Herding Cats Read online

  Just occasionally, a player will do more than sulk. It is hard watching your team slide to defeat without wanting to do something about it. On one such occasion I found myself deposed as on-field captain. One moment I was in charge, the next I was the one sulking on the boundary as we lost our heads. Team spirit is always harder to maintain when abroad, as many touring sides have shown over the years. Players are cooped up with each other in a way that doesn’t happen at home. Tired and in unfamiliar surroundings, they can squabble over the smallest things. In this match we were playing in India under lights on a pitch next to Mumbai airport. We’d stood in English rain countless times but this was our first experience of the dew factor and we coped no better with these damp conditions. We batted first and ran up a good score, passing 200 in our 30 overs. By the time we took the field for the second innings, the dew had soaked the grass and our bowlers and fielders struggled against a very strong batting line-up. Few of our seamers exerted much control and though some wickets did fall, our opponents kept a firm grip on the run-rate. Team-mates made suggestions about bowling changes, as planes roared overhead, but we didn’t have as many options as I’d have liked and few were tempting. One, an occasional spinner with occasional yips, had already lost us a game earlier in the tour, with a devastatingly expensive over. Another had looked OK in the nets but had not bowled in anger for over a decade. A third was sulking on the boundary, wishing he were back in Wiltshire. The most insistent was the tour’s best batsman, Joe. We needed to take the pace off the ball. This wasn’t the first time he felt that this situation required his unique set of skills.

  Really good cricketers are different from the rest of us. They know that they can win games and they want to do so again. Most of us quail if chasing 300. Joe sees it as an opportunity to get that first double-century. In that respect he is a captain’s dream. You do have to heed the principles of the game, however. Bowlers often think they can do the batsmen’s job and vice versa. Sometimes introducing a part-time spinner can work. It can provoke a batsman into throwing away his wicket. This is what Joe was hoping for that night in Mumbai. But usually it involves giving away runs to the opposition. On the few occasions I’d given him a bowl before, he’d bought us the occasional wicket, as the batsman slogged him straight into the hands of cow corner. But he was also prone to bowling the odd wide and on that damp night we couldn’t afford any extras and had few fielders who were going to hold on to steepling catches in the deep, especially with a slippery ball. Straight and fastish was my only strategy.

  A couple of years on, I still don’t know how it was that he came on to bowl. It certainly wasn’t my idea. It may not have been entirely his either. But suddenly he had the ball and was setting his field. The opposition needed 24 off three overs. I dropped back to long-off, mute with fury, aimed as much at myself for this paralysis as it was at him. There are moments in cricket when the wheels start to come off – your bowlers struggle to hit the right length, the batsmen find the boundary again and again, and your fielders misjudge the few chances that come their way. When this happens everyone looks around, wondering how to save this situation. Cricket is a game of momentum and, when that is lost, it is hard to reverse. That is when you need a tactical masterstroke or for your best cricketer to step up. Brearley had Botham to rely on in these situations, we had Joe and me. I was having a meltdown and Joe was about to bowl part-time offies against high-class players of spin. He marked out his run-up and then came in, with a strange dragging gait, as if he were a penalty-taker waiting for the goalkeeper to commit himself. The batsman committed himself. In that one over he hit enough boundaries to end the game there and then. I trudged off the field, knowing I’d blown our best chance of winning a game in India. (Our record stands: played eight, lost eight.) That game more than any other made me wonder why anyone would choose to be captain. Nothing exposes you more than a situation like that where you find yourself at a complete loss.

  In age-group cricket it is usually the most talented players who are asked to captain. Rightly so. In another team Joe would be skipper. Everyone has to learn the ropes and that’s easiest to do if they’re the best in the side. They can atone for any mistakes they might make with runs and wickets. At that age the strongest players can open the bowling and the batting. Once they’ve captained for a season or two, leadership will come naturally to them. Until then, the adults will often make the harder decisions, namely who to omit, what to do after the toss and with the rest of the batting order. Twenty or 30 years on, the situation has been inverted. The best players still want to be on-field captain but without the accompanying administration. Action is what they crave and they’d like to be at the centre of it. Sitting in a room typing is not how they see their role.

  The truth of amateur captaincy is that administration is the largest part of your job. Alex Ferguson once said that no sooner had he won a title than he was planning for the next one. It is the same with you, just without the titles, salary or five-star lifestyle. Towards the end of the season you’re already thinking ahead. The best-run clubs are organising the following summer’s fixtures in September and October. Others will get in touch with you in March or April, when almost all pitches are booked. The easiest games to arrange are those that fall on the same day each year – the second Sunday in August, for example. The hardest are those where you, as a wandering team, wait in line as all those above you in the food chain book their dates.

  When planning a season I have to look at the whole squad. We will have some games against strong clubs with sides packed with league cricketers, all younger than us. The idea is that our more competitive players will turn out then. Other fixtures will be against more occasional teams, where the age range is closer to our own. I try to ensure that these gentler games come towards the beginning or end of the season, with the likely heavy defeats happening in the middle. You don’t want your squad beginning or finishing the season in a state of despair. It is also harder than you’d think to space out games over four months. One July we found that we had ten days of cricket, at the end of which we were sick of the game.

