ENGLAND'S GREATEST CAPTAINS: DOUGLAS JARDINE BY GIDEON HAIGH

"IN HINDSIGHT, EVERYTHING LOOKS INEVITABLE."

The harlequin cap. The rigid bearing. The mirthless aquiline features. Modern spin doctors would tell Douglas Jardine he had an image problem – and perhaps, in historical terms, he does. Assessments of him usually accent the personal characteristics that emerged during the Bodyline series of 1932/33 – his determination phasing into stubbornness, his imperviousness up to and past the point of antagonism. His skills as captain have been overlooked. 

The long chapter about captaincy in his Cricket (1936), for example, is wonderfully shrewd. Written from the point of view of a fielding captain manipulating a five-man attack trying to prevent an opposition scoring 340 at a run-a-minute in a fourth innings, Jardine presents ‘The Skipper’ with a series of problems. The ground has a slope. A stiff breeze is blowing. Bowlers have preferences as to ends, and to particular batsmen. There are issues of temperament. The fast bowler is a bit of a fusspot. The slow bowler gets collared. A batsman gets sets and needs to be isolated. A new ball falls due. There is luck. There is rain. There are debates about fields, which are illustrated diagrammatically. It might not be The Art of Captaincy, but the relish is evident and the thinking disarmingly supple: “A good side works like a good machine, but this is not to say that it works mechanically. No side will run according to plan, but this does not say that its captain should not have a plan, and a very definite plan. The plan must, however, be capable of instant modification to an almost infinite degree.”

In hindsight, everything looks inevitable. In Bodyline, everything points back to dinner in the Piccadilly Grill Room in August 1932 with Harold Larwood, Bill Voce and their county captain Arthur Carr, where leg-theory was first discussed. But at the time, the nearest thing to inevitability was Bradman, Test average then 112.29. The likelihood was an Ashes series as high-scoring as the two preceding it. There’s no reason to doubt Jardine when, in his In Quest of the Ashes (1933), he states that he was not in advance “inclined to rate the possibilities of leg-theory very highly”, because he harboured “a very healthy respect for their [Australians’] play off the leg stump.” Never imagining that leg theory “would stand such a test as would prove its effectiveness throughout the whole tour”, he thought merely that it “might occasionally prove a profitable variation when two batsmen were well set”. He persevered, then, not only because he was ruthless, Spartan, not for turning; he also persevered because he intuited, sometimes against the run of play, that it was working.

In Quest provides further evidence for a view of Bodyline as more dynamic and evolving than usually imagined. Jardine describes his observations of timeless cricket in Australia in 1928/29 – how attritional the tone, how skiddy the wickets, and how necessary they made it to attack the stumps rather than persevere in an off-stump line at which the batsman could in theory refrain from strokes all day. He also notes how Australian wickets in the intervening years changed, being flattened and top dressed to such a degree that medium-pacers could extract next to no sideways movement, but on which ‘parabolic’ bounce suited the fast and the slow – and for all its retrospective definition as the series of pace, the summer of 1932/33 featured 1,000 (8-ball) overs of spin. The host country, then, played an unwitting part in rendering Bodyline more effective.

“He’s a queer ‘un,” confided the Yorkshireman Maurice Leyland of Jardine, and he was the martinet’s martinet: he scowled at players playing golf, forbade them whisky, fell out with his emollient manager Pelham Warner, and, of course, treated colonials with contempt. But consider the man-management challenges facing a captain 85 years ago. There was no coach, no support staff, no media minders. English cricket was also a good deal more diverse than today: Jardine had to mix coal miners with old Etonians, ex-servicemen with Indian aristocrats. But if his amateurs sometimes chafed, his professionals offered more than dumb obedience. “Everyone respected and admired him and many of us liked him,” said Larwood. “One of the greatest men I have ever met,” thought Herbert Sutcliffe. “He planned for us, cared for us and fought for us on that tour,” said Bill Bowes. Hedley Verity named his son for Jardine, and when weak-kneed Warner convened a team meeting about Jardine’s captaincy after the unruly Adelaide Test, the Yorkshire leg-spinner Tommy Mitchell is said to have growled: “It’s got nowt to do with you.” If Jardine had no WAGs to corral on tour, he was also solicitous of those far away: he had team members send cases of Australian produce to wives and mothers for Christmas, with a card ‘To The Old Folks At Home’ designed by Australia’s Arthur Mailey. And if captaincy is about leaving a mark, well, who will be debating Michael Vaughan’s merits in 2090, or Andrew Strauss’s in 2095? 

Bradman? Of course it was about Bradman, for whom Jardine worked up a pathological distaste, and who also inflicted on him his only Test defeat (otherwise his record was of nine wins and five draws). In 20 years no captain so got under Bradman’s skin and skull, so that by the fifth Test the Australian was spooked: the bluff of parking the injured Larwood in Bradman’s eyeline (“I want you to stand there and just stare at him”) was mental disintegration avant le lettre. Yet in its way Bodyline was the greatest tribute ever paid Bradman, the saga becoming integral to his legend.  And Bradman was paid no more sincere compliment by an opponent than Jardine’s concession, twenty years later to John Arlott, in the spirit of his ruminations on the complexities of captaincy in Cricket: “You know, we nearly didn’t do it. The little man was bloody good.”

This article first appeared in our December issue where you can read all 10 profiles of England's greatest captains...