Allott: Livi can captain again
PAUL Allott believes the Lancashire captaincy ‘weighed more heavily’ on Liam Livingstone than he thought it would.
The all-rounder stood down from the role last month after just a season as skipper.
The Red Rose were relegated from Division One of the Specsavers County Championship under Livingstone’s captaincy, and his form with the bat dipped.
But having come through the ranks at the club with several of the current first team, Livingstone found it hard to adapt to the captaincy role, according to Lancashire’s director of cricket Allott.
“It was most certainly his decision,” Allott told M.E.N. Sport.
“I was a little surprised, but not totally surprised.
“When you sit down and analyse how he played through the summer, while he had a blistering period in T20 cricket, I think his red ball form suffered a bit.
“He possibly realised he had a little too much on his plate at times.
“He probably found it harder than he thought handling players from a management point of view – not that he was bad at it particularly.
“But it weighed on him a little bit more than he thought it was going to do.
“But what he wanted was to score runs for Lancashire – and himself – and he realised if he wasn’t captain it would give him the best opportunity of scoring runs and being of ultimate use for the county and to himself as well.
“There was nothing in the decision other than him trying to do his best for the club. He must have thought about it long and hard over a considerable period of time.”
Dane Vilas has been handed the job of trying to lead Lancashire back into Division One next season, but Allott insists Livingstone could well return to the captaincy in the future.
“Tactically he is pretty good, and the proviso when he decided he was going to finish was that this wouldn’t be the end of his captaincy career and that he could revisit it sometime,” said Allott.
“It is not something you give up easily.
“You could draw the conclusion it may have been too soon for him. Maturity and experience, by definition, come with age.
“But we gave him the captaincy knowing what he was like and we got more than we bargained for.
“In a lot of aspects he was better than we thought he was going to be in terms of tactics and motivation.
“It was certainly not a failure in any shape or form.”