  Planning the fixtures is just one aspect of captaincy, though. The hardest part is ensuring that you have enough players for each one of those games. You are recruiting all year round – the winter is your transfer window, when you introduce new players into the club through nets. Because you can never have enough players. There is no transfer market in amateur cricket but it is not unknown to tap up the opposition’s star all-rounder in the pub after the game. There are players you’d love to have and others you’d rather ship out. I get the odd email from cricketers in India hoping I could offer them a professional contract. There are no sports agents for amateurs, unsurprisingly. If you want a new opening bowler, you’ll have to find one yourself. Our selection requirements make that even harder. How many novelists can bowl at 75mph? They don’t advertise that in the Times Literary Supplement classifieds.

  Your team-mates may like the idea of being in charge if it means getting to choose when they bat and bowl. It is never a bad idea to remind them every so often of just what the rest of the job entails. The art is to delegate certain jobs every so often to remind the players that they really don’t want to be captain. Those who have kindly organised winter nets sensibly decided only to serve one term, overwhelmed by the bureaucracy and financial demands of the role.

  In the professional game few players would turn down the captaincy if it were offered to them. The money, the status, the guaranteed place in the team … In amateur cricket the skipper is chosen in an entirely different way. League clubs have a process that resembles the papal conclave if you can imagine cardinals in a clubhouse. When the white smoke rises, it is not unusual for the first choice to decline the post, quickly followed by the second. They want to play cricket, not allow it to ruin their life. Do you keep going, and keep asking until someone says yes, usually the worst possible candidate? Or do you return to the first two and keep begging until one of them
accepts? Captaining a league side is a tough job, harder than mine. League cricket is more predictable than the Sunday game. There, not only do you have your players and opposition to row with but you will also find yourself in conflict with the captains of the teams above and below you, as they try to borrow the linchpin of your side each weekend, or you theirs. You also have the non-playing members of the club to contend with. Rightly, denied power everywhere else, they have created their own fiefdom here.

  The most straightforward way to be captain is to set up your own team and appoint yourself president, chairman and treasurer. Those who do this do so for a variety of reasons, usually because, like J. M. Barrie, they are inept players who are denied cricket elsewhere. It goes without saying that such people have no previous experience of leadership. I didn’t. Most normal people do not want the hassle of organising a summer of fixtures. Much better to have someone else do it for you. But if you are a sporting catastrophe, you can found your own XI. It’s how cricket started after all.

  There is one pitfall that the corporate headhunters must try to avoid. They must not, under any circum­stances, appoint more than one captain. The cardinal rule in amateur cricket is that you cannot have two leaders in one team. Even having different captains on Saturday and on Sunday is just paving the way for a bitter fight. As anyone who has watched Highlander knows, there can be only one. And as always in life, the lower the stakes, the bloodier the battle. The average amateur club only bears this out, with struggles for power more commonly seen in the pugilistic disciplines. Boxing muddles through with a number of rival governing bodies. Over the years, many teams have been set up by would-be Kerry Packers who flounced out of their club, taking as many players as they could. Amateur teams can ill afford to lose squad members, so this is can be terminal. The best way to avoid this is to act alone.

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

  Brearley imagined that a major company was hiring a cricket captain and asked what their human resources department might look for. If a committee were constructing a perfect version of the cricket captain, it would probably look something like Alastair Cook. A specially designed android could not do the role better. When speaking he errs on the side of caution, having been media-trained to say nothing that a journalist could possibly turn into controversy. When not playing cricket, he lives an unimpeachable existence out on his farm, away from the fleshpots of London. When he is playing cricket, he is sensational, defending the good balls, clipping away the bad ones and making the game look so easy. His team-mates seem to follow his lead unquestioningly and with the utmost respect. He is famous for barely sweating at all. Nothing seems to ruffle him.

  A more enterprising company might look beyond the safe hands of a Cook or an Andrew Strauss. As opening batsmen, both instinctively take a dim view of risk and their teams played accordingly. The great captains in history knew when to roll the dice and the headhunters might favour a swashbuckling player like Viv Richards, Imran Khan or Brendon McCullum, who led with the verve and aggression with which they played. But for all their successes, there are countless examples of similar appointments that didn’t work – from Ian Botham to Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff. And that’s just the England team. Sometimes being the best and the bravest doesn’t inspire those beneath you.

  Perhaps the key quality is a cool head. Misbah-ul-Haq is another professorial type in the Brearley mould, and has an MBA from the Lahore University of Management and Technology. He has usually had to steady innings, as others played shots around him and perished but he answered the detractors who nicknamed him “Tuktuk” for his slow scoring rate by equalling Viv Richards’s record for the fastest Test hundred at the age of 40. Brendon McCullum would break this record a year later in his final Test innings. That cool head can be harder to maintain in the amateur game, when you’re out there opening the batting because others haven’t turned up yet. You know you can’t be out until they arrive. I did make my highest ever score of 98 in this situation, forced to play circumspectly for the first half-hour by the absence of others.

