CRICKET’S THINKER
Stokes to open, why Buttler can be better than Botham, what Root did wrong — nearly 40 years on, you can’t stop Mike Brearley’s original ideas about cricket... and life
MORE than 40 years after his first Test as England captain, Mike Brearley can’t quite kick t he habit. It’s not that he thinks things were better in his day. Far from it. But sit him down in front of the cricket, and his response is almost Pavlovian.
Should third man be at third slip? Are the fields too defensive? And why pick a leg-spinner if you’re not going to bowl him? Even now, he thinks like a captain.
‘I can’t not,’ he says, as if sharing a self-evident truth.
‘If I’m concentrating on a game, I’ll be thinking about that as much as the batting or the bowling. I hope I’m not always critical.’
Brearley’s credentials hardly need burnishing. He led England to victory in 18 out of 31 Tests, and etched his place in cricket’s folklore when he replaced Ian Botham as captain two games into the 1981 Ashes, with wondrous results for both men.
As Brearley himself acknowledges in his delightful new book —
On Cricket, an anthology of his best writing down the years — he was branded ‘England’s luckiest captain’ by Ray Illingworth, one of his predecessors.
It was an allusion, perhaps, to the miracle of ’81 and to the fact that five of Brearley’s wins came in one winter against an Australian side weakened by defections to Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. Equally, he never led England against the all- conquering West Indians. His Test average was 22, only a fraction higher than Keaton Jennings.
Yet Brearley — 76, avuncular, gentle — is not far off national-treasure status and an hour in his company is a reminder of why, that summer, he was able to get the best out of a disgruntled Botham, and why Rodney Hogg once observed that he had a ‘degree in people’.
These days Brearley divides his time between his psychoanalysis practice, watching cricket and writing — much of which he does during the two months a year he spends in India. His wife, Mana, is from Ahmedabad, where he met her during England’s 1976-77 tour.
He is t houghtful, measured, original and entirely without malice. Even now, you’d want him on your team.
His suggestion that Ben Stokes might bat in the top three of the Test team this winter, and even open, is characteristic — a left-field idea followed by a consideration of the pros and cons.
He checks himself as he talks, as if wary of definitive statements. Perhaps because of his day job he is more used to asking questions these days than answering them. But his replies are always thoughtprovoking.
‘I thought of Stokes because he’s got a good classical defence. Now the only trouble is — it’s a bit like Botham — you don’t know if batting up the order is going to inhibit him. Should he remain at 5 or 6 or 7? I just don’t know the answer.
‘I even thought he might open the batting in Sri Lanka and the West Indies, especially if he’s going to be fourth seamer and bowl in bursts now and then to intimidate and stir them up.’
Both Stokes and Jos Buttler can become bett er batsmen t han Botham, he says. Jonny Bairstow, he thinks, edges Buttler as a keeper. And what of Joe Root?
‘Root is a terrific batsman. He hasn’t quite come off in the last year and I don’t know why it is that he keeps getting out between 50 and 100. It’s not for want of trying. Perhaps he starts trying too hard. Virat Kohli’s conversion rate from 50s to 100s is something like 59 or 60 per cent [it’s 54], Root’s is something like 25. It’s quite an interesting contrast — these are two of the best four or five players in the world.’
Might a session on the psychoanalyst’s couch help? Brearley chuckles. ‘It takes 10 years, you know. I don’t know the answer. It isn’t that he keeps getting out in the same way. It isn’t that he’s short of shots and by the time he gets to 70 he has to take a few more risks than Kohli would have to. It isn’t that: he’s got all the shots.’
If Root hasn’t spoken to Brearley yet, perhaps he should. But Brearley did enjoy his captaincy during the 4-1 Test win against India and encourages him to keep control of his relationship with his senior strike bowlers, Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad.
Some have argued that Root should simply let two bowlers with 997 Test wickets between them get on with it, preferably at a distance from the slips. Others, such as Nasser Hussain, say he should stand at mid-off, where he can talk to them.
‘ I’m on the Nasser side,’ says Brearley. ‘Yes, you’d be stupid if you didn’t listen to the bowlers. Sometimes you’d say, OK, let’s do it your way. I could say to John Emburey: “All right, we’ll try it your way a bit longer, but if it doesn’t work, try it my way.”
‘I think, and so would Ian Chappell and Ray Illingworth and probably Gavaskar or Bedi or Graeme Smith, you’d want to be ultimately in charge. Of course you give people their head, and you listen to the best cricketers in your country but you don’t always agree with them.
