The Cricketers Who’s Who 2026

Martin Chandler | 9:51am BST 05 April 2026

Published: 2026
Pages: 672
Author: Moorehead, Benj (Editor)
Publisher: Fairfield Books
Rating: 4 stars

I reviewed last year’s Cricketer’s Who’s Who, the first edition of this particular incarnation of the title I have read, here. If you didn’t read that then then it is probably worth doing so now, because the publishers have once again wisely chosen not to interfere with a successful formula. The 2026 edition is very much a case of ‘more of the same’. That said I can’t bring myself to conclude a review in less than a hundred words, so I will take this opportunity to digress a little, something I am always happy to do.

So I will begin with an update and confirm that I do still have just the two editions of this one, and  have not in the last twelve months set out to acquire the 45 I am missing. In fact at one point I did have the opportunity to pick up the others in one job lot, and at a price that was certainly modest. I would have to confess that if I had another couple of hundred feet of shelf space I might have been tempted, but I was able to decline the offer with no regrets.

Something else I can say with the benefit of hindsight is that as last summer wore on I found the 2025 edition more than useful. It was a year when, my beloved Lancashire being in the second division, I took much more of an interest in the doings of all the counties rather than concentrating on the top division and found there were many more county players that I knew next to nothing about than I had thought. Amazing resource that the internet is I found the Who’s Who much easier to navigate in order to find out more about them.

And I also recall one long session I spent with last year’s Who’s Who, on one of the many August days when, of course, there was no county cricket to watch. My mind went back half a century to 1975, the first year in which Wisden carried a team photograph of every county. There were no batting helmets to obscure batsmen’s faces in those days and county cricketers were, thanks to the BBC’s coverage of the three limited overs competitions, regularly in our living room. In addition my father was a keen reader of the Daily Telegraph. He always claimed he bought it only because of the breadth of its sports coverage, and throughout the summer it certainly had a reporter at every county ground. 

So I went through all of those seventeen teams and, even fifty years on, I could still name just over  half of the men in them and, once I read the names, have little doubt that back in the day I would have recognised many more. Today my passion for county cricket is undiminished yet I consume it in a different way. The batsmen now are always helmeted, and television and newspaper coverage much diminished. I didn’t expect my result to be good, but I was certainly disappointed at my success rate on a similar exercise in 2025 – had it not been for the fact that I recognised all the Lancastrians my success rate would probably not even have been as high as even 20%.

Returning to 2026 the eagle eyed will have noticed that one thing that has changed from the last edition to this one is my rating, which has gone up from 3 stars to 4 stars. There are three reasons for this. The first is that, as I have said I now know, rather than merely have my suspicions, that The Cricketer’s Who’s Who is a really useful book for those who watch county cricket.. Secondly the foreword to this one is contributed by Annie Chave, the nearest thing we have in county cricket to a national treasure and, finally, not a single one of the 672 pages of the Who’s Who is taken up by The Hundred