If Wisden is cricket’s Bible, here is the New Testament. Gathered together into one chunky volume is the pick of nearly three decades’ worth of the Wisden annual, a period spanning some of the game’s greatest troubles (Packer, match-fixing), the golden age of the allrounder (Botham, Hadlee, Imran, Kapil Dev) and possibly the greatest Test side in history.

The sport has undergone immense change, from the rise of the one-day game and the noisy birth of its offspring, the Twenty20, from the kit the players wear, to the frenetic pace of today’s Test cricket and the money that now flows freely through the top levels of the game.

The period begins with the schism that was the Kerry Packer affair as poorly rewarded players were only too happy to join the media mogul’s breakaway. While there were fears for the game’s future, it is now appreciated that Packer and his World Series Cricket led to much change for the better and helped create the more dynamic sport of today. Money and a leather jacket feature in the coverage of the corruption scandals that hit the game from the 1990s. Wisden shouted loud and long from early on that here was a real threat — a ‘poison’. If only the authorities had paid heed and conducted proper investigations. It was an issue Wisden got right, but that has not always been the case.

The most troublesome section is on cricket’s approach to South Africa. The Wisden of the day failed to see that the representative cricket side of the apartheid regime should be shunned. But then it was not alone in this country in opposing the isolation of a wicked regime. As Stephen Moss, the anthology’s editor, points out in his notes, this is in part condemnation by hindsight; nevertheless it is a blot on the yellow copybook.

But Wisden is not now the reactionary tome many assume it to be. Last year the editor, Matthew Engel, stated that if a county is heading for bankruptcy, ‘let them go’. It is Wisden that has provided the loudest voice against the International Cricket Council’s inadequate response to the problem of Zimbabwe.

There is much more in this anthology. Tributes to the greats who have departed during the period (Bradman, Larwood, Marshall), debate over how good Steve Waugh’s Australians were (very) and a roller-coaster chapter on England that ends on the high of last summer.

And there is plenty of the obscure, including an obituary section that does not focus only on the mighty men of the Test game. Take Robert Crisp, who had just climbed Kilimanjaro when he received the news that England wanted him. He was a tank commander in the second world war who started a newspaper for black South Africans in the apartheid era, and who died in 1994 ‘with a copy of the Sporting Life on his lap, reportedly having lost a £20 bet’.

It will cost twice as much to buy this, but quality doesn’t come cheap.