There is an old debate in cricket. It involves captaincy. Is it such a specialised job that you pick a player for captaincy alone? Or do you pick the best team and then appoint the captain from within? England seemed to believe — as did India — that captaincy required special skills available only to a few, so traditionally the captain was picked first. But this was essentially a class issue, as it was in India when Maharajahs who could barely play were chosen to lead.
Australia, more egalitarian, picked the team first. Former England captain Mike Atherton was a believer in the Australian approach, but England and Australia have occasionally borrowed the other’s method. Before the tour of India in 1979-80, for instance, Australia appointed Kim Hughes captain ahead of the team.
Mike Brearley, by common consent the greatest captain of all, was seen as a ‘specialist’ choice, picked for his captaincy. Perhaps, on and off Nasser Hussain too, although that might be unfair to Hussain who in nearly 60 Tests more than Brearley, averaged over 15 runs more per innings. In his last series, Tiger Pataudi was chosen purely for his captaincy — he was finished as a batsman by then.
Captain’s focus
All these players led when the captain was king, being responsible for everything from net sessions to coaching drills and planning the sharing of hotel rooms. Today teams travel with a big support staff, with batting, bowling and fielding coaches, a chief coach or team director and sundry others. The captain’s focus is exclusively on tactics on the field.
Just how power is shared between the captain and his off-field team depends on the relationship between the two. The decisions on the field, however, are the captain’s and if he is poorly advised, then he has to take the blame. The captain’s role might have diminished, but he will rise or sink by the calls he makes on the field.
“A captain must instil the will the win; which means both ramming home an advantage and clinging on desperately when up against it,” wrote Brearley in his classic The Art of Captaincy. By apparently failing on both counts in the first Test against England, Pakistan’s captain Azhar Ali has reopened the captaincy debate. For the greater part of the match, Pakistan were ahead. They set England 277 runs to win, not an easy task.
Pakistan’s bowling lacked experience. Fast bowlers Naseem Shah and Shaheen Afridi together were younger than England’s Jimmy Anderson. The leg spinners Yasir Shah and Shadab Khan were not handled well — the former kept away from the attack for too long as the final innings progressed, and the latter barely used at all. Still, the best captains rise above such handicaps to stamp their mark on the game. It is when things are going wrong that captaincy skills reveal themselves.
Azhar was defensive for too long, refusing to harry the later batsmen with aggressive bowling, seemingly disappointed when there was no sign of reverse swing. Plan B was absent.
Or maybe we do him an injustice. What was former skipper and now coach Misbah-ul-Haq and his team doing? Surely during the breaks, they could have passed on messages to Azhar? Or maybe we over-simplify, picking a single thread over the many that went into the tapestry of the match.
Measurable?
This is an intriguing aspect of cricket, a game where most things are measurable, but no one has worked out how to compute captaincy. Cricket ratings are popular, but captaincy ratings do not exist. We look for intuition, tactical acumen, ability to get the best out of the players — none of which can be quantified. As often in cricket, the simple calculations do not always tell the full story. The best batsman in a series or over a period is not necessarily the one with the highest average, nor is the best bowler the one with the best strike rate. These are indicative, but not conclusive (Don Bradman’s average of 99.94 being an exception, of course!).
Captaincy, like leadership anywhere, admits of, as Brearley said, “an incalculable mix of qualities in tension with each other.” In one player the proportions might work to perfection, in another not at all. And what are these qualities? Here’s Brearley: “hard work and letting go, conscious planning and gut feeling, containment and confrontation.”
You can add too the instinct to grab an opportunity when it comes, the temperament to impose one’s personality on a game, the spirit to experiment when all seems lost, the confidence to look like a winner and communicate that to the team. Captaincy could well be the most intriguing aspect of the game. Is the captain only as good as his team, or is it the other way around?