An evening with Mike Brearley: 'Coaches are doing half the job'

Mike Brearley, one of the greatest captains, told his Cricketer Live audience that the art is undervalued today, reports James Coyne

The Art of Captaincy was so fascinating that Mike Brearley has spent the last three decades fobbing off requests to write a sequel. He has had weightier issues to deal with, of course, in his second career as a psychoanalyst, while offering summertime snippets of his cricketing insights for The Observer and latterly The Times.

Now, though, Brearley has written On Form, in which he mulls over how we can reach a productive state in all walks of life – including cricket. Brearley fleshed out some of these ideas at a live ‘Evening With’ The Cricketer at The Tabernacle in Notting Hill earlier this month.

Such a free thinker was never likely to lapse into ‘in my day’ tendencies, especially given his role as chairman of the MCC World Cricket Committee until last year. But he does sense a decline in captaincy intuition – especially in judging the moment to attack.

“I think partly it is because coaches are doing half of the job,” he said. “If a captain and a coach get on well, I think it must be wonderful for a captain. If they don’t it must be next to useless.

“But, because the batting mentality is more aggressive, the captaincy is more defensive. A few overs into the game there is a deep point, sometimes to David Warner almost right from the start. In Test cricket, even in one-day cricket, you need to attack with a few slips. Tony Greig would almost always have two slips to good bowlers.”

^{Brearley says England err too often on the side of defence in the field}

Brearley feels even England’s two supreme new-ball bowlers of the last 10 years are culpable: “Anderson and Broad are terrific bowlers. I think Anderson’s the best swing bowler I’ve ever seen. He’s magical.

“But they could be even better. They bowl to defensive fields. Extra covers… they won’t often bowl to three slips. Anderson will bowl to right-handers, and beat the bat, beat the bat… I’m talking about optimism, and looking ambitiously to take wickets when you have an inkling of a chance.

“If Botham was bowling now with Anderson’s skill, he wouldn’t have deep square cover. He’d be saying ‘get my short-leg in’.”

Brearley is wowed by Joe Root – “Andy Flower said to me, when Root was first playing for England, that he always plays to the situation of the game… and naturally, not in an exaggerated way” – but on this score does not exempt him from criticism.

“At Sydney in the Ashes, Mason Crane sent two or three past the outside edge, and Mitchell Marsh looked like a novice. Whether you’re 40 for 4 or 400 for 4, you have to seize that moment. They didn’t put in a second slip, and the ball did go through there, possibly not at catchable height. You don’t get many moments like that.”

An intuitive understanding of how to use spin bowling – which now plays a peripheral role in English cricket – is surely part of it. Brearley says Ray Illingworth was “the best tactical captain I saw”, much of it down to his handling of spin.

^{Mike discusses Joe Root's Test captaincy}

“When we played Leicestershire they sometimes had four spinners, who would all land the ball on different parts of the pitch. You’d look at the pitch at the end of a game, and there’d be two feet difference in length for their stock ball.”

Brearley has occasionally been characterised as the last of the amateur captains – in spirit if not in reality, as the status had been abolished in his days at Cambridge University.

“In the old days captaincy probably was overvalued, because it was all mixed up with class consciousness. Here it had to be an amateur, in the West Indies they had to be white… and so that interfered with it.

“But there was the idea that the captain had a special role. You picked the captain first, then the team, and he’d be involved in that too. Now you pick the 11 best players, then the captain. I think it’s gone too far the other way.”

Brearley is a great admirer of Ian Chappell as a captain, batsman and commentator. But, when once asked about Brearley’s captaincy, Chappell quipped that it was hard enough captaining 11, let alone 10. That was a reference to Brearley’s batting – and it is a source of frustration to him that, of his 45 first-class hundreds, none came in Test cricket.

Few would have predicted that, though, when Brearley received his first call-up on the back of nine first-class hundreds at Cambridge and a century against the 1964 Australians. He went on England’s tour of South Africa, the last before isolation, where a strange figure loomed by the nets at Durban while Brearley was practising.

^{Brearley captained England 31 times}

“He wanted me to be less tense in the way I held my grip, especially the top hand. I thought it would make me loose. I listened and walked away. Later I realised it was Wally Hammond, one of England’s greatest batsmen – and I didn’t take his advice.

“I think even if everything had gone for me I still would have struggled in Test cricket. If I’d been a bit more relaxed, not so intense and had a bit more luck, I probably would have averaged 30 not 22.”

Brearley sees the India tour of 1976/77, when he was vice-captain to Greig, as one that got away: “I was in the best form of my life at the beginning of that tour. In the fifth Test at Bombay I got 91, and if I’d scored a hundred I might have got a couple more.”

And, for those who mistake Brearley’s excellence as a captain and analyst for iron-clad confidence, they should consider how lack of runs could play on his mind.

“Sometimes there were occasions when I hadn’t done well, and I needed runs in order to go out on the field and tell people what to do. So on occasion I had to act a bit because I felt depressed about my batting.

“I did once go to Doug Insole, who was manager – Willis and Botham would probably have been there, too – and I asked them about my position. They said, ‘don’t think about it, we need you out there’.”

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