REVOLVER cricket, a soft ball training game started in Queensland this year, has been received well in England so far since its introduction in May. It delivers what the inventors claim -- that all players are involved all the time, which does not happen in orthodox formats.

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A coach from Stanmore CC in Middlesex described Revolver as an "egalitarian" game, because all players, even the weaker ones, make important contributions. One of the flaws of orthodox cricket is that a batsman might face only a few balls, even in the Ken Barrington pairs, and might not even reach the crease at all.

In existing formats such as Kwik Cricket,the strongest players tend to dominate at the expense of the less able. This causes frustration (and anger sometimes), and periods of boredom discourage young players from the age of about 10 to about 15. Revolver solves this problem.

Revolver is interesting and ingenious because it is real cricket with a competitive edge. The idea of splitting 15 players into three teams is the key. Every batsman faces 12 balls, no more and no less, and the game is rigorously logged on a special scoresheet. Numbered coloured bibs are required and the game works best with revolving stumps and a dead soft ball such as Incredi-ball.

Revolver has been trialled by Charlie Randall at Radlett CC, the Hertfordshire club, and at Stanmore. Anyone interested in seeing this game in action is welcome to contact charlierandallcricket.com for a demonstration. This is one of the most potent developments in club cricket for a long time. If you think this must be an exaggeration, you would believe it after seeing the children enjoy a competitive Revolver game.

Graham Pulsford, a watching Radlett parent, noted that the movement in an under-10 Revolver game kept the boys on their toes. "All were involved and it seemed to hold their interest. That is very unusual at this age," he said. "Last week in a more orthodox game half the boys were lying around on the ground looking bored. Usually at the end of training the boys start rushing off when they see others starting to leave, but the boys playing Revolver didn't seem to notice."

Mark Shashoua, parent watching the same game, said: "The tracking on the scoresheet is amazing. At this age they're facing a large amount of deliveries. Otherwise they usually face much fewer. It's very good."

Arif Rahman, assistant coach at Radlett and a parent, commented: "It's quite interesting the way the game is set up. Everyone gets a fair go at bowling, batting and fielding, and I could see that the children enjoyed the game. The only thing is to get used to it."

Pulsford added: "With Revolver, however good or bad you are, you get a go at bowling and batting -- and the players know that. One young boy was virtually shunned last week in a normal game because he wasn't very good at all. He was very reluctant to play Revolver at the start. Now he says he wants to play next week. It's remarkable."

www.revolvercricket.com

www.radlettcc.com

OXFAM stands to gain thousands of pounds from the proceeds of the first four editions of Wisden almanacks on offer at Bonhams book sale in Oxford on June 29.

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The books have been put up for sale with the auctioneers on behalf of the charity, and the first edition alone, published in 1864 by the cricketer John Wisden, could raise about £4,000. The three subsequent annual editions have usually attracted lesser bids, but all four carry the title The Cricketer’s Almanack before the name was changed in 1869 to Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack , still familiar to this day.

Wisden has been published without interruption since 1864, even during the two world wars. This makes it the world’s longest running sports reference book as well as the most famous. "In all that time," Bonhams say, "it has only had 18 editors and has carried articles by all the great names in cricket writing." Including Charlie Randall.

In contrast to recent editions, with their 1,500 or so pages, the first edition had only 112 pages and contained non-cricketing information such as the winners of the Oaks and the dates of the battles of the English Civil War. The Bonhams book specialist at Oxford, David Walker, said: "It’s a thrill to be able to offer such wonderful, historic books especially in such a good cause."

Full sets of the almanack attract big money. An unbroken set from the first year 1864 to 1984 was auctioned at Bonhams in London in November 2009 for £90,000, well above the expected price. Though this was not a full set up to the year of sale, the books were handsomely bound and offered in fine condition as the top lot.

A proper full set was sold at auction by Graham Budd at Sotheby's for £120,000 in 2006. The following year a price of £144,000 was apparently achieved at auction, the highest on record. Certainly early gaps can be expensive to fill. For example the year 1896 is notoriously rare, once fetching £24,160 in 2007 as an original hardback with surface wear.

