Sorry for the lack of action here this week, but I’ve been playing and watching sports other than cricket this week – namely golf and football. There is an eerie quiet in England regarding cricket at the moment, its still a bit cold to get excited about playing or watching, so the pre-season games that are on are getting very little coverage. We do have the ever present merry-go-round of the Indian leagues and who will/won’t be playing over here but its all getting very dull.

Wisden did announce the other day though their five cricketers of the last year, an annual thing which precedes the publication of the new Wisden. I found it rather odd that players can only be given this honour once in their career – if they’ve had a good season surely it shouldn’t matter how many times they’ve been given the honour? The overall cricketer of the year was Jaques Kallis, and although he isn’t the most exciting cricketer to watch, he has an immense amount of talent with the bat and the ball (and a pretty hot wife as well!) and has scored x runs to deserve the accolade.

Sidebottom and Bell are two England players named as one of the best five of the year, and they have both had decent years. Sidebottom went from being a “who?” when brought back into the England side, and is now arguably the lynchpin of the bowling attack (I’ll start eating my hat once i’ve finished writing this). Bell has had a decent time and if only England would stop shifting him around the order he could be the key to England’s batting over the next 18 months (Ashes series included). Otis Gibson also got a mention for his stunning county season, and Durham have already admitted he’ll be a big loss for them in the upcoming season. Chanderpaul was the final player given the honour, which isn’t surprising as he has racked up the runs over the past year (also winning a damn close game for the WIndies yesterday against Sri Lanka). The final player was Zaheer Khan, which to be honest doesn’t really register with me. He was decent over here last year, but I’d have thought there were better players than him over the whole year.

Anyway, its nearly time for the proper season to start, so hopefully there’ll be some interesting things to talk about soon!