Mike Brearley - The Art of Captaincy

London: Channel 4 Books, 2001

Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - It’s long been on my to-read list given the amount of research I’ve done into the field of psychoanalysis I’ve done over the past five years, and every profile of the author focusses on his off-field achievements at least as much as his first class record. So when I spotted it in a charity shop I had to pick it up.

About the author - Mike Brearley played thirty-nine tests for England, captaining thirty-one of them. Three of these were during the famous Ashes series of 1981, in which he led England to a fanous 3-1 victory. In addition to his precocious excellence while still studying at Cambridge, he toured with the MCC and later captained Middlesex for a number of years. He obtained a degree in philosophy and later became a psychoanalyst, serving a brief period as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is now a writer and therapist.

Plot - If you’ve ever dreamed of leading out eleven men in white suits, you’re either Roy Evans at the 1996 FA Cup Final or want to captain the England cricket team. If the latter, this is the only book you’ll ever need.

Review - Now England have managed to win the Cricket World Cup, it might be worth asking exactly what they have left to achieve. It may sound flippant but in the days immediately following that extraordinary final over at Lord’s on a sunny Sunday, a friend of mine asked exactly that question.

For over forty years, that was the prize which had eluded the England and Wales Cricket Board – played three finals, lost three finals, all when chasing. It looked to be that way during this year’s final too: no matter the one-day side had pummelled all comers in the four years since their humiliation in the Antipodes, no matter that their top order has been as destructive over the past twelve months than any in history. No, this was England, in the Cricket World Cup Final, chasing a comparatively low total against a team which wasn’t Australia or India. It’s a wonder they made a hundred.

For me, I’d grown used to the idea that I would probably never see England win that tournament, just as I have made my peace with never watching their footballing brothers winning a meaningful trophy. It’s arguable why England (or Great Britain, depending on event) seem to flake out when the likes of the Aussies, the All Blacks, the Germans or the Americans find the will to carry themselves over the line time and again, but I think it bears repeating that there’s a lot to be said for exposure. I have no problem imagining Team GB’s rowers earning medal after medal at a World Championships, or Adam Peaty (or Jonnie Peacock, or Lewis Hamilton or Chris Froome or the Red Roses or countless brilliant male and female athletes) breaking records and sauntering to them as they do so. But the pressure that’s brought to bear on the trinity of major team sports in the UK (football, cricket and rugby union) must play a part, as must the four-year wait to achieve something.

There are other arguments too: Lewis Hamilton races for Mercedes, and all of his racing work is geared towards winning for them. Adam Peaty might race for a club but his true achievement is at international meets. Football at international level is at the munificence of clubs, who have already wrung the juice out of player energy and commitment over eight or nine months by the time of a summer tournament. That argument falls down somewhat when you consider the general tournament excellence of the Germans (or the Americans in the women’s game), and that’s not to mention the central contacts the ECB offer to England cricketers, which has helped them so much to be a competitive and consistent unit.

So I suppose what I’m trying to point out is that England don’t lose because England are shit – generally, the country punches above its weight and spends a lot of money to help them do so. It’s also not because they are unlucky, because as that final shows, they needed and had most of their luck in the course of one batting innings. If I was to try and narrow it down, I’d put it down to overthinking, which is a consequence of the intolerable levels of intrusion by the press and public. It’s long been mentioned by foreign coaches how unprepared they were for the hostility of the sporting media in Britain, and personally I feel that has to have a negative effect. 

A newspaper man or sports correspondent will point out, somewhat rightly, that they cease to have an influence once a player crosses that white line, and that a professional sportsperson should be able to rise above the gossip. However, these people in their prime are often in their early to mid-twenties, and being told they are useless by forty thousand people weaned on the teat of banner headlines might not be the ideal bedrock to rest our World Cup hopes on. 

Having said that, I believe Villa Park needs to be exorcised. That’s the only reason we went from European Champions to Division Two within five years.

