Reading my Telegraph Sport colleague Tim Wigmore’s new and authoritative book Test Cricket: A History was an ideal psychological preparation for the new Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
He stresses that there have always been unsavoury aspects to what he several times calls the “brutal” game of Test cricket. They were there right from the late Victorian period: cheating, gamesmanship, financial greed, racism, classism and, where some of the poor professionals were concerned, a philosophy of the devil taking the hindmost.
A few Test cricketers became, and remain, legendary, and reaped the profits of that even in eras before the modern obsession with money: Hobbs, Sutcliffe, Bradman, Compton, Sobers and Gavaskar.