Gus Atkinson was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year for 2024. Stephan Shemilt’s piece on Atkinson originally appeared in the 2025 edition of Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack.
The Five Cricketers of the Year represent a tradition that dates back to 1889, making this the oldest individual award in cricket. The Five are picked by the editor, and the selection is based, primarily but not exclusively, on excellence in and/or influence on the previous English season. No one can be chosen more than once.
Amid the hullabaloo that surrounded the end of one fast bowler’s career, the start of another was barely noticed – at least to start with. As James Anderson was nudged into retirement, Gus Atkinson took over. Inside the first hour of the first Test against West Indies at Lord’s, he replaced Anderson at the Pavilion End. Two days later, he owned better match figures – 12-106 – than Anderson had managed in 188 Tests. It was the start of the Summer of Gus. By the end, Atkinson had more wickets, 34, than any England bowler in their first home season, and his name on all three Lord’s honours boards.
Atkinson was a relatively late developer: stress fractures prevented him from making his first-class debut until 2020, when he was 22. Three years later, he was in the pub when his Surrey captain, Rory Burns, told him he would play for England by the end of the year. Burns was right: Atkinson made debuts in both white-ball formats. But the progression wasn’t entirely smooth. Unused during the Test tour of India in early 2024, he returned for the domestic season struggling with his run-up. “I was thinking: ‘I need to sort this out,’” he says. “I had my run-up, then I went back a few paces and thought: ‘I’m going to run in from here.’ It felt good. I still measure my old run-up, then do the paces: it’s 19.1m, then nine and a half small steps.” Armed with the new approach, Atkinson was tipped the wink by Ollie Pope – his friend and England vice-captain – that his Test chance would come against West Indies.
England have long coveted pace, and Atkinson’s first ball in Test cricket was 89mph. His second, at 88mph, removed Kraigg Brathwaite, dragging on. It set Atkinson on the way to 7-45, the third-best by an England debutant. Short steps, straight approach and high arm – he bowled a full length, and nipped the ball off the seam. His match analysis has been bettered by only three debutants in Test history, and not by an Englishman since Kent left-arm seamer Fred “Nutty” Martin snared a dozen Australians at The Oval in 1890.
Still, Atkinson had not been looking for his 12th on the third morning. On that Friday, four West Indian wickets remaining, Anderson notched Test victim 704, with a greatest-hits delivery to Joshua Da Silva. Nine down, a fairytale waiting to be written, he dropped Gudakesh Motie in his follow-through. Atkinson, a wicket away from his second five-for in three days, was on at the other end.
“There were probably two overs when I wasn’t trying to get a wicket – just bowling down the leg side,” he says. “Joe Root said there aren’t many chances to get two five-fors in a game, so I thought I just had to bowl.” When Atkinson had Jayden Seales caught on the leg-side boundary, Anderson became a former England cricketer. “I said sorry. He just told me to fuck off!”
Anderson took the adulation but, in England’s next Lord’s Test, seven weeks later, the limelight was all Atkinson’s. Promoted to No.8, he was pushed out of the dressing-room by Brendon McCullum with the instruction to attack Sri Lanka spinner Prabath Jayasuriya. He returned that evening unbeaten on 74. Dinner with Zak Crawley and Harry Brook provided the pep talk, an overturned lbw decision third ball next morning the drama. A drive past mid-off made Atkinson only the sixth man to own a five-for, a ten-wicket match haul and a Test century at Lord’s – all in two games. No player has plastered their name over the home of cricket more quickly. That evening, he rode a Lime bike to Notting Hill for dinner with friends. Two days later, he chalked up five more wickets, joining Ian Botham as the only Englishmen with a century and five-for in the same Lord’s Test. For good measure, he took a hat-trick at Wellington in December, and finished the year with 52 wickets at 22.
ANGUS ALEXANDER PATRICK ATKINSON was born on January 19, 1998, in Chelsea. He has always been Gus, never Angus. The lineage on his mother’s side includes Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, and commander of the Chilean navy in the 19th-century war of independence against Spain. On his father’s side is Sir Henry Norris, an MP who engineered Arsenal’s move to North London in 1913. Atkinson has learned more about both from the media than he knew before he played for England.
Through village cricket in Sussex, Spencer CC in South London, Bradfield College and the Darren Lehmann Academy in Australia, Atkinson flirted with the game, instead of engaging in serious courtship. “Maybe I was lazy, even if I didn’t think that at the time. Looking back, it was more that I didn’t know how far I could get, or what I could do.”
When his father, Ed, was working abroad, it was his mother, Caroline, who ferried him to games, waited on the boundary, and kept in contact with Surrey. She was killed in a car accident in 2020. As Atkinson was making his impact for England, a long legal process to jail the man responsible finally ended. “It was closure, but that was it,” he says. “I don’t really speak much about it. Most of the information that has come out has not come from me. Everything is out there now. There’s not anything I can do about it. My job is to play cricket, and that is what I was trying to do.”
Caroline got to see her son play professional cricket, but not his international achievements. When Atkinson walked through the Long Room after his first day as a Test bowler, seven wickets in his pocket and ball in hand, Ed was there – just as he had been when Gus received his cap from Pope in the pre-match huddle.
“Once, my dream was to be a professional cricketer, then to play for Surrey,” says Atkinson. “Then the dream becomes playing for England, then having a successful England career. Dreams can change quite quickly.” Atkinson began quickly, and may only be getting started.