‘ One of the jobs as captain or coach is to expand people’s horizons to what’s possible. And sometimes it’s to play according to the overall strengths of the team.
‘For example, I was critical of Root in Australia, watching him on television, for not attacking with the new ball. Easily our best two bowlers were Anderson and Broad and the ball wasn’t going to do anything after the first 10 overs. So in that time you couldn’t afford to play a long game because you didn’t have the firepower or a brilliant spinner.
‘You had to go all out for attack in my view, and they didn’t. He let Anderson and Broad bowl according to their preferred mode, which is to squeeze the life out of the batsmen.’
Brearley has similarly astute observations to make about Kohli, even while emphasising how much he enjoys watching him. ‘ I was slightly disappointed with his captaincy at The Oval, when England started to get on top,’ he says. ‘ He let things drift a bit, whereas when the match was evenly fought, or they were in with a chance, or had the new ball against Root, he was keen- eyed, hawk- eyed, articulate, non-stop.
‘I admire him probably as much as any cricketer I’ve seen. But there is a risk: everyone’s strengths can become faults and in his case his articulacy, his charisma, his presence, his skill, his fierce thoughtfulness could become tyrannical, a bit autocratic. ‘He needs people around him who will tackle him, take him on, challenge him, otherwise he’ll get opinionated and dogmatic, and then powerful—sometimes for good, sometimes not. I can imagine he might be difficult to play for. He’d be very impatient of carelessness or laziness or lack of intensity. And some people aren’t of that mentality.’ The assessment is pure Brearley, coming, ultimately, from a position of concern, for the player and the game. He never stops observing, it seems, and On Cricket is full of trifles that in the hands of another writer might have been unconsidered. There’s the story of Len Hutton theatrically holding up play to change his bowling at the last minute and bring on Frank Tyson, purely because the batsman, Richie Benaud, hated facing him.
Then there’s the umpire who erroneously gave Brearley out during an MCC Under-25s tour game in Pakistan and later sent his apologies, explaining that he ‘felt his arm going up, and couldn’t stop it’.
The chat broadens out to the health of the sport. For six years he was chairman of MCC’s world cricket committee, an independent advisory board that allowed him to do more than for the game than chip in via newspaper columns.
He doesn’t like the idea of the ECB’s planned 100-ball tournament, though he can ‘see why they think they need something distinctive’, and he concedes he was anti-Twenty20 when it began, only to be won round.
He worries about the future of Test cricket outside England and the dominance of home teams. One solution, he suggests, would be to tinker with the toss: ‘You either give the toss to the opposition, or you have a toss as to whether there should be a toss.’
In other words, if the visiting captain wins the first toss, he chooses whether to bat or bowl, rendering the second toss redundant. ‘Home teams would be nervous about fix--
‘ENGLAND HAVE CHARACTERS WHO PLAY IN AN INVENTIVE AND VIGOROUS WAY’
ing the pitches,’ he says. He would also ease life for the bowlers around the world by standardising use of the Duke’s ball.
‘I don’t like the Kookaburra,’ he says. ‘I just don’t think they’re good for cricket. They only stay hard for 10 or 15 overs, and they don’t swing in the ordinary way. Then you get a war of attrition — people bowling short and fast.’
Brearley has a knack for paying respect to the past without denigrating the present and for calmly considering the future. He does not, for instance, completely agree with the suggestion that cricket is losing its characters. ‘One of the chapters I like in my book is about Tom Cartwright,’ he says, referring to the stalwart county medium- pacer, whose 1,536 first-class wickets cost just 19 apiece. ‘That was an old-style cricketer of the best kind — cantankerous, curmudgeonly, direct, humorous, hard-working, high standards, a great craftsman. A fount of knowledge about the game. A lot has changed, yes. But if I think of the England team now, they seem to have characters; people who play in an inventive and vigorous way. ‘I heard Jason Roy at a discussion after the MCC Cowdrey lecture and the first question from Mark Nicholas was: “Do you feel any sense of awe when Kohli comes into bat,” and he said: “No. Why should I?” ‘It was like a line in Julius Caesar, when Cassius says he is not in awe of Caesar, or any human being, and would rather not live than be so.’ Brearley apologises for ‘ showing off ’, but his point is well made. The yeomanry of a Cartwright might have given way to the confidence of a Roy, but cricket retains the capacity to reveal its character. ‘On the whole, they’re wonderful cricketers,’ says Brearley of the current England team. He means it, too.
On Cricket, by Mike Brearley is published by Constable, £20