Wisden remains a timeless gem in today's digital age

Every January, my uncle Roderick comes to visit. Each time he arrives noticeably thicker around the middle, sporting the same old garish mustard-yellow polo shirt. For the next seven days at least he takes up most of my time, as well as an entirely unreasonable amount of living space, while he drinks me out of house and home.  He is 47 and has lived in a perpetual state of mid-life crisis for the last decade, constantly fretting that his long-time companion, Debbie, "is about to leave me again".

Uncle Roderick, like the Wisden Almanack, is one of the perennials by which I measure my year. To me the two seem more than a little similar. Wisden, now aged 146, arrives each April looking familiar but fatter, and proceeds to consume all my available time, a large chunk of shelf space, and no little expense (the 2009 edition costs £45). And like my uncle, over the last ten years Wisden has been fretting a little about its place in the world.

The amount of cricket being played has grown massively, but Wisden cannot grow with it. The internet is unfettered by space restrictions. Cricinfo has become cricket's international archive. For statistics and match reports especially it is able to provide a comprehensiveness which a book, even one that is 1,680 pages, is unable to match. The Almanack has been forced to adapt, and it has done so with more success than my uncle.

More cricket matches don't just mean more results and statistics, but also more stories. The sport has rarely featured on the frontpages as much as it has in the past 12 months. The Indian Premier League, the Stanford fiasco, the decline of Australia, the sacking of both Kevin Pietersen andPeter Moores, the Mumbai terror attacks, Michael Vaughan's tear-soaked resignation. It is in tackling these issues that the Almanack thrives, the only exception being its coverage of the final chapters of the Stanford affair, which presumably broke too late in the publishing process to feature much.

It is in the Almanack, away from the white-heat of the daily presses and the demands of news journalism, that you find the best cricket writing. The writers get the time and space to reflect properly on issues that matter. One of the real gems this year is a piece by Dean Wilson, freed from the Daily Mirror style, on the decline of cricket among Britain's Afro-Caribbean community. Nasser Hussain provides an appreciation of the careers of his contemporaries Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick. He is as insightful on the enigma of the former as anybody I've read. Tanya Aldred's diaries of a year in the life of three county cricketers – Darren Maddy, Claude Henderson and Chris Jordan – is an example of ghost writing at its finest, making the day-to-day lives of professional sportsmen seem fascinating and sympathetic.