Spin meets Mike Brearley

 Mike Brearley is widely regarded as the greatest English Ashes captain of all. Recalled to the captaincy for the third Test of the 1981 series, he presided over what remains the most iconic fightback of all time, one that saw England take the Ashes 3-1 and secure the legendary status of Ian Botham, Bob Willis and Brearley himself. 

In all, Brearley beat Australia 11 times in Tests, losing just five. In 1978/79, he led England to their biggest win over the Aussies, a 5-1 drubbing of a side weakened by defections to World Series Cricket. But 1981 was his finest hour. He was 39 by then and retired from international cricket at the end of the summer. After an era in which his Middlesex side had dominated the domestic game, Brearley left county cricket at the end of the following season. 

With his Cambridge Classics background, Brearley, as a captain, was regarded as a donnish master of psychology, a great man-manager and original thinker: he averaged just 22 in his 39 Tests (1976-1981), which contributed to the notion that he was in the England team as a specialist captain, rather than one of the best 11 players in the country. That, after retirement from the game, he should go on to practice as a psychoanalyst, only confirmed the impression. 

Brearley’s book, ‘The Art of Captaincy’, first published in 1985, soon became required reading for any skipper. Now, a quarter of a century on, Brearley has produced a new, interactive captaincy masterclass, for the online Pitchvision academy.  

SPIN: Should the captain be involved in the selection process?

Mike Brearley: I think so, yes. Not everyone agrees. Australian captains never have been selectors and sometimes haven’t even been asked for their opinions.

The argument against captains selecting teams is that it can damage their relationship with the players…

That’s true, it can. But leadership is full of dealing with hurt and upset. It’s not just selection, either. A bowler might be unhappy if they don’t get to bowl at the end they want, or if they don’t come on to bowl when they want. You have to be prepared to engage with people who don’t get what they want and deal with those issues. You have to be strong enough to say, “I stand by that decision.”

You have to be prepared to be unpopular?

Absolutely. There’s no virtue in courting unpopularity, but you do have to be prepared to be unpopular. The thing is that respect and popularity are different things. People do get upset and people can dislike you; that’s human nature. Sometimes you have to work to regain their respect.

You took time out of the game in your mid-20s. Could a player come back from a similar break today?

With difficulty. I hesitate to say it wouldn’t be possible, but I do think it would be hard. For a start, careers are shorter now. I know Sanath Jayasuriya played in the World Twenty20 aged 39, but he was the oldest by miles. Players have to be fitter and more athletic. It’s a more professional game now and today’s players have to spend more of the year involved. I thought I’d finished as
a cricketer. But then Middlesex offered me the captaincy at a time [in 1971] when I
was thinking I wasn’t cut out to be a university lecturer.

 The timing was lucky. Actually there was quite a lot of luck involved in my career. I mean, I was fortunate to be picked for England aged 34 [in 1976] and I was only asked to be captain [in 1977] when Tony Greig became involved with Packer. There was a lot of chance involved for me.

Did that period out of the game affect your batting?

I think so, yes. It was from when I was 25 to when I was 29, I think. Those are key years for batsmen. But things were different then: I did play for Middlesex  occasionally. I remember playing immediately after returning from a holiday in Florence. I think I was out for nought, though it may have been the time I was run-out without facing.

You were good enough to win selection for the MCC team to South Africa in 1964 as a 22-year-old batsman. But you are sometimes described as a specialist captain and your batting is largely forgotten. Does that grate?

What grates me is the fact that I didn’t score more runs in Test cricket. I scored a lot in county cricket, but I didn’t do it in Tests. Even now, I regret that. I sometimes find myself thinking about mistakes I made when batting. It’s a great disappointment that I never scored a Test century. I had some good moments – a 50 here and there, even a 91 – but my record as a Test batsman is a disappointment.

You played against some pretty ferocious fast bowling attacks…

Yes, but I also played during the Packer years when the bowling attacks weren’t as strong. As I say, I still find myself thinking about the mistakes I made when batting. Human nature, I suppose.

It seems somewhat ironic that, as a captain, you were able to coax the best out of most of your players, but not yourself.

Quite. John Arlott wrote a very warm article about me entitled ‘Physician heal thyself’, the theme of which was that I seemed to be able to do more for others than I could for myself. I was a bit tense, I think. I was probably trying too hard, in Test cricket in particular.

Had you been your captain, what would you have done to help you?

It’s a very good question. I never quite put it in those ways. I wish I had. I wish I had been more thoughtful. I would have tried to find a way to get me to relax. I would have tried to free me up. I could see it happening with other players. A few years ago I had a conversation with Mike Gatting. He had been dismissed playing no shot to Malcolm Marshall in Test cricket a couple of times. Now Marshall was a terrific bowler but Mike was not out like that in county cricket. He was worried about Marshall’s outswinger and had begun to think of complexities that, in another context, he would not have done.

