Wisden Cricket Monthly outlines 100 changes to the game in its 100th issue
Wisden Cricket Monthly, in its 100th issue published on 22 September 2026, listed 100 ways cricket has evolved in the 21st century and broke those down into 15 gains and 10 losses.
The magazine’s compilation ranges across technique, equipment, formats and off-field culture, citing specific innovations and incidents that have altered how the sport is played and viewed. It points to bowling developments such as the wider use of the wobble seam by practitioners including Vern Philander, Mohammad Abbas, Scott Boland and Sam Cook, crediting Stuart Clark with first perfecting the delivery and noting Stuart Broad’s later adoption and bowling coach Troy Cooley’s description of it as a "dirty seam". The issue also highlights new batting personalities like Dewald Brevis and Harry Brook and documents shifts in language, costume and spectator behaviour.
Wisden details the November 2014 accident in which Phillip Hughes was struck on the neck attempting a pull shot to a Sean Abbott bouncer at the SCG; the impact crushed the vertebral artery, caused a massive brain haemorrhage and Hughes died three days before his 26th birthday, with his doctor saying fewer than 100 such cases had been recorded in medical literature. The magazine records the global outpouring of grief — people placing bats outside their houses, Hugh Jackman propping a bat on stage in New York and Elton John dedicating a song in Munich — and says helmet manufacturers subsequently designed a neck guard that is now compulsory in Australian cricket.
On spin bowling, Wisden points to the proliferation of varied wrist and finger spin — legspinners, left-arm wrist-spinners, carrom-ball practitioners and ambidextrous bowlers — and names Rashid Khan, Mujeeb Ur Rahman and Noor Ahmad as examples tied to Afghanistan’s bowling culture. The issue describes the carrom ball as a delivery "squeezed out from between the thumb and the middle finger, with the effect of sending the ball breaking in the opposite way to a standard off-break" and argues that short-form cricket has encouraged experimentation in such variations.
The magazine addresses structural change in Test cricket, outlining arguments for four-day Tests: boards could include more matches in a series, manage player workloads and give smaller nations a better chance of avoiding defeat. It cites a Cricinfo study from 2024 that found Test durations have shortened by decade, with the average match span from January 2020 to March 2024 at 295 overs — "roughly three days and a session" — while noting marquee series would remain at five days.
Wisden recounts the pandemic-era scheduling choices that saw the ECB persuade the West Indies and Pakistan to tour England to play three Tests each in largely empty grounds, naming Old Trafford and Southampton as venues selected because they had hotels onsite. The magazine describes those seasons as "two mind-bendingly unhinged years" and says they culminated, for England’s cricketers, in "a collective breakdown in Australia in 2021-22."
The issue also covers media and cultural shifts: Ben Hammersley’s 2004 coining of the word "podcast" is noted as the start of a landscape in which players now host podcasts to shape narratives, advertise products and interview colleagues. Wisden records changes in matchday behaviour such as restrictions on players’ phones with referees collecting devices, the rise of minimal wicketkeeping pads — Sarah Taylor once reportedly dispensed with them — and an increase in player tattoos, referencing Darren Gough and Michael Slater (the latter associated in the piece with the Baggy Green cap-number anecdote involving Brendon Julian).
Read the full list of 100 changes in the new issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly, or access the content digitally via a six-month subscription priced at £6.
