Herding Cats Read online

  To R

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Foreword by Mike Brearley

  Introduction

  Captaincy in Action

  How does a captain think?

  What makes it hard for a captain to think?

  Choosing a Captain

  Why do so many players want to be captain?

  What qualities would they most hope to find in a captain?

  Is there in any sense a blueprint for the man?

  Does his age matter?

  How much ability as a player is called for?

  Is he likely to be a batsman or a bowler?

  Taking Stock

  What programme does he advocate for the players’ pre-season training and practice?

  How much attention has been given to the state of the nets?

  Is the dressing-room atmosphere conducive to a sharing of problems or insights, or does each jealously guard his ideas from the rest?

  You have a private income, don’t you?

  Ought we to want to win so much?

  Is there a tendency to complacency?

  Did he want to continue with his method and remain at his present level? Or was he willing to work on his technique to give himself more of a chance?

  Selection

  First, who would captain the side if I were injured before the match? And, second, who would take charge if I were off the field during it?

  Who will help him make his decisions on the field?

  Do any general principles exist governing sound selection?

  Is there a structure of youth cricket within the club, through which the senior sides may expect to receive a flow of promising players?

  The Morning of the Match

  Whose call is it to start or delay play?

  What remains to be done by the captain before the first ball is bowled?

  What can he tell from looking at the strip?

  What factors enter into the decision to bat or field on winning the toss?

  Batting

  Why are most captains so loath to be flexible about the batting order?

  Who’s going to get these runs for us, then?

  Are we still going for the target?

  Should the interests of an individual ever take precedence over the needs of a team?

  Bowling

  The first question was, who should open the bowling?

  Is the captain in the best position for deciding when to bowl himself?

  Are they round? Are they red?

  Shouldn’t we, and he in particular, bowl faster and straighter?

  What happened?

  Should you give your fastest bowler one or at most two overs before the interval?

  Taking the Field

  What else can a fielding team expect of its leader? And what should he ask of them?

  What field should a fast bowler have at the start of an innings?

  How attacking should we be?

  Do you want a 6-3 or a 5-4 field?

  How deep should they be for particular batsmen?

  What sort of response is called for by the authorities to such displays of bad temper?

  Excellent advice – but was this the moment for it?

  Who would the new batsman least like to face?

  The Tour

  How homesick does an individual become? And how well can he adapt to the local conditions?

  You don’t want to go all the way out there again, do you?

  Who is ­Ultimately in Charge?

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Author’s Note

  The following is based on a true story. On a screen or page, these words are to be treated with caution. In the last eight years, I have played over 200 games of amateur cricket, for more than 20 teams, with or against over a thousand players. Some of them appear in various forms in the following pages. I hope that they will forgive me. The great majority of them have been male and so I have used “he” and “his” to refer to captains and players.

  Foreword

  In an article for The Nightwatchman about amateur captaincy, Charlie Campbell wrote that I didn’t have to deal with having nine players, and didn’t have to try not to win too hard. Nor did I have a first slip suffering from a long night of ecstasy. The drug, that is. I suppose he’s right: as captain I did usually have a full side of professionals, all sober and all trying to win. But Middlesex did once draw lots for a batting order in a Sunday League match. (At Cardiff, for the record. Also for the record, we won.) And I did find myself one tourist-busy August driving round Canterbury and its environs looking for a hotel for the night of a Gillette Cup quarter-final, when the match was still going on and we needed something like 16 runs to win with two wickets left. That was an evening where captaincy duties were broader than deciding whether to have three slips or two.

  At Middlesex our bad memories were of a lack of hotels in Kent. Monday 17 June 1963 was the second day of the three-day match between Kent and Middlesex at Tunbridge Wells. Middlesex were in a strong position: having bowled Kent out for 150, they were 121 for three, as Peter Parfitt had been run out on 54, with Bob White not out on 43. To save money, and probably to suit the players, Middlesex had no hotel reserved for the Sunday night, Sunday being a rest day. At the start of play, at 11.30, Kent took the field under the captaincy of Colin Cowdrey. But only three Middlesex players had made it through the traffic: one a not-out batsman, one a batsman who was already out, and one the twelfth man. Kent did not offer to delay the start, and Middlesex were forced to declare. By the time Middlesex took the field, ten minutes later, they had six on the ground. They were allowed to use their twelfth man as wicketkeeper and were loaned five fielders by Kent, one of whom caught a catch. All the Middlesex team were on the field by the end of three overs. The result? Match drawn. Kent scored 341 for seven declared. Middlesex ended their second innings 82 for three, with the same not-out batsman as on Monday morning. Rain, I presume.

  Here is a Fred Karno episode (now there’s a dated reference, probably lost on many) that, while not quite what Charlie has had to deal with captaining the Authors XI, veers in that direction. Essex v Middlesex at Southend, 1980. Wicketkeeper Paul Downton – batting with a pulled muscle and a runner – played the ball into the covers and called for a single. Forgetting his injury (and runner), he hared off for the single. Essex lobbed the ball in to the keeper and ran him out. Should I have complained? I think not. Keith Fletcher as Essex captain was acting according to the Laws.

