The Art of the Cricket Awards Season: Who Really Deserves to Be Remembered

The Season Ends, The Ceremony Begins

There is something quietly bittersweet about October in cricket. The covers go on. The groundsmen breathe out. The dressing rooms empty. And somewhere, in a hotel function room or on a broadcast stage, someone hands a trophy to a batter who scored the most runs or a bowler who took the most wickets, and everyone claps, and the season is officially declared done.

Cricket awards season is a ritual as old as the game itself, in its own way. Every county, every board, every broadcaster has its version. Player of the Year. Young Player of the Year. The fans' vote. The pundits' pick. And every year, without fail, the same quiet question surfaces in clubhouses and living rooms and WhatsApp threads across the cricketing world: did the right person win?

That question matters more than it sounds. Because how we choose to honour cricketers says everything about what we value in the game. And right now, I think we are getting some of it wrong.

Runs and Wickets Are Not the Whole Story

The problem with most cricket awards is they are essentially dressed-up statistics. The player who scored the most runs in the series. The bowler with the best average over the summer. These numbers are not meaningless — they represent real skill, real effort, real excellence. But they are also incomplete.

Cricket is a game full of contributions that never make the scorecard. The fielder who takes a blinding catch at short leg off a ball that was going to cost the innings. The lower-order batter who grinds out forty-two not out to save a Test. The spinner who bowls into the wind for eighteen overs to dry up one end while the real wickets come from the other. None of these performances win awards. Most of them barely get a mention in the match report.

The most glaring omission, year after year, is the fielder. Fielding remains the most underappreciated discipline in cricket, full stop. A brilliant outfield catch that turns a game, a run-out that shifts momentum in a one-day chase, a diving stop at backward point that saves four — none of this is ever properly rewarded at an awards ceremony. We hand out Golden Gloves in football. We celebrate defensive players in rugby. But cricket keeps pretending that fielding is just what you do between the proper bits.

The awards season, at every level, would be richer and more honest if it started asking different questions.

The Club Cricket Awards Nobody Talks About

Here is what I actually love about October: the club cricket awards dinners. Not the televised ones. The ones in function rooms above pubs, with a dodgy PA system and a raffle where the top prize is a cricket bat donated by someone whose sponsor logo is slightly peeling off.

These evenings are the real awards season. The ones that matter to most of the people who actually play this game.

Because at club level, the awards are different. Someone wins the Most Improved Player trophy — and they might have gone from being genuinely terrible to just about competent, but the journey behind it involved hours of net practice and not giving up after a terrible June. Someone else wins the Club Person of the Year, which at a good club is actually the most important award of the night, given to the person who marked out the crease every Saturday, made the teas, organised the tour, chased the umpires, and sent the scorecards to the league.

These awards understand something that professional cricket's shiny ceremonies often forget: cricket is not just about the best players. It is about the people who hold the whole thing together. The volunteer who has given thirty years to a club and never taken a penny. The woman who runs the bar every home game. The teenager who turned up to field for the seconds every week even when they never got a bat.

If you want to know what cricket really values, do not watch the county gala dinner. Watch a village club hand out its end-of-season awards. That is where the game's actual soul lives.

The Problem With 'Player of the Year'

Let's talk about the big one. Player of the Year, at international level, is a prestigious thing. It should be. But the criteria are almost always implicitly about volume. Who scored the most? Who took the most? Who appeared in the most matches?

This systematically disadvantages the player who came in at number three for a team that was already in trouble, and somehow held things together for five Tests in a row. It disadvantages the spinner who played in conditions that didn't suit them and still delivered economy rates that kept their side in the game. It disadvantages the captain who made the right calls even when those calls cost them personally.

There is a strong argument that cricket should separate its awards more explicitly. Batter of the Year by format. Bowler of the Year by format. But also: Most Valuable Performance — a different category entirely, honouring not cumulative stats but the single effort that changed something. The innings that saved a series. The spell that won it. The fielding performance that swung a final.

We already do something like this with the ICC's Spirit of Cricket award, which recognises a player or team who exemplified cricket's values in a given year. It is one of the few awards that feels genuinely unique to this game. But it gets almost no airtime compared to the statistical gongs, which tells you exactly where our priorities are.

What October Should Really Make Us Think About

The end of the season is a strange moment. For professional players, the work rarely stops — there are winter tours, training programmes, contract negotiations. But for the rest of us, the ones who play on Saturday afternoons and follow the game from sofas and pub screens, October is genuinely a pause. A moment to reflect.

And in that reflection, most real cricket fans are not thinking about who won the Player of the Year award. They are thinking about that one afternoon in July when everything clicked. The match they drove two hours to watch. The over they cannot stop replaying in their head. The summer's cricket lives in moments and memories, not in ceremonies.

The awards season, at its best, should reflect that. It should try to name and honour those moments — the innings, the spells, the catches, the partnerships — rather than just consolidating the season's statistics into a single trophy.

There is a version of cricket's end-of-season celebration that actually feels as good as the game itself. One that tells proper stories, honours the people who make the game possible at every level, and understands that cricket's greatness is not just in its records but in its rhythms, its rituals, and its characters.

We are not quite there yet. But every October, I think we get a little closer.

The Unsung Heroes Who Deserve a Trophy

If I were redesigning the cricket awards season from scratch, here is who I would make sure got recognised.

The groundsman. Every single year. The people who prepare surfaces that make great cricket possible are never, ever celebrated at scale. The outfield that made the ball skid through beautifully. The surface at a county ground that held together for five days and produced a genuine result. These are works of craft. They deserve acknowledgment.

The club captain who kept a fractious squad together through a difficult season. Leadership in club cricket is an underappreciated art form. You are managing egos, personalities, availability crises, and the guy who always says he'll play and then texts you at 9am on Saturday. Getting eleven people on a pitch and in a good headspace is harder than it looks.

The scorer. Yes, the scorer. Cricket is a game defined by its statistics, and those statistics exist because someone, usually voluntarily, sat in a small box for six hours and wrote everything down. They deserve a trophy shaped like a pencil and a standing ovation.

And the debutant. The young player who pulled on whites for the first time and discovered what this game is about. Every cricket club should find a way to mark that moment, because those are the people who will still be here in forty years, handing out the awards.

Closing the Book on the Season Right

Cricket's awards season, for all its limitations, does something important. It closes the loop. It gives the game a proper ending, a narrative conclusion before the winter sets in. And there is real value in that ritual — in gathering, reflecting, and saying: this happened, this mattered, we were here.

The best awards evenings, whether they are held at Lord's or in a function room in Shropshire, do the same thing. They remind us why we play this game and why we watch it. Not because of the trophies, but because of the stories behind them.

October cricket has a particular kind of beauty. The season is over, but the memories are fresh. There is still warmth in the conversations, still something vivid in the recollections. The awards are just the excuse to have those conversations out loud.

And that, in the end, is what cricket has always been. An excuse to gather, to talk, to remember. The trophies are just objects. The season — every innings of it — is the real thing.