Might Twenty20 have helped your batting?

It might have been good for me. It might have helped. Batting is a combination of spontaneity and control. Some people suffer through ill discipline and others suffer through leaving no room for spontaneity. The balance was not quite right for me.

Which captains have you admired and learned from?

Tactically I learned a great deal from Ray Illingworth. He was very shrewd and he knew the game to an extreme degree. There was a thoroughness about him. Tony Greig was good in an extrovert way, too. I learned a lot from playing under him. I wouldn’t say I played under any great captains at Middlesex. I admired Keith Fletcher, too. I thought he was treated very badly by England when he was captain [Fletcher succeeded Brearley as skipper, on the 1981/82 tour of India], which was a shame. I wouldn’t say I recommended him as England captain, but I had spoken warmly about him.

Graeme Smith seems like a good captain, as did Dhoni and Younus Khan. I suppose that must seem like a pretty mixed bunch?

But captains vary hugely in personality and style. The secret is in finding a balance between treating everyone differently but treating everyone with an eye to fairness.

You wouldn’t treat David Gower and Graham Gooch the same, for example. Gower was a sort of child of nature. He had that lovely, languid style, but he wasn’t keen on practise. My solution was to make Gower attend nets for the first half of a tour, but once he had played a bit, to let him do his own thing. Different people have different requirements.

It’s hard for me to comment about modern captains as I’m not close enough to the game to see. But I thought Michael Vaughan was very good. He was innovative and put people in different places, though the flaws began to show towards the end. Michael Atherton was good, too, though he could be a bit tense. And Nasser Hussain was good. But you can find flaws with everyone after a while.

Does that mean that there is a lifespan to captaincy? You were captain at Middlesex for more than a decade…

I imagine that captains can renew themselves. I don’t think there’s a specific lifespan. But there is a risk that, after two, three or four years, a captain can become a bit stuck in their ways. People get fed up of listening to the same voices and hearing the same ideas, so a captain probably needs provoking to renew themselves. 

It was difficult at Middlesex at the beginning, but then we started to perform a little better. I needed little reminders, though. I came back from a tour at the start of one season and found that I hadn’t been re-elected as captain. 

There were questions about my commitment. I think the previous year had been quite hard – perhaps I had been injured or it had been my benefit season – but there were questions that people wanted answering. I was upset at the time but it was the players’ way of making sure I was still committed. It worked, too. I became more involved; I organised nets and practise and threw myself into Middlesex again. Yes, it was quite a useful experience.

Tell us about the new coaching course you’ve put together.

Derek Randall had done a fielding course for Pitchvision and thought I could do something similar with captaincy. I’m still interested in captaincy and leadership. I wrote a book a few years ago, The Art of Captaincy, and the hope is that this will reach a new audience.

Mike Brearley’s new interactive Cricket Captaincy masterclass – with video, audio and written components – is available at www.pitchvision.com/academy. The Pitchvision academy offers a range of courses on all aspects of the game.

Andrew Strauss: ‘We’d be mad to be satisfied by Ashes win’

Andrew Strauss puts the Ashes win in perspective in his interview in the special 2009 Review issue of SPIN, which is in shops from Friday November 27.

SPIN: You’re very feet-on-the-ground about the Ashes win, aren’t you?  There’s no triumphalism – you feel it was the start of something rather than the end-goal…

Andrew Strauss: It has to be. Look at our world ranking and look where Australia are. Anyone who thinks that we’ve achieved our life goal would be… mad. Quite frankly.

But it is the life goal of every English cricketer to win the Ashes…

Well, it is, but…

So it would be a reasonable reaction to think ‘job done’…

Exactly. It’s so important to our country: the history, the tradition, the rivalry. But in pure cricketing terms at the moment, there are bigger challenges for us. We may not have the same euphoria if we win in South Africa, but it’s a bigger challenge. I personally think it’s sad that the England team has never been the No 1 team in the world for any extended period of time, certainly in one- day cricket. And we’re going to be taking as many steps as we can to make sure we get somewhere near that.

To England fans, the 6-1 NatWest Series defeat to Australia after the Ashes may have looked similar to the 5-0 thrashing your side took against Sri Lanka in 2006. Has there been any progress at all? Did the two series feel any different to you?