THE official song for the ICC World Twenty20 in the West Indies, Bring It by a duet of Mr Vegas and Fay Ann Lyons, has been released and has already been given air time on Caribbean radio stations and dance halls. To many pop music lovers the sound might be disappointingly hip-hop until the song warms up about halfway through.

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And it is noticeable that soca queen Fay sings better than Mr Vegas, but the package should prove catchy enough when amplified at the cricket grounds in May. The ICC describe Bring It as "contagious", which might be taking the effect a bit far. Nearer would be 'slightly catchy'.

The audio of Bring It can be heard on www.iccevents.yahoo.com

This time, everyone has been assured, will be different. The ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat said: "We want this event to be a celebration of nation-versus-nation cricket with all the atmosphere, fun and excitement traditionally associated with the game in the West Indies. So, we are calling on the people of the Caribbean to ‘Bring It’."

"We invite you to bring your biggest voices. We invite you to bring your loudest noise makers. We invite you to bring your most outrageous costumes and facepaint. The world will be playing. The world will be watching. It’s time for Twenty20 international cricket, West Indies style."

First-time visitors to the West Indies might be shocked at the frequent lapses of grammar they hear, but they will enjoy the experience after a few rum punches. And an official message to "the cricket fans of the world" has been broadcast on the event website by the Bring It Posse, the tournament's cricket-loving gang and the nearest equivalent to the Barmy Army.

In case you haven't noticed, we enjoy our cricket a little different in the Caribbean. We live it. We breathe it. We Bring It for every match. With that in mind, consider this an invitation - an invitation from some of the craziest cricket fans in the world to you. We invite you to bring your biggest cheers. We invite you to bring your loudest noise makers. We invite you to bring your most outrageous costumes and facepaint.

You call yourself a cricket fan? Well this is your chance to Bring It, West Indies style. The world will be playing. The world will be watching. It's time to Bring It!

Sincerely, The Bring It Posse

Ticket prices range from three US dollars for ground entry at single group stage matches to five dollars for double-headers and eight dollars for entry to Super Eight matches. Prices for the semi-finals in St Lucia range from $10-20, and general admission to the men’s and women’s finals in Barbados on May 16 will cost $20 with a premium stand ticket available for only $40. Under-16s will gain entry free of charge for all group stage matches and significant discounts at all other fixtures. Admission to the women’s group matches in St Kitts is free to all.

Supporters from overseas can choose from a range of official tour operators signed up with service provider Cricket Logistics.

UK: Gullivers Sports Travel, Howzat Travel, ITC Sports, The Cricket Tour Company, Sporting Getaways.

India: Cutting Edge, Pyramid Travels, Tui India, SOTC Sports, Kuoni Travel, Cox & Kings.

Australia: AST Sports, Cricket Australia, Sportsnet Holidays.

United States: PKT Tours.

United Arab Emirates: MMI Travel.

Ireland: Sadlier Travel.

If the general public would like to organise travel packages to the ICC Twenty20 2010 in the West Indies, they can find all the information they need at www.cricketlogistics.com

Any parties interested in becoming an official tour operator are asked to contact Shirley Rattray of Cricket Logistics by email on shirley@cricketlogistics.com for an information pack.

Group A: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia

Group B: Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Zimbabwe

Group C: South Africa, India, Afghanistan

Group D: West Indies, England, Ireland

Match schedule, ticket prices: www.iccevents.yahoo.com

Information on tour parties: www.cricketlogistics.com

THE content of the 147th Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack will be exceptionally interesting this spring because 2009 was an eventful year. The third edition to be edited by Sunday Telegraph cricket correspondent Scyld Berry is due to be published on April 15.

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Unrivalled writers such as Mike Atherton, Matthew Engel, Gideon Haigh, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Sir Michael Parkinson and of course Charles Randall have contributed. Among many features, there are articles on the year cricket lost its innocence, from the time the Sri Lanka bus was ambushed by terrorists in Lahore on March 3, 2009.