All jokes or criticism aside, you don’t win the big pots without planning, cool heads and the application of talent, and all that came to bear in the Cricket World Cup Final. I’m glad I saw it, although it left me completely drained over the course of eight hours, and now I can add it to that list of phenomena I can tell the grandkids that they’ll never believe, like the time I saw David Bowie or that films used to be released that weren’t created by Marvel Studios.

It took me a long time to become a cricket fan, and like all sports wanker fans that you hate, I came in directly at a glory period, namely the 2005 Ashes series. Universally ranked as the greatest series ever, it came as a direct vindication for the years of hope for many an England fan, who could see the team building between the captaincies of Nasser Hussain and Michael Vaughan. Even then, the win was precarious, the ties fluctuating between Australia and England in a flipbook of ‘did you see that?!’ moments. The day England sealed the Ashes for the first time since 1987, I was following it at the library I worked in, refreshing the only internet computer we had on the desk, hoping we’d do it before the building had to shut.

And like many, I found something in the game I never knew I liked. I associated cricket with awkward stances over a bat, boring clonks when all you want to do is swing the wood around your head, stupid overarm bowling and tedious grainy footage of people in white suits and huge moustaches. I never played it for pleasure, and it featured on my radar sparingly. The World Cup featured in my teenage years twice: once when Shoeeb Riaz kept using the phrase ‘x days and the Cricket World Cup draws nearer’ in late 1995, and once on the day the 1999 tournament opened. It was the same day I went on study leave for my A-levels, and following a party at Amy Pickles’ house, I said I was going home to watch the England-Sri Lanka match and promptly fell asleep in the middle of the opening ceremony.

So it’s fair to say that I had a lot to catch up on. Luckily, cricket is as much a sport for archivists as it is for thrill-seekers, and Sky (who have a lot to answer for in terms of cricket consumption, but their coverage is excellent) were prepared to meet their new audience halfway by having explanations of terminology on the red button. In the gaps between exciting bits, I would be told about the eleven ways of getting out by a cartoon cricket stump, and the rest I was picking up swiftly. I couldn’t believe (and can barely believe now, if I’m honest) about the feather touches which can be counted as a ball hit and taken as a catch, but all these years later, I’m still discovering bits about it I enjoy. Test cricket is still the best form of the game – not necessarily that exciting, but it’s like an absorbing novel. But to be honest, I’ll take it all, as long as they don’t have an advertising break after every boundary as they do in the IPL. It’ll be interesting to see what The Hundred, the ECB’s latest money-spinner, sees as the right balance between a sport and an opportunity to sell an evening out.

One of the people I learnt about in my quest to understand my new passion was Mike Brearley. Now, as one of those floating voters, the English cricketers I had heard of were as follows: WG Grace, Ian Botham, Boycott (couldn’t remember his first name), David Gower and anyone in the current Ashes squad. I quickly became familiar with the less showbiz elements of the sport, one of which was Botham’s captain in the 1981 Ashes series, the aforementioned Brearley. I had been under the impression, I suppose, that Botham had been captain, star bowler, opening batsman, team manager, tealady and groundskeeper, because it was termed and continues to be termed ‘Botham’s Ashes’. No mention of Chris Old, Bob Willis, Graham Dilley et al; for shame.

John Michael Brearley had been, in fact, made England captain twice, as well as being captain of Middlesex. Now widely credited with allowing Botham his head in that famous Ashes series by relieving him of the pressure of the national captaincy, his astute leadership recognised the astonishing spells being enjoyed by his other talisman, Willis. Adding this to the general respect afforded to him by his squad (Brearley was a relatively old captain, having only made his international debut at 34), that summer has gone down in British sports history. It says much about Brearley that his career has taken him into academia rather than the media.