  There may even have been a bit of history dogging this scenario. A few years earlier, we played Essex in a one-day match at Lord’s. Their then-captain, Brian Taylor, was given out run out when our wicketkeeper, John Murray, had I think dropped the ball before breaking the stumps. Taylor complained and walked off in dudgeon, gesturing at me for not calling him back. I was standing near the umpire who gave him out when it happened, and I wasn’t sure which was the correct decision – had Murray broken the stumps with his gloves and no ball, or had the ball itself disturbed the bails? I had no grounds for challenging his decision, but Essex were incensed. And teams, like countries, have long memories for grievances.

  When I wrote The Art of Captaincy I set out to describe something: what the man who stood at first slip waving his arms around actually did and how it affected teams of highly skilled individuals, for better or for worse. Charlie Campbell’s book explains that same process at the other end of the scale. I wish him every success. I imagine his book will be at least as relevant for captains up and down the country as mine.

  Mike Brearley

  Introduction

  * * *

  Asterisk noun. 1. A small star-like symbol, used in writing and printing as a reference mark or to ind
icate omission, doubtful matter, etc.

  The asterisk is the perfect symbol for the cricket captain. Placed next to your name on the scoresheet, it indicates fallibility, unsuitable language or the need to consult another source. As you make mistakes, curse the gods and turn desperately to your team-mates for advice, you’ll understand why they don’t want your job. Because cricket captaincy is an almost impossible role, requiring a deep understanding of the game and, occasionally, of humanity. In no other sport can a player be selected purely for their leadership qualities. In no other sport are they so sorely needed.

  Cricket is, as many have noted, only a team sport in the loosest sense. Players can quantify precisely their contribution to the overall performance. They can win while failing abjectly themselves or lose in a blaze of personal glory. Cricket’s great quality is how it blends the team struggle with that of the individual. A match will be punctuated by contests between batsman and bowler, as each tries to dominate the other. But other battles are being fought, too. The captain’s great challenge is to create an environment in which players celebrate the achievements of others, as well as their own: one in which the strike bowler isn’t sulking as wickets fall at the other end; where the middle order aren’t all willing the slow-scoring openers to get out so they can have a bat; and when players don’t laugh when fielders on both sides spill catches. But how do you manage this? Most don’t …

  There are two principal templates for leadership in cricket. The first requires a position of almost total power. The captain should be either the best or the wealthiest player in the team – ideally both. Examples of these types include W. G. Grace, Donald Bradman and the Regency aristocrats who ran their own teams, gambling heavily on the outcome. The first two were natural cricketers for whom the role came easily and as a result they have left us little of their methodology. In his book The Art of Cricket, Bradman devoted more pages to running between the wickets than he did to captaincy. For him effective leadership was about dominance and averaging 99.94 in Tests. If he played well, his side was going to be hard to beat. The Australian way has always been to pick your strongest side and then choose a captain.

  The second approach to cricket captaincy is epitomised by Mike Brearley who famously steered England to victory in the 1981 Ashes. Unlike Bradman, he led from the rear – his record as captain (won 17, lost four of his 31 matches in charge) was much better than his performance with the bat (no centuries in 39 Tests and an average just under 23). But through brilliant man management he turned around an England team that had been in disarray under the captaincy of Ian Botham. The best players don’t always make the best leaders and Botham was just one of many who ended up failing at the role. Brearley may not always have been among the top 11 players in England but his leadership skills outweighed this. In his classic book, The Art of Captaincy, he quotes Xenophon, who wrote that an elected general should be “ingenious, energetic, careful, full of stamina and presence of mind … loving and tough, straightforward and crafty, ready to gamble everything and wishing to have everything, generous and greedy, trusting and suspicious”. He considers that Xenophon had it about right.

  But if, as Brearley’s title suggests, leading a professional cricket team is an art, what of the amateur captain? Is this role also an art? Could it even be a science? And what else is different? We know about the great captains of the international game and there have been many fine leaders in first-class cricket. At the pinnacle of the sport, their job is to win. They have no wider duty to the game. But what about the layer of captains beneath them? Who are the legendary skippers of the amateur game? We don’t hear about those who’ve led their league team for decades, up and down the divisions. Extracting the best out of a side of highly motivated and skilled sportsmen is not easy. But how much harder is captaincy lower down? The job is no longer solely about winning. You are like one of those fish that lives on the seabed, developing ways of coping with the intense pressure and lack of light hundreds of metres below the surface. In the cricketing abyss, you struggle to keep hold of your players in the sludge and darkness. Not because other teams are trying to poach them, but because there are other demands on their time. Work and family don’t mix well with a game that takes up a whole day. You won’t have the professionals’ facilities or backroom support either. And you will be dealing with players who lack both cricketing sense and ability. They will often be manifestly unfit, maybe even the worse for wear from the previous night’s excesses. They will also often be in a state of complete despair about their own game but unwilling to take the steps necessary to improve, like practice. They will have a range of inventive excuses for their failures – usually each other, but once it was flat-hunting that caused a batsman’s dismissal. Nor will there always be 11 of you – late drop-outs are inevitable in amateur cricket. Often the 11th player is the child of the tenth and the tenth the son of the ninth. If this is all sounding a little biblical, that should be no surprise. Cricket has long been held up by some as a religion, or at the very least a cult, with its strange rituals and outfits.

