Oh dear, oh dear! The Australian cricket scandal really is a blow to a sport whose greatest teams have more often than not hailed from Sydney and Melbourne. Ball tampering may not seem the gravest of sins to non-fans, but the scale of the outrage, humiliation and collective shame is indicative of the high passions that can rule what was once the most gentlemanly of sports.
Take all of this into consideration when looking at the collectables market surrounding cricket.
Let’s start at the relatively moderate level with Gary Sobers’ six sixes ball – so controversial there is even a book written about whether what sold was the real thing – which took £26,400 at Christie’s in 2006. Moving up a level, Don Bradman’s 1946-47 Ashes bat sold for almost £42,500 in December 2012, while Sachin Tendulkar’s bat made £58,480 two years earlier.
Bradman (the greatest batsman ever, with Tendulkar) appears again with a price of £175,375 for his 1948 Invincibles tour cap.
Sets of Wisden, the cricketer’s almanac, have reached as high as £90,000, but the biggest prize of all was the collection of cricket scorebooks by Samuel Britcher, the MCC’s first official scorer, whose 1795-1806 records, set down in four books, rose to a staggering £324,000, again at Christie’s, in 2005.