A lively record of the Ashes series in England includes input from Andrew Strauss, the captain, and Andy Flower, the coach. Perhaps even more exciting, by Randall, there is a look at the umpires' new bond with technology and an account of the England Lions tour of New Zealand. This alone makes the 2010 edition excellent value at £45.

Perhaps the most famous sports book in the world with its daffodil dust jacket, the almanack has been published every year since 1864.

THE Bexley all-rounder Adam Ball, 16, has been called up by England for next month's Under-19 World Cup in New Zealand to replace Calum Haggett, of Somerset, who withdrew on medical advice.

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Ball, a Kent Academy left-armer already in the ECB fast-bowling elite group, scored a 118-ball century for Bexley in the Kent League last July, an achievement at Tunbridge Wells that marked him out as a player of special promise at such a young age. The Beths Grammar School pupil was a deserved winner of the league's Young Cricketer of the Year award at the end of the season.

The England Under-19 squad, captained by the Yorkshire off-spinner Azeem Rafiq, are due to leave on Jan 1 for a week acclimatising in Wellington before reporting to Christchurch for the start of the World Cup. England play two warm-up matches against Papua New Guinea Under-19 on Jan 11 and New Zealand Under-19 on Jan 12.

England’s first match in the group stages will be against Hong Kong at Lincoln University on Jan 16, followed by Afghanistan at Queen Elizabeth II Park in New Brighton on Jan 18 and by the holders India at Lincoln on Jan 20. The top two teams in each group will progress to the quarter-finals. The final will be held at Lincoln on Jan 30.

England Under-19 Squad

Adam Ball                Kent

Michael Bates          Hampshire

Paul Best               Warwickshire

Danny Briggs           Hampshire

Nathan Buck            Leicestershire

Jos Buttler              Somerset

Chris Dent              Gloucestershire

Matthew Dunn         Surrey

Ateeq Javid            Warwickshire

Jack Manuel           Worcestershire

David Payne           Gloucestershire

Azeem Rafiq           Yorkshire, capt

Joe Root               Yorkshire

Ben Stokes            Durham

James Vince          Hampshire

AN unbroken Wisden Cricketers' Almanack set from the first year 1864 to 1984 has been auctioned at Bonhams in London this week for £90,000, well above the expected price.

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The books were handsomely bound and offered in fine condition as the top lot. Other items attracting big bids included a revised tyupescript for Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Diamonds Are Forever , which went for £62,400, a unique Jacobean play, for £84,000, and papers relating to the life of the revolutionary Thomas Paine, for £86,400.

Wisden is established as the most famous sports reference work ever published, founded in 1864 by the cricketer John Wisden as a competitor to Fred Lillywhite's The Guide to Cricketers . There have been only 15 different editors in its 140 years.

Though the Bonhams almanacks is short of a complete set, the price looks good value because the remaining 25 books can be acquired easily enough. A full set was sold at auction by Graham Budd at Sotheby's for £120,000 in 2006. The following year a price of £144,000 was apparently achieved at auction, the highest on record. Certainly early gaps can be expensive to fill. For example the year 1896 is notoriously rare, once fetching £24,160 in 2007 as an original hardback with surface wear.

The most valuable single cricket auction item must be Albert Chevallier Tayler's oil painting of Kent versus Lancashire in 1906, which Kent sold for £600,000 in 2006.

Whether James Bond was interested in cricket, one cannot be sure, but Fleming’s typescript became the target of enthusiastic bidding, fetching more than double the estimate. The Bonhams auctioneer described Lot 42 as "peppered throughout with authorial tweaks, written in Fleming's characteristic blue ballpoint."

Bonhams added: "Many taughten the plot, while some are gloriously inconsequential (to the untrained eye at least): a telephone number, for example, gets altered from Wisconsin 9.00456 to Wisconsin 7.3697. When Bond checks himself into the Hotel Astor it was originally 'in front of an elderly woman'; now it is 'before a hatchet-faced woman with a bosom like a sandbag'.

