MY ADVICE FOR SKIPPER ROOT
Nasser Hussain on the perils of captaincy
I STILL remember getting the call to tell me: ‘ You are the new England captain.’ My first feelings were disbelief and then pride.
It is a position you dream of as a boy and suddenly you’ve reached as high as you can possibly go.
That euphoria will last a little while yet. Joe Root’s had time to get used to the idea of being the captain, but he will feel it again — in a more intense way — when he walks through the Long Room on Thursday morning at Lord’s to toss the coin before the first Test against South Africa.
And he will feel it when the PA man announces his name as he leads his team out. It’s a wonderful thing and I hope Joe enjoys every minute. But, very quickly, reality kicks in and that euphoria is replaced by your plans for the team — short and long-term. I don’t mean to sound like a misery guts, I’m just pointing out a basic fact of life as captain of England. Joe will obviously want to begin his captaincy with a win over South Africa, but beyond that he’ll discover that the job will change everything about the way he prepares for his cricket.
When you’re in the ranks, the days leading up to a Test match are very nice. You get to concentrate on your own game, watch some videos of the opposition, maybe, or visualise your innings out in the middle. But for a captain the Test-match week becomes a fortnight. Joe has already attended his first selection meeting, at Worcester on Friday, and in the days leading up to this Test he’ll find his mental energy is directed elsewhere.
At the start, that’s fine. The adrenaline rush you get from the job makes up for the other demands. One of the challenges is making sure you can cope with those extra demands once the adrenaline wears off.
Once the job starts to drag you down a bit, you have to make sure that the 40 per cent of mental energy you lose as captain because of all the peripheral stuff doesn’t take its toll. It is not easy.
One thing Joe will have to work out quickly is who are the guys in the team he needs to have on his side. That might sound like a strange thing to say because they’re all your team-mates. But I remember realising from the start that I needed to back Darren Gough to the hilt. If I had him on board, I had the team.
Part of the job is realising that you need to win over some of the stronger personalities, the guys whose voices are listened to above all others. For Joe, he’ll be very grateful for the backing of guys like Alastair Cook and Ben Stokes, who is always loyal and the ideal vice-captain.
Perhaps Joe’s Gough equivalent will be a guy like Stuart Broad. If he can get Broad bowling for him in the way Gough bowled for me, it will make life a lot easier.
But what will make Joe’s life easiest of all is if he’s doing well himself. My first England coach Duncan Fletcher used to tell the press when I was struggling that I was one of the team’s allrounders. I knew it was rubbish.
I knew that the best spells for me as captain came when I was scoring runs. That helped my confidence and helped me feel as if I belonged. Joe doesn’t have any problem in that regard, but if he can get to the stage where he’s captaining on gut instinct — and that gut instinct is proved correct — he’ll be halfway there.
There’s been some criticism of England’s squad for the first Test, with people saying Gary Ballance owes his place in the team to the fact that Root rates him.
I don’t have a problem with Ballance’s selection, but Joe will need to make sure he’s able to accommodate characters he doesn’t know that well — including guys who are perceived to be high-maintenance. In my era, that meant the likes of Phil Tufnell and Andy Caddick. You don’t want 10
‘yes’ men, you want characters and individuals. Joe is a character himself, so he’ll understand that.
I interviewed him a couple of years ago and mentioned that he always plays with a smile. He basically answered, why wouldn’t you? You’re living the dream and lucky to be doing what you dreamed of as a boy.
The important thing now is that Joe has people around him who can alleviate the pressure. I wish him the best of luck. There are times when he will feel he needs it. And there will also be times when captaining England will feel like the best job in the world.