

There was nearly a 40-year gap until the West Indies were introduced as a fourth competitor in 1928 and New Zealand and India quickly followed to increase the number of teams to six by 1932. There continued to be gaps, with Pakistan gaining admission to the essentially Commonwealth Club post-partition in 1954, and Sri Lanka becoming the eighth Test-playing nation in 1982. Zimbabwe was the ninth nation to be added in 1992 and Bangladesh (the former East Pakistan, which had already staged six Test matches in Dhaka between 1955 and 1969) became number ten in 2000. Ireland and Afghanistan made up the dozen in 2018.

Nine of the teams are independent nations; the English team represents England and Wales, the West Indies is a combined team from 15 nations and territories, and Ireland represents both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Wigmore traces both the development and retardation of the game in these places and the bypassing of the United States (mainly Philadelphia cricket), Argentina and Kenya when they might have been promoted to Test-match status. The book combines a grand narrative with critical interpretations at key moments.

Wigmore has read the game’s rich literature widely and wisely, and this has enabled him to offer astute analyses such as the significant advances made in bowling at the start of the twentieth century:

Bernard Bosanquet invented the googly, the leg break which turned the other way, just before 1900. As pitches improved, more pace bowlers focussed on beating batters in the air – using swing, by holding the seam upright, to move the ball late in its trajectory towards where the seam on the ball is angled. This was subtly different to swerve, which was effectively bowling spin at a fast pace, relying on drift in the air and then deviation after the ball had bounced …

Which leads him to enlarge, a paragraph later, on the mysteries employed by Sydney Barnes:

Barnes was among the most skilful bowlers of all time, defying easy categorisation. Over six-feet tall and with a high arm action, Barnes combined new-ball swing and quick leg spin, with swerve – fast off breaks – while varying his pace and where he released the ball from on the crease. He was a unique bowler who swerved the ball both ways at speeds that could reach perhaps 65-70 mph, bowling by turns rapid off breaks and leg breaks. Barnes deliberately varied his pace, and could also seam the ball. Whether bowling to right- or left-handers, his specialty was to get deliveries to drift in, then spin away to off stump after they had pitched.

Is Jasprit Bumrah something of a modern-day equivalent to Barnes?

‘Bradman, Bodyline and The Invincibles’ might be a predictable title for a chapter, but remarks by former English minor counties player Tony Shillinglaw are not. Shillinglaw argues that Bradman’s unorthodoxy was the key to his prodigious run-getting, and that he evoked Ranji’s logic from a generation earlier: ‘A style which is not so effective as it might be can hardly claim to be either good or beautiful.’

Coming to our own time, Wigmore again cites Shillinglaw, suggesting that Steve Smith has come closest to replicating Bradman’s style, before moving to his own conclusion and the creation of a perfect vignette:

On strike, Bradman was perfectly still, not even tapping his bat; he did not have what is now called a trigger movement. As the bowler delivered, Bradman moved forward to meet the ball or back to give himself more time before meeting it. Bowling to Bradman was ‘like trying to tap a wild duck, his movements were so swift’, England pace bowler Harold Larwood observed.

These are just two splendid snapshots from what seem like hundreds in this vast and enthralling account.

Discussing the emergence of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, the author says the surprise was that it took so long to arrive, offering not just more money to players but more security in the form of long-term contracts. Packer had deep pockets and even though he lost $6 million in the first two years, his victory in winning the rights to broadcast Australian cricket and a ten-year promotion and marketing contract won him $134 million against the Australian Cricket Board’s ‘paltry $2 million’ within five years of doing the broadcasting deal.

Packer was a cricket entrepreneur but as Wigmore points out ‘his structure was still predicated on nation-v-nation, just wrapped around the WSC banner’. He did not consider basing his tournament on domestic cricket ‘giving city-based teams a couple of West Indies quicks each and enticing fans to watch Sydney v Melbourne. It would be another thirty years until a major alternative [the IPL and like competitions] to international cricket appeared.’

An important aspect of Test cricket is how unequal it is and not just in terms of playing personnel but structurally and financially.

The West Indies dominated the game between 1976 and 1995 to a degree never equalled by other nations and did so because of the four pillars that supported it: an expanded player pool, the development of player skills in English county cricket, the embrace of World Series Cricket, and the backroom support afforded by psychologist Rudi Webster and physiotherapist Dennis Waight. The decline of the Test side – it won just 24 of 189 matches between 2000 and 2025 – has been due to lack of investment in infrastructure, short-term goalsetting, poor financial management and failure to nurture talent. Wigmore states that the decline is often told through clichés such as ‘sporting talent gravitates to US sports’, when ‘there has never been a better time to become a professional cricketer’. The difficulty that he also acknowledges is that the West Indies was ‘uniquely vulnerable to the sport’s changing landscape’. After winning the T20 World Cups of 2012 and 2016, players of rich talent like Sunil Narine, Kieron Pollard, Dwayne Bravo, Samuel Badree and Nicholas Pooran would in previous generations have pursued Test cricket, but only Bravo played more than six Tests. Playing slightly earlier, Wigmore suggests that Chris Gayle’s ‘gallivanting image’ of representing 25 different domestic teams in T20 cricket obscures the fact that he also played 103 Tests, scoring over 7000 runs at an average of 42.

Indian cricket is now awash with money. In 1992, Wigmore tells us, the Board of Control for Cricket in India had a deficit of $150,000 and in 2023 a net worth of $2.25 billion, well ahead of the next national board with $79 million. Quoting Ramachandra Guha’s 2020 book The Commonwealth of Cricket that with its demographic and financial base ‘India should always and perennially have been the top team in all formats of the game’, it is nevertheless a delight that cricket can also be a great leveller.

New Zealand took 26 years to win a Test match in 1956 against the West Indies, and 13 more to win a series against Pakistan in 1969. It had sand kicked in its face by Australia, who recognised it for only one Test match officially in 1946 and only 43 years after its first appearance did Australia give it full Test recognition. When New Zealand triumphed with a victory over India in the inaugural World Test Championship final in 2021, it not only followed a tenth win in 12 series but, in Wigmore’s words, was ‘a counterpoint to the notion of financial determinism in international cricket’.

Make no mistake, Test Cricket: A history is a marvellously comprehensive text. It packs in the big names (heroes as well as a few villains), the excitement and turning points of matches and series, the controversies – racism, classism, various forms of malpractice and corruption – and critical aspects of the story of each nation, while always keeping control of rich and varied material. If you’re going to buy one cricket book this year, this should be it.

Tim Wigmore Test Cricket: A history Quercus 2025 PB 592pp $34.99

Bernard Whimpress is a historian who usually writes on sport. His most recent book is Rushed Behinds: Writings on Australian football available from www.lulu.com/spotlight/bernardwhimpress

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Tags: Bernard Bosanquet, cricket, cricket history, Don Bradman, Jasprit Bumrah, Steve Smith, Sydney Barnes, Test cricket, Tim | Wigmore, World Series Cricket