England’s Moeen Ali and Gary Ballance have been named among Wisden’s five cricketers of the year while Australia’s captain Meg Lanning has become the inaugural winner of its Leading Woman Cricketer in the World award.

Ballance’s county team-mate Adam Lyth, whose 1,489 runs helped Yorkshire win a first County Championship in 13 years, is also among the five along with the Sri Lanka captain Angelo Mathews, whose side won four series against England in 2014, and Warwickshire’s New Zealand off-spinner Jeetan Patel, the leading wicket-taker in domestic cricket last summer.

The Sri Lanka batsman Kumar Sangakkara, who retired from one-day international cricket following the recent World Cup and will play for Surrey this season, was named as the leading men’s cricketer in the world, with Wisden also issuing its equivalent in the women’s game for the first time in the annual’s 152nd edition.

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The 23-year-old Lanning was the obvious choice, having ended 2014 on top of both the one-day and Twenty20 international batting rankings and having led Australia to the women’s World Twenty20 title in Bangladesh last April, a tournament in which she top-scored with 257 runs. “Meg was the natural choice for Wisden’s inaugural award,” said the Wisden editor Lawrence Booth. “She’s a genuine star, and I’d be surprised if her name doesn’t feature regularly on our list of winners in the years ahead.”

Among the five cricketers of the year, an award that can be won only once, is the England and Worcestershire all-rounder Moeen – also the cover star of the primrose-coloured book – who took 22 wickets in seven Tests during his maiden international while scoring his first Test century with a defiant unbeaten 108 in the series-sealing defeat to Sri Lanka.

Ballance, meanwhile, scored 704 runs at an average of 70.4 in Test cricket last summer, including an unbeaten 104 against Sri Lanka at Lord’s and back-to-back centuries in the 3-1 series win over India. Back at his home ground of Headingley, Lyth was driving a championship-winning campaign, with six hundreds forcing his way into England’s Test squad for the current tour of the Caribbean.

Sangakkara claimed the global men’s award after winning the World Twenty20 with Sri Lanka and finishing with 2,868 runs in all formats – a record for a calendar year. “Choosing Sangakkara just felt natural,” added Booth. “And his four consecutive hundreds at the World Cup confirmed we’d chosen the right man. We’ll miss him when he’s gone.”