  Cricket has many of the trappings of faith. The first record of cricket as an adult activity was at the prosecution of two men in 1611 for playing when they should have been in church. Derek Birley’s A Social History of English Cricket also recounts how Maidstone was considered “a very prophane town”, which saw “Morrice Dancing, Cudgels, Stoolball, Crickets” on the Sabbath. George Bernard Shaw famously wrote that “the English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them an idea of eternity”. For many of us it is as close as we get to belief. The sport has its own special book, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, and, like the ancient Mayans, its own immensely complicated calendar. There is a priestly class, the keepers of the flame, in the form of MCC, who administer the game’s Laws. Most sports merely have rules. Such is the premium it places on experience and wisdom that applicants must wait 27 years before being able to join. Worshippers flock to Lord’s, the Home of Cricket, to pay homage to the game. They can buy indulgences – in the form of merchandise from the Lord’s shop – before marvelling at the relics that are housed in the MCC museum. These range from the Ashes urn and Bradman’s boots to Denis Compton’s kneecap. Cricket even had its own schism, as power moved east and India and Twenty20 started to dominate.

  Ancient laws, rituals, burnt offerings, infallible officials, a reformation … cricket has all of these. Like many belief systems, it harks constantly back to a better, purer time, before the game was corrupted by money. The struggle between the traditionalists and the modernisers is a constant one and has been raging since the game’s very beginning. There must have been opposition to the introduction of the third stump, just as there was to the emergence of roundarm and overarm bowling and the invention of DRS. Each side interprets the spirit of cricket in their own way. Many embrace the changes that have come as the sport has been adopted by other countries. If the class barriers have not come down completely, they have at least been lowered, and women are at long last encouraged to play. But there are some who wish the sport could be more like golf.

  A cricketing Eden never existed and money has always been at the heart of the game but there are many who continue to practise the old ways, playing as we imagine it was once played, purely for the sake of it. This could be on the traditional English village green but the game now belongs as much on the maidan in Mumbai, or in a street in Karachi with a tapeball. What do the participants there care of edicts from St John’s Wood? The only numbers that matter are those in the scorebook. They are not businesspeople trying to improve on last year’s statistics. They are playing this game for the sheer enjoyment of it. This strand of the amateur game is more like a pagan cult than a religion – ancient, earthier and unchanged by time. At the head of this cult is one person – the captain.

  An amateur captain may have a great many more responsibilities than in other sports but with them comes the power to play however you want. You can choose your oppositi
on, without the interference of any administrators above you. You can choose where you play. You can choose the format. (My team, the Authors, has played T20s, two-innings games over two days and everything in between.) You can even make your own rules. There is at least one side that doesn’t allow players to be out first ball. On the field, your word is law. (Well, most of the time.) If your opening bowler is bowling too short too often at a helmetless batsman on a spicy pitch you can take him off. If your middle-order batsmen are too quick to shut up shop and block out for a draw, you can give instructions to force the pace. If that fails, you can send a new umpire out with instructions to raise the finger the next time the bowler clears his throat. If your keeper and slip cordon chirp too aggressively at the new batsman, they’ll be fielding on the boundary the next game. If they’re playing, that is.

  The amateur captain has dubious antecedents in the form of the Regency aristocrats, a degenerate bunch who organised matches against each other, and employed cricketers on their estates for this purpose. Huge sums were staked on the outcome of these games and so the best players were sought. Edward “Lumpy” Stevens, the greatest bowler of his age, worked for the Earl of Tankerville as a gardener and many other outstanding cricketers found jobs in this way. A scorecard from the time was a curious sight, with the bulk of the runs seemingly coming from the tail. Players were listed by social rank, with the aristocrats eking out a few runs at the top and the professionals making hundreds at nine, ten and 11.

  Since then a new template for amateur cricket has emerged. The captain no longer owns the ground upon which the game is played. Nor are the best players dependent on him for their livelihood. The game has broadened and there are now thousands of cricket clubs, from those registered with the ECB that put out five teams on a Saturday and two on a Sunday to the village XIs who play their local rivals and friendlies against wandering sides. England is liberally stocked with beautiful grounds. In some counties it feels as if every village has one. A Sunday match played on the green is, for many, the perfect incarnation of the summer game. And while the professional game has been revolutionised over the last hundred years, the village game remains the same, or so we like to think.