England colleague Rodney Hogg famously said of Brearley that he had “a degree in people”, and he was almost literally correct. As well as obtaining a degree in philosophy (the reason for that late flowering), Brearley is now a writer and psychoanalyst, serving as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society for two years. His first book, The Art of Captaincy, was an immediate hit, condensing his thoughts about leadership into one volume and was published in the mid-eighties after the end of his England career.

There are a lot of sporting autobiographies out there, and a lot of books about leadership. After every triumph, the market is flooded with glorified newspaper columns detailing the secrets of success by everyone from the man of the match to the waterboy, and most of them are as interesting as that day’s lunch menu. It’s not that they’re badly written, just that they never get under the skin of why and how. Similarly, books on corporate success are usually dry and smug, with the central message that you have to have bollocks the size of cantaloupes and an attitude which would sell your grandmother to the Natural History Museum, whether she was dead or not.

So I was hoping for the perfect distillation of the two with this reprint of The Art of Captaincy. It has a foreword by director and cricket buff Sam Mendes, who claims that when he was in Los Angeles filming American Beauty, he would often reach for the book to help him put his ideas across. Well, he won an Oscar and got to direct a Bond film, so it must be good, this.

And it is. If you want to win a four-day county match, that is. Because The Art of Captaincy is a dry-as-a-bone exploration of what it takes to captain a cricket side, and nothing more. No transferable equivalents you can take into the boardroom, no particular insights into how to improve your interpersonal relationships, nothing.

In eleven fairly lengthy chapters, Brearley takes us from the nets, through the Long Room and the dressing room, telling us who to pick based on the condition of the pitch (what to look for in the pitch, in fact), which field to set for which kind of bowler and in what configuration, how long to bowl them for and several examples of why you should do them, unless you decide to do something else.

As for the perfect captain, the key to it is to make sure that you do certain things, until maybe you have a different player in front of you, in which case you should consider an alternative way of thinking. And that’s it, mainly. An entire book of ‘well, do this, unless you think you could do it differently’.

There’s no other way to say this, but The Art of Captaincy is boring as hell. It’s not that Brearley himself is boring (far from it, he sounds like you could chat to him for ages), just that this book is far too intricate and of little transferable value to anybody who doesn’t obsess about the minutiae of the game, whether that’s player, spectator,  manager, board member or selector.

Maybe if I’d played the game, at all, I’d find insight into the game I never knew I needed. But even me, trying to catch up on two centuries of a game I’d missed, couldn’t get anything like enjoyment from it. There is the odd morsel which makes you smile (a few anecdotes and the obvious antipathy everybody has for Geoff Boycott in the England dressing room), but these are for illustrative purposes and don’t keep you going for the long stretches of monotonous insight.

In fact, you might compare this book to a Test match on a slow wicket: nothing happens, nothing happens, a few singles, then an entertaining wicket or a boundary, followed by monotony again. I dunno, maybe I’ve been conditioned to follow cricket like a post-Ashes spectator and expect too much, but this is a book based in England 1985, with its Cornhill Insurance and its cowering under the onslaught of the West Indian quicks, and as such it’s very of its time. The game changed decades ago, and this reprint is an historical curiosity. Even the copy I have illustrates this – Brearley faces alongside Nasser Hussain, who was there are the start of what England now are, which is nearly twenty years ago.

It makes me wonder what value Mendes was reaching for when he claimed The Art of Captaincy helped him through the making of his debut feature. Maybe Annette Bening was out of form, or possibly Thora Birch was playing across her stumps? Obviously, I’ve had to drop a player in this little gag, but I’m afraid the selectors and I thought it was for the best. Be that as it may, I’ve seen nothing to help me as a writer or blogger, unless getting two thousand words out of my efforts counts as wise leadership.

The book is also riddled with sloppy printing errors and spelling mistakes, which count as easy wides conceded. In all, I figure maybe we can do to The Art of Captaincy what gave us the Ashes all of those years ago, because it might be a little more entertaining.

Will I move it from the floor to the bookshelf? - I’m going to hike it to cow corner and hope somebody fancies catching it.