'One of the all-time great performances': He lost the Ashes, and his job, but Joe Root has won Wisden's top award

He lost the Ashes 4-0, and then the England captaincy, but Joe Root has been awarded the title of Leading Cricketer in the World for 2021 by Wisden Almanack.

The cricket bible also named its five additional Cricketers of the Year for the calendar year of 2021, but no Aussies made the cut.

A quirk of the Cricketer of the Year list is players can only appear on it once in their careers, ruling out Steve Smith, Pat Cummins and Marnus Labuschagne from the current crop, and is heavily weighted towards performances in England.

Root stood down last week after 64 Tests in charge and takes the award over from Ben Stokes who won it in 2020 and 2021.

He had a run of outstanding performances, especially early in 2021, finishing with 1,708 runs at 61.00 in 15 Tests but was a failure as captain with England on a run of one win in 17 tests.

“Root rose above the struggles of England’s Test side to produce one of the all-time great performances in a calendar year,” Lawrence Booth, Wisden’s editor, wrote as the 2022 edition of the annual was launched on Thursday.

“His 1,708 runs have been beaten only by Mohammad Yousuf in 2006 and Viv Richards in 1976, and included six hundreds. And he scored his runs in his fifth year as England captain, at which point many of his predecessors had already called it a day.”

England played India in eight Tests home and away in 2021 and two of India’s stars, Jasprit Bumrah and Rohit Sharma, were named on the five Cricketers of the Year list.

There were two other overseas recipients in the five – New Zealand’s opener Devon Conway, whose 200 on debut at Lord’s set up their 1-0 series win and South Africa allrounder Dane van Niekerk, who captained Oval Invincibles in the Women’s Hundred.

England’s Ollie Robinson, who had 28 wickets at 19.60 in his maiden home season, was the fifth player named, despite a controversy over historical anti-Muslim, anti-Asian and misogynistic Tweets.

English cricket’s racism scandal was a major theme of this year’s Widen Almanack, while Booth gave a wqhack to England Cricket.

“Can there ever have been a bigger gap between what English cricket hoped to be, and what it was – between reality and fantasy?” Booth wrote.

Joe Root is bowled by Scott Boland. (Photo by Steve Bell/Getty Images)

“Early in 2022, a long-planned assault on the Ashes ended with all-out surrender… Before that, a racism scandal brought to light by the courage of Azeem Rafiq made the game look unwelcoming, and worse. There was little to cherish.

“For overseeing the launch of The Hundred, ECB chief executive Tom Harrison and a few lucky colleagues stood to share a bonus of £2.1m. As the annus horribilis took shape, this felt more and more wrong.

“The ethics of the bonus scandal were as bad as the optics. But there was an exit strategy, if only Harrison would recognise it: the bonus should either be returned, allowing the ECB to re-employ some of the staff whose work still had to be done, or used to broaden the game’s diversity.”