  Leading by example is one thing but what a captain really needs is the ability to get the team playing in a certain way. The right way. This is a real challenge. Cricket has an unfortunate appeal for life’s nit-pickers, for those looking to find fault in others. The game’s Laws offer unparalleled opportunity for this. We all know that the umpires are always right, that we don’t walk onto the field before them, that we return the ball to them at the fall of a wicket, to ask them if we can leave the field of play, and if we can return. But it is hard to adhere to these strictures every time and it only takes one person on the field to blow an infraction up into something it isn’t. Every team has its combustible elements and they will invariably seek each other out.

  The ideal captain will need a hardness in these situations. You need to keep your most unruly players in line, if you want your opponents to do the same. One of the world’s oldest ball games, ōllamaliztli, had versions played in Central America by the Mayans and Aztecs. The sport had a strong ritual aspect and the showpiece matches sometimes involved the sacrifice of players. This option is regrettably not there for the amateur cricket captain. Banishment is the harshest penalty you can offer. In football, this exile is often used as a technique. Managers like José Mourinho and Pep Guardiola arrive at a club and target one high-profile player, who is made to train separately, as an example for others not to cross them. But the amateur captain doesn’t have the luxury of an extended squad, ready to sprint onto the field of play, week in week out. So banishment is reserved only for the most severe cases. Until then you just have to muddle through.

  Is there in any sense a blueprint for the man?

  We have established that the would-be captain should be one person, with good administrative skills. But what else is needed? The first requirement is time. Cricket is the most time-consuming of games and many find the demands of family and work don’t allow them to spend eight or 16 hours on the pitch at the weekend. And if cricket takes a long time to play, it takes even more time to organise. The amateur captains I have faced tend not to be running FTSE 100 companies off the field. They’re not running anything in fact. They’re holding down a job, maybe a marriage, and drowning in a sea of cricket-related admin. Fixtures to be arranged, pitches to be booked and players to be herded into the right place at the right time.

  The second thing the amateur captain must have is a driving licence and car. The great Victorians who built the railway system that criss-crosses the countryside were clearly not cricketers, because it is almost impossible to get to most grounds by train. The only reason I have a car is so that I can get to cricket. Each game I need to bring my own kit, spare kit for the idiots who left theirs behind, match balls, a scorebook and possibly tea, as well as two or three team-mates. I sometimes have sets of stumps in my car, too – it’s not unknown to find the pavilion locked, the key missing and stumps and bails inside. And in the event of rain it has been known for three or four cars to act as a makeshift set of covers, carefully driven on to the pitch, with the wheels on either side of the danger zone. You will also have to arrange lifts for the rest of the side, which is more complicated than you’d think. Not all of you live near each other and there’s always one player who drives so badly no one will risk their life with him at the wheel.

  Lastly, the captain must harness the power of modern technology, in the form of a smartphone. It’s not impossible that one day a manufacturer will produce a model with apps for ball tracking, detecting thin edges and other assistance for the umpire. Until then, phones are essential for locating the ground, the players who’ve got lost and providing a detailed weather forecast. The downside is that players can get hold of you at any stage to pull out of the next game. I try not to answer mine on a Friday night. And sometimes fielders take them onto the pitch, for those dreary middle overs. Nowadays amateur teams post their scores on social media, with photos to arouse jealousy in t
hose who pulled out at late notice.

  Does his age matter?

  Amateur cricketers can be sensitive about their age. Some of us who play cricket regularly like to think we’re improving and that delusion becomes harder to maintain after a certain point in life. The professional game does offer hope, though. For every player who declines as they approach 40, another reaches new heights. As I write, Misbah-ul-Haq is dominating the England attack in English conditions. Furthermore, at the age of 42 he has a career average of over 48. But it is not just the batsmen who are rolling back the years. On the same day, Rangana Herath became the oldest player to take a Test hat-trick, just four years younger, with a part-time job in a bank.

  The rest of us can only dream of an average that exceeds our age or waistline. A team of writers is never going to be youthful, in that publication usually happens later in life. So we have rarely played a side older than us. I am often the youngest player in the side, aged 39. But our kind of cricket attracts the more senior player. Talented youngsters understandably prefer the challenge of Saturday league cricket. They haven’t yet given up on dreams of playing at a higher level. Moderate cricketers often abandon the game in their twenties, as life throws up challenges and attractions off the pitch. We return ten years later, disappointed and exhausted by the lost decade, to find that our bodies no longer have the suppleness that cricket requires. The Sunday game is perfectly suited to these types.

  The captain’s age is important in that it is hard to balance the responsibilities of family life and the demands of a cricket team. As players get married and have children, they become increasingly unavailable, until those children are of cricket-playing age them­selves and can do most of the fielding for you. The captain’s age matters less on the pitch. You just need to make sure you play sides of the same vintage. If you aren’t the most limber of players, then you take your position at first slip and stay there for the rest of your career, even when the bowling does not require any close fielders. There are players for whom this is still too much exertion, however. A team-mate recently complained that he was caught at second slip by a man who was sitting down – the cordon had brought fold-up chairs onto the field. If you are the youngest player, however, you succumb to the pressure to throw yourself around the field in the covers, with scant regard for future matches.