Well, some of the traits were similar. At that time [2006] we had a pretty good Test side but we were experimenting with one-day players: Tim Bresnan and a couple of other players came in for that Sri Lanka series probably when they weren’t quite ready. This time, we are maybe a bit more settled as a side. But when you’re losing like that it makes you reassess what you’re doing as a side. Myself and Andy Flower have a number of areas that we feel we have to improve upon if we want to compete with some of these teams away from home as well as at home in the future. And the Australian defeat was really a catalyst for us to start putting some of those plans into action…

Writing in SPIN, Eoin Morgan said that defeat gave England a new carefree, nothing-to-lose  approach to their batting. He used the phrase ‘hell-for-leather’…

Well, there’s a number of things we’re looking to do, some of which we haven’t spoken to the players about yet, actually. But that attacking intent is a good one, away from home in particular. To live with the likes of India and some of these teams you have to play that way. But at the same time, you can’t use that as a crutch: ‘I got out but at least I played my shots’. We need to be more consistent as a batting unit, so we need to improve our skills. If we want to be more attacking and more consistent, our skills need to improve a lot. 

Andrew Strauss’ book, Testing Times – In Pursuit of the Ashes’ is published by Hodder and is in shops now. This is an extract from an interview in the Christmas issue of SPIN, also featuring Stuart Broad, Michael Vaughan, Garry Sobers, Viv Richards and the debut of Andy Caddick as our hard-hitting star columnist – as well as our now-traditional Top 50 countdown of the year.

Joe Denly speaks exclusively to SPIN

First game for Kent It was quite memorable, actually. It was against Oxford Univerisity. I opened with Michael Carberry and got a golden duck and two overs later they came off for rain and we never went out for three more days. Not a great start…

First 100 I was 12. It was for my school in a 20-over game, which was all we used to play. I think I got 125 not out. My dad bought me a book to record every 100 I got from there on in. Have I still got the book? It’s at home somewhere. Obviously, I haven’t kept it right up to date. I got bored of it after I got to 17 or 18 hundreds about four or five years ago.

I went to Chaucer Technology School, a local school, nothing posh. Cricket wasn’t the big thing and not a lot of people played it. So, yes, I might have been the best player but that wasn’t saying all that much because we played on a council field with an artificial mat. But I always played down at my local club Whitstable.

First club game I started out as aa seam bowler who came in at six or seven. I started in the third team when I was about 13 and made my way into the first team when I was about 15.

First first class wicket Mark Ramprakash. did I bamboozle him with my leg-spin? Not really, no: they needed about 20 to win with not long left and was trying to get on with it he ran down the wicket at me and I managed to turn one and got him stumped. I’ve got Stuart Law out as well. Why don’t I bowl more often? Ask Keysy! I’m constantly asking him if I can bowl. I bowl in the nets quite a bit. I’m waiting for my opportunity. If I keep working at it and get some opportunities, I think I could definitely put myself in that all-rounders’ bracket.

First overseas player you played with at Kent Andrew Symonds, in my first Kent T20 game. Interesting. I got on quite well with him, actually. I was very young and pretty shy, just coming into the side. My first game was a T20 game against Middlesex at Maidstone and he got stuck into me as the Australians do. He was a good laugh and great to play in the same side as him and see how he goes about his stuff. I didn’t get a chance to bat with him in that game, but he hit 120 – in a Twenty20 game – so it was pretty extraordinary.

Last Kent overseas player played with Wayne Parnell. Extraordinarily, he’s only 20… he’s full of life, good to have in the changing room and everyone’s tipping him to have a bright future. People are already comparing him to Wasim Akram.

First proper job I used to work on a Saturday evening at my local fish and chip shop in Whitstable, washing up in the kitchens. Not brilliant. I was just stuck right at the back where the freezer was, so it was absolutely freezing. I did a paper round when I was very young then I did two or three weeks working in the offices for customs, basically splitting bits of paper and sorting out files. I wouldn’t have a clue what I’d do if I didn’t have cricket.

First game in England colours England under-19s v Bangladesh in 2004, when I was about 17. I opened with Alastair Cook. I missed out on all the under-15s and under-16s. Ravi Bopara was in there, James Hildreth, all these guys who had really dominated age-group cricket and were really thought of very highly. They were tipped to he up there even from a very young age so I was pretty nervous going in. I don’t think I scored a run in the whole series – my top score was a 50 in one of the last one-day games.

First CD bought The Backstreet Boyz. Or possibly Mark Morrison.

Last CD bought Kings of Leon

Last celebrity met Tom Chaplin, the lead singer from Keane. He’s on my phone. Him and his brother are linking up business wise with Dave Fulton, who is my agent. So I suppose Keane are my agents, in a way. So that could be quite good.

This interview appeared originally in Kent Cricket, the official programme of Kent CCC, produced by SPIN magazine