ONE
MIKE BREARLEY
‘For one golden summer, [his] skill enabled Botham and Willis to light up the Ashes and inspire a generation.’
Mike Brearley penned the classic The Art of Captaincy more than 20 years ago, but its anecdotes remain as illuminating as ever, its lessons as apposite. Such was its popularity and so revered was the author by leaders in sport everywhere – who used the book as part inspiration, part instruction manual – that only a few have dared to offer anything of substance on the subject since.
Brearley was an exceptional captain. Extremely intelligent, resourceful, tactically astute and very capable of relating to others, he understood the game and the people who played it. Yet there is little doubt that his legend has grown because as a player at the highest level he wasn’t much cop. He failed to score a hundred in 39 Tests and finished with an average of 22.88. In any other sport such a comparable record wouldn’t have cut it. As a cricketer in a different era, or indeed a different country, he might have sunk without trace. In Australia, for instance, the best eleven players are picked by the selectors, who then appoint one of their number as captain. By contrast, England have traditionally placed more emphasis on captaincy, selecting the captain first so he can play a formal part in picking the rest of the team. And, as a captain, Brearley was a proven winner. He led Cambridge University from 1964–68, enjoyed an eleven-year tenure at the Middlesex helm, winning four Championship pennants, and won eighteen out of thirty-one Tests in charge of England – the best win ratio of any England captain. His record against Australia reads: played 18, won 11, lost 4, and drawn 3. Only one of these losses, moreover, was when the Ashes were at stake.
He would be the first to admit that he was fortunate to have swerved the West Indies, against whom Tony Greig had captained in 1976 and Ian Botham had come unstuck in back-to-back series in 1980 and 1980–81. Botham’s misfortunes against Clive Lloyd’s team, the best side in the world by some distance, and latterly against the old enemy in the Ashes of 1981, saw Brearley’s stock rise and the office of captain assume even greater importance. Brearley’s subsequent handling of Botham upon his reinstatement saw such a dramatic and immediate turnaround in the form of the unshackled all-rounder that Brearley’s string-pulling took on mythical status. Spellbinding motivational captaincy became more important than runs and wickets. In reality, Brearley was a pretty decent player, scoring more than 25,000 first-class runs, including 45 centuries. As a young man he was selected to tour South Africa in 1964–65 with the full MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) side before captaining an under-25 side to Pakistan two years later, where he compiled 793 runs at an average of 132, including a career-best 312 not out against North Zone and 223 against Pakistan under-25.
One could be forgiven for thinking that as a Cambridge graduate (he achieved a first in Classics and a 2:1 in Moral Sciences), a highly respected university captain and with a batting pedigree to match, Brearley’s future was preordained. But that would be to underestimate the struggle for acceptance a young captain feels when placed in charge of seasoned professional players. His limited availability early in his career, when he had to juggle his cricket with his studies, saw him flit in and out of the Middlesex dressing-room, which did not endear him to all his senior colleagues.
‘I played a few times under Fred Titmus between 1965 and 1968 and then Peter Parfitt between 1968 and 1970, but I wasn’t that good a player at that time in county cricket, averaging about 30,’ he said. ‘At that time if you came in and took a professional’s place for a few weeks, either if you were a teacher or studying, it didn’t make you the most popular person. The Middlesex team was very hierarchical and you weren’t encouraged to offer much of an opinion unless you had been a capped player for a number of years or had played for England for a while, so I must have come across as a bit arrogant and a bit pleased with myself. I didn’t like that atmosphere and I think I fought against it as captain. Those two things, a resistance to the old school and a certain amount of unpopularity amongst the old school as an occasional player, were there when I took over in 1971. I don’t think I handled it particularly well. I struggled.’
As Bob Willis notes, in comparison to captaining a strong Middlesex dressing-room, taking charge of England was a doddle. ‘He was the student who breezed in to play after university had finished. There were some very strong characters at Middlesex: Eric Russell, Peter Parfitt, John Murray, Fred Titmus – and not only did he have to deal with them, but he was also put in charge of them, which was not an easy task. When it came to England, it was relatively easy to captain Gower, Randall, Botham and Willis.’
‘I did find it hard to deal with players who were better than me and older than me,’ Brearley said. ‘I found it harder to get the best out of them and to get a good working relationship with them than with the younger players. I didn’t find too much trouble with the up-and-coming, bit-too-pleased-with-themselves young players or the ones who were a bit too nervous.’
It’s quite refreshing, from my own viewpoint, to hear that even a man with the man-management skills of Mike Brearley struggled to win the respect of his peers when he was first elevated to the captaincy. The Middlesex dressing-room of the late 1960s and 1970s was renowned as a tough school, but the reaction of the senior players to the promotion of a junior player above them would not have been atypical of most clubs at most levels. I captained the Kent under-19 side aged sixteen and could almost feel the resentment from guys two years older than me.
My first game in charge, too, was against a touring side from Bombay (as Mumbai was then known) and a fifteen year old called Sachin Tendulkar was making hay against our two senior bowlers. With the scoreboard at 55 for 0 off just five overs, I discussed with our opening bowler the idea of trying a bouncer with two men back on the hook. It wasn’t the most subtle of plans I’ve ever hatched, but the bowler – who was conceding about 13 an over at that stage – got the line of the bouncer right and Tendulkar nailed it flat to my man on the boundary edge. In that one moment the team accepted me. If it had gone for six, perhaps I might never have captained again.
When you take over any team, there is always a balancing act between seeking advice from other players, especially those senior to you, and stamping your own authority on proceedings. You want to be seen to be inclusive of your players, many of whom will have lots to offer, but you also need to do things your way and establish that you’re in charge. Brearley also realised that he had to do things his way at Middlesex. He was likely to meet with resistance whichever path he trod, and so that, in many ways, helped him to have the courage of his own convictions. ‘I think I was tactically experimental compared with what was customary,’ he said. ‘I had always been interested in tactics and was always willing to try things that were different from the norm. I’m not sure everyone agreed with the way I was going, but I had a fundamental belief that this was the right way.