"Or, at page 88, 'too many expense-account customers' becomes 'too much expense-account aristocracy'. While most pages contain one or two alterations, more substantial additions appear in eight places. Every now and then the nagging voice of the publisher's reader can be heard, saying at one point, but surely the world's diamond centre is Amsterdam?"

THE ICC will be hosting an orgy of nostalgia at their cricket history conference in Oxford this week, and certainly tradition is a trump card in the battle of wits with the Twenty20 money men because even the Indian Premier League marketing puffs have highlighted Test pedigree to stress the quality of players.

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The ICC have stressed the primacy of Test cricket more than once, but making logical decisions in the face of the huge payments on offer to players, by the Indian Premier League for example, is no easy matter. Divided loyalty is nothing new; a raft of players were prepared to desert the ICC family for relatively large fees in the Kerry Packer tournaments in Australia in the 1970s and to tour South Africa behind the apartheid curtain in the 1980s.

The ICC began as the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 with only three members – Australia, England and South Africa -- and a century later the organisation has 104 members. The development over those 100 years will be charted by a host of experts in the Nissan Institute at St Antony’s College on Wednesday July 22 and Thursday.

Leading administrators, players, academics, historians and statisticians gather for reflection as part of the ICC’s centenary celebrations. The ICC's president David Morgan said: "One of the key themes of the ICC’s centenary year is tradition, to use 2009 as an opportunity to look back at the game’s rich history. The history conference should be a fantastic occasion."

Former ICC president Ehsan Mani and the organisation’s first chief executive David Richards will come together to reflect upon the big issues they had to deal with during their times at the helm of the global game long before the advent of the 20-overs explosion. And ex-international greats Bishan Bedi, Angus Fraser, Sourav Ganguly, Clive Lloyd and Bob Willis will assess how the game has changed since they began their careers.

Other contributors include Sir Hilary Beckles, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Principal and Professor of Economic and Social History of the University of the West Indies, Brian Stoddart, the former Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University, Australia, Boria Majumdar, of the University of Central Lancashire, Don Neely, the president of New Zealand Cricket, and leading journalists and cricket historians Mihir Bose, David Frith and Gideon Haigh.

Women’s cricket past and present will be represented by former England captain Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, who lifted the inaugural women’s world cup in 1973, as well as current captain Charlotte Edwards and her team-mate Ebony Rainford-Brent. MCC curator Adam Chadwick will talk about the importance of cricket heritage and perpetuating the game’s legacy, and David Kendix and Rob Eastaway, two of the men behind the Reliance Mobile ICC team and player rankings respectively, will explain how statistics and rankings allow comparisons across history.

To bring the conference right up to date, it will also be attended by current ICC president David Morgan and chief executive Haroon Lorgat, as well as ICC director and ECB chairman Giles Clarke and ECB chief executive David Collier.

Looking ahead to the conference, Morgan said: "One of the key themes of the ICC’s centenary year is tradition, to use 2009 as an opportunity to look back at the game’s rich history, to honour past greats and recognise milestones. We are honouring those past greats through the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame in association with the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations, recognising the achievements of the great players who have graced the game.

"And the ICC History Conference will be an opportunity for administrators past and present, as well as players, journalists, academics, historians and statisticians to come together and reflect on the events of the past 100 years. It should be a fantastic occasion and a highlight of the ICC centenary year."

Limited space is available for anyone wishing to attend. Media and public must register by email at history@icc-cricket.com .

THE Brit Oval groundsman Bill Gordon has won the best four-day pitches award for the sixth year running and the best one-day pitches for fourth year, the ECB have announced.

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Half of the head groundsmen on the circuit received praise: Stuart Kerrison (Chelmsford) as four-day runner-up, Peter Marron (Old Trafford), Mick Hunt (Lord’s) and Paul Marshall (Northampton) for commendations, Mike Grantham (Canterbury) as one-day runner-up, Nigel Gray (Rose Bowl), Marron again, Philip Frost (Taunton) and David Measor (Riverside) for commendations.

