The shock remains too raw to think of 2014 as anything but the year in which Australian batsman Phillip Hughes was killed while batting in a match at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
Horror and disbelief at the event that felt inconceivable and the grief of a close-knit, global community of players will reverberate for a while. So, too, will the sense of loss attached to any life cut off so prematurely.
Yet the most significant cricketing events of 2014 probably occurred off the field earlier in the year. The restructuring of the International Cricket Council, the game’s ruling body, in which India, Australia and England constituted themselves a version of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — taking a permanent majority on the main committee and the chairmanship of others — has potentially profound longer-term implications for the game.
It was an alliance of new power — Indian cricket’s overwhelming economic clout — with old. England and Australia in the past had, as founding members of ICC, a veto over its decisions.
It also betrayed ICC’s British-rooted tendency to act like a club rather than a representative body. There are different classes of membership, voting power is limited to a privileged few and there is a profound ambivalence about developing the game outside established elite nations.
That attitude has already had an impact on 2015’s big event — the World Cup to be played in Australia and New Zealand in February and March. It took vigorous protests to get any of the non-test nations a place in the tournament. The strongest of them, Ireland, faces the spectacle of the best current Irish player, Eoin Morgan, not only lining up in England’s team but captaining it after a late and somewhat panicky change of leader.
The I.C.C.’s new regime also began with the unseemly spectacle of Narayanaswami Srinivasan stepping down as head of the Board of Control for Cricket in India while charges of cricket-related corruption were investigated — he was cleared in November — but still being deemed fit to chair the global body.
India may at last be reconsidering its refusal to accept the Decision Review System for umpiring calls, used in everybody else’s matches, influenced by being on the short end of a number of marginal calls in its current series against Australia. That a distinguished recent Indian player, Anil Kumble, is chair of the ICC’s D.R.S. committee doubtless helps.
The World Cup, which is played under the one-day international format, offers significant challenges early in 2015 to the major figures of 2014. Hashim Amla, who became South Africa’s first permanent nonwhite captain, will hope to maintain his superb batting form as he aims to end the Proteas’ run of big tournament underachievement.
His participation is assured. Not so for Saeed Ajmal, the devastating Pakistan spin bowler who was the biggest name caught in 2014’s crackdown on illegal bowling actions. Ajmal conceded Saturday that he would not be reinstated in time to play in the tournament and withdrew from Pakistan’s World Cup squad.
A trio of Sri Lankans who excelled in 2014 will be aiming to take their country one step further than its losses in the last two World Cup finals. That Kumar Sangakkara scored more runs in both test and one-day internationals and the deceptively harmless-looking Rangana Herath took more test wickets than anyone else in the world in part reflected the Sri Lankans’ busy program, but still more the quality of their play.
The same goes for my choice as cricketer of 2014, Sri Lanka’s captain Angelo Mathews, who led his team by stunning example with huge numbers of middle order runs all year and a series-winning spell in his one serious bowl, against England at Leeds.
That match also unveiled the Rookie of the Year, England’s Moeen Ali. Faced with the young cricketer’s holy grail of a first test match score of 100 or more he turned down numerous run-scoring opportunities to protect a tail-end partner. That was early evidence of a maturity, selflessness and ability to adapt and rise to challenges — turning himself from an occasional spinner to one capable of bowling out India — evident throughout his first international season. He showed himself to be everything, other than a very fine cricketer, that Kevin Pietersen — whose dismissal from the England team reverberated through the year — was not.
Like most World Cup years, 2015 will bring its crop of retirements. Sangakkara will play his last one-day internationals at the World Cup, and it would be no great shock if Indian leader Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Pakistan’s magnificent batting veterans Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan were gone by the end of 2015. Michael Clarke’s chronic back trouble may permit few more fine innings for Australia while this summer’s Ashes series could be the last for two superb pace bowlers, the Aussie veteran Ryan Harris and England’s Jimmy Anderson, who should become the first Englishman to take 400 wickets in tests. But just as new years replace the old, so will new stars rise to replace those retiring.
