World Cup winners make up majority of Wisden’s cricketers of the year
For the first time in the award’s history, three women cricketers have been named among Wisden’s five Cricketers of the year. England’s Heather Knight, Natalie Sciver, and Anya Shrubsole achieved the rare feat by being among the players from the previous English summer.
Before these three World Cup winning players, only two female cricketers managed to make it to the list; once in 2009 when Claire Taylor became the first woman to have been included in the list and then Charlotte Edwards was named in 2014.
Anya Shrubsole has been handed the honor of being on Wisden 2018’s front cover with the World Cup itself. This is also the first time since 2002 when no England players, form their men’s team, have been named in the list.
Wisden’s editor, Lawrence Booth criticized England's Test team and described it as “going backward”. However, he heaped praise on Natalie Sciver.
He said: “No stroke in 2017 was more memorable than Nat Sciver's deliberate deflection between her legs, instantly christened the Natmeg.
“But she was more than a one-trick pony. She hit 369 runs in the tournament at an average of 46 and a strike rate of 107, including hundreds against Pakistan and New Zealand, took three for three against West Indies and scored a half-century in the final against India.”
West Indies batsman Shai Hope and Essex bowler Jamie Porter were the other two players on the list. Shai Hope’s twin hundreds against England helped his side pull off a shock-win in July 2017. Porter, on the other hand, helped his team win the County Championship by bagging 75 wickets throughout the campaign.
Afghanistan spinner Rashid Khan was declared the inaugural Twenty20 cricketer.
India skipper Virat Kohli was named the leading cricketer in the world, while compatriot Mithali Raj was the world's leading women's cricketer. Kohli is the second player after Virender Sehwag to have achieved the feat for two successive years.
“For the second year in a row, Indian captain Virat Kohli is Wisden's Leading Cricketer in the World,” Booth said. “In all formats in 2017, he scored 2,818 runs - more than 700 ahead of Joe Root in second place. Three of his five Test hundreds were doubles, and the other two unbeaten, and his 1,460 one-day international runs were unsurpassed.
“Mithali Raj made it an Indian double after she was named the Leading Woman Cricketer in the World. In the course of captaining her country to within a whisker of the World Cup title, she became the leading run-scorer in the history of women's one-day internationals, and completed her seventh successive half-century, another record.”