The missing grounds are Cardiff, Headingley, Leicester, Worcester, Edgbaston, Trent Bridge, Hove, Derby, Bristol,

University Centre of Excellence Richard Sula (The Parks, Oxford); outground category joint winners Micky Stewart and Christian Dunkerley (Scarborough) and Vic Demain (Uxbridge). Commendations in the outground category went to Mark Wakefield (Kidderminster), Bob McInroy (Cheltenham) and Andy Peirson (Beckenham).

Alan Fordham, ECB head of first class operations, said: "Once again the nation’s groundsmen and their teams have worked incredibly hard to produce some excellent pitches during another wet season. Great matches happen on great pitches, and the tireless work that groundsmen do all year means that many thousands of spectators and players get maximum enjoyment from the game."

CHARLIE SAYS: The Oval seems to be going the featherbed way, from what I saw, though perhaps it was just the innocuous Surrey bowling that gave that made it seem that way in their 2008 relegation season. Fordham is right about the important role of groundsmen in the enjoyment of cricket.

SO FAREWELL (sort of) to Peter Marron, Lancashire's head groundsman, who has done more than many people realise to enhance the entertainment of cricket followers in his 30 years at Old Trafford. When Sir Allen Stanford reads this, he should be on the phone to Manchester straight away.

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The Stanford matches in Antigua this week have underlined the importance of proper pitches. Low and slow usually means dull cricket that cannot be rendered more attractive by glitz. A strip with bounce and pace is the ideal that Marron has achieved so often.

The late 1980s and early 1990s in my opinion were the best years at Old Trafford for sparkling cricket. The venerable ground -- and Marron by proxy -- will always be remembered for Shane Warne's 'ball of the century' on a fine pitch. The Laker 19-wicket achievement in 1956 was famous, but he was operating on rain-affected red marl, a clay embarrassingly helpful to off-spin when wet. In these days of covered pitches, the ECB should consider encouraging marl again rather than the various loams that form solid blocks, leaving the finger spinner as an endangered species.

Marron conjured up near-ideal strips by hard work, though the price was often 'root break' and the pitches would become tired and mild after a few seasons -- requiring another round of re-laying. The Oval has suffered similarly in London and the pitch has lost pace and reverted to featherbed status.

Marron, 53, has decided to go freelance and use his experience on a consultancy basis. He said: "Not many people can come to work each morning and honestly say they love their job, but I can. However, when you’ve been doing it for as long as I have, you get to a point when you need a new challenge and want to use your knowledge in a different capacity.

"Lancashire Country Cricket Club and Old Trafford is a massive part of who I am. I’ve had the best and the worst of times whilst working here, and over the years some work colleagues have become my closet friends. But there is a big wide world out there, and you just know when it’s time to pass over the reins and try something new."

Andy Atkinson left his Essex job and pursued a precarious freelance career when the South African authorities shipped him out to revitalise the tired squares on their circuit after the years of isolation and too much one-day cricket. The Newlands strip in Cape Town, especially, needed skill and experience.

Marron was awarded a benefit in 2006 and he leaves Lancashire's employment at the end of the year after working on the new drainage and outfield. The Jim Cumbes said: "Peter has been thinking about this for some time, and it’s something he and I have discussed at length over the past couple of months. He has been head groundsman here for 25 years, and there are things away from Old Trafford he would like to do, and felt if he didn’t do them now, he never would."

"To my mind, he has been the best groundsman in the country for years. And I know he doesn’t win the top awards, but they tend to go to those with the flattest pitches, not necessarily the best 'cricket' pitches. You just need to read the comments made by the England team and touring sides over recent years, and they are always full of praise for the pitches at Old Trafford."

Cumbes added: "Pete has just completed installing our new £600,000 start-of-the-art drainage system and outfield, and will be kept busy over the coming weeks overseeing the turfing and maintenance of this. It’s not the last we will see of him, as I fully expect him to be driving the re-orientation of the square when that takes place at the end of 2009, it’s just he won’t be here on a full-time basis."