Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind

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For instance, Brearley talks about field settings from an era where batsmen used to play in from of their leg guard to his era when batsmen started playing with their bats close to the leg guard: in the former case, the field setting would be a little finer on the leg side while in the latter the field setting would be squarer. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. In life, as in sport, worrying about what might happen or has happened comes at the expense of attentiveness to the present and its satisfactions.

In his work on cricket captaincy, the former player has penned down his genuine inputs on the role of a captain in cricket. How many books have a index that contains – to confine ourselves only to the Bs – entries for “Bach, JS”; “Bion, Wilfred” and “Boycott, Geoff”?

On retiring from cricket in 1982 (“I was tired, ready to go; it was not a mid-life crisis”), he trained to become a psychoanalyst, underwent analysis himself and emerged as a highly respected practitioner. His insight into the game is pertinent to every form and to every team, and his examples are enlightening. I don’t suppose you did, and nor did I, till, worrying at it, I looked up the word in the online etymological dictionary. He adds that a good captain is most likely to be skilled at spotting talent and bringing the best out of his team, potential wise. A few years later, Brearley inspected a batting glove of Ian Botham – never guilty of under-hitting the ball – and was amazed to see its fingers almost unmarked by the bat.

For a few years in the 1970’s and 80’s, he was a highly successful captain of the England cricket team, often leading his side to unlikely victories, widely attributed to his remarkable powers of leadership, his mixture of tactical astuteness allied to his highly acclaimed man management skills. Cricketing stories and anecdotes (“I enjoy the humour of cricket”) don’t come across as an intellectual slumming it. A shrewd captain is always persistent in his individual efforts and also readily willing to persist with his players giving them a fair amount of opportunities to showcase their talent and commitment before they're written-off by the experts and critics.Particularly interesting is the fact that these skills and qualities don't sit well with each other and therein lies the balancing role. How to handle such a group of people in this situation, to guide them, punish them when they are out of line, encourage them when they are on debut, or at county level, how to develop uncertain young talent, to motivate players who have been in the game for thirty years or more - all of these are given deft and wise advice by Brierley, king of captains with Middlesex and England, and who guided and directed Botham, Willis, Gower, Boycott et al to the famous victory over Australia in the 1981 Ashes.

Known to be held in high regard within England's cricketing circles, chiefly for his selfless service to England cricket as an outstanding captain, The Art of Captaincy is a good leading example of things falling into place for the author as a result of choosing the right person for the right job. The structure of this book, instead, has something of the messiness and unpredictability of an hour on the couch, but with a decent, fallible man whose psychoanalytic training hasn’t shorn him of his capacity for irony and scepticism – both of which are frequently turned towards psychoanalysis itself. One trick used by athletes to cope with it is to develop mantras, or simple mental routines, to be deployed at high-pressure moments. It is more a book I would give to a promising 12 year old who aspires to captain cricket teams in the future, fielding team instructions, ways to analyse the dressing room, how your bowler is going and the ways batsmen prepare.There is unity, of a kind, in all this, but one needs to put oneself in Brearley’s hands to let him reveal it – and himself – in his own way. However, Brearley's strength lies in bringing out the people side of the game and how the game is shaped by the motivations, strengths and weaknesses of the players. That said, the book is well-written, entertaining and - as far as a hybrid of the above three genres goes - a success. Or someone: for several overs before Ramprakash’s dismissal, Warne had been goading him into a dramatic, showboating stroke.