‘A committee man asked one of the senior players how I was going and he replied, “He keeps putting fielders in funny positions and the ball keeps going there.” I don’t know whether that was meant as a compliment or not.
‘One of the best – and you remember the best bits of captaincy – was when I put a deep gully to Jim Parks, who was not only a fine wicket-keeper but also a fantastic attacking batsman who played inside out through the offside a lot. I figured that if he got a thick edge it would not go to conventional gully and, sure enough, it flew straight to my deep man off Harry Latchman. Things like that don’t happen often, but you remember them with great satisfaction.
‘But I sometimes think that I overestimated what thinking could do. I remember looking at Wisden from the previous year, and looking how players had got out, to see if that would give me any clues. The intentions might have been right, but I could take it too far to the extent that the players thought at times I was a bit naïve or too clever by half.’
Tactically, Brearley was ahead of his time. In an era of conventional field placings, he was prepared to experiment with different positions. As for his studying of Wisden to see how players get dismissed, it’s not very different from what coaches do today. At Kent, we would often watch a video of opposition players to examine their strengths and weaknesses. Statistics would be provided to illustrate any patterns of dismissal, which together with the video analysis would influence a bowler’s line and length and the plan we would adopt.
The influence of county cricket on Mike Brearley should not be underestimated. The Championship was very much the premier competition at that time. There were 24 three-day matches contested in one division where the emphasis was on winning games. There was no looking over your shoulder at the trapdoor to division two or notions of playing for a draw to safeguard your bonus points. It enabled captains to be creative. As Graham Gooch said: ‘It meant the last day was invariably crucial, so everyone had to be on their mettle. Bowlers defending 280 in 70 overs had to bowl tight, had to know their game and there was pressure for captains to make the right moves. There were far less dead games and some very enjoyable last days’ cricket. Yes, it had some bad points, like declaration bowling, but as captain you had to gauge what a good target was, know how to negotiate it, be aware of conditions and make your team believe they could win.’
Brearley’s most outrageous piece of captaincy occurred against Surrey at Lord’s in 1977. Needing a win to maintain their Championship challenge, Middlesex watched with alarm as all but twenty-five minutes of play on the first two days was lost to rain and bad light. When the covers were pulled off on the final morning, revealing a green, damp pitch, Mike Selvey told Brearley he believed Surrey could be knocked over twice in a day. Surrey, 8 for 1 overnight, were bowled out for just 42, with Wayne Daniel taking 5 for 16 and Selvey 3 for 29. The Middlesex supporters fully expected their side to look for 300 and maximum batting points, but Brearley was aware the pitch was still incredibly helpful to the seamers so he declared Middlesex’s first innings at 0 for 0 after just one delivery. There were still 45 minutes to lunch at this stage and Surrey lost Geoff Howarth and Monte Lynch before the interval. Surrey defended stoically in the afternoon session on an easing pitch, but their score went nowhere and they were eventually bowled out for 89. Middlesex chased down a target of 139 in a little more than 20 overs, leaving eleven balls to spare; Brearley finished an exceptional match as captain 66 not out.
Brearley was originally selected for England against the West Indies in the summer of 1976, aged thirty-four, having spent five years as captain of Middlesex. He was picked solely as a batsman but took over the England captaincy from Tony Greig for the Ashes of 1977 when Greig’s covert recruiting for Kerry Packer came to light. He triumphed 3–0 in Jubilee Year, reclaiming the Ashes against Greg Chappell’s tourists and then bettered even that scoreline in humiliating an under-strength Graham Yallop-led Australia 5–1 in 1978–79, when the majority of Australia’s best were playing in World Series Cricket. It was only when Australia had their full-strength side back together after Packer in 1979–80 that Brearley lost a series (3–0). The Ashes weren’t up for grabs, however, as the three-match series was seen as too short to award full Ashes status and England had had little preparation time. The hastily arranged tour meant many of the playing regulations were still to be decided and Brearley made few Australian friends as he fought England’s corner on what would and wouldn’t be allowed. The World Series had seen innovations to the game that we are familiar with today (inner fielding circles for one-day games, white balls, day/night cricket) but which England had no experience of at that time. ‘I put the English case firmly,’ Brearley said. The result was that many of the new rules that had become the norm in Australia since the World Series were not adopted, including the inner circle. Brearley, moreover, poured fuel on the fire in the very first match of the triangular one-day series.
‘In our first match, against the West Indies at Sydney, I put all ten fielders, including the wicket-keeper, on the boundary for the last ball of the match and we won by a couple of runs,’ Brearley said. ‘There was a hell of a fuss about that and people have since compared it to when the Chappells conspired to roll the ball along the floor when New Zealand needed six to win in another one-day international, which I thought was a bit wide of the mark. But I quite relished that fuss, too.
‘I was seen by the man in the Sydney street as the embodiment of all that’s bad in the British. I wore my sweater over my bottom for a start, and that proved I was a “poofter”. I talked too glibly and with the wrong accent. And when they had a go at me on the field I ignored them, like the stuffy stuck-up Pom that I no doubt was.’
Brearley had grown a beard in an attempt to toughen up his appearance, but the truth was he enjoyed getting under the Australians’ skin and cultivated this slightly contemptuous British image. On the earlier tour, indeed, he had wound up the Aussies with a bit of leg theory. ‘In 1978–79, when we won in Sydney with Emburey and Miller taking four wickets each, we had seven men on the leg-side at one time,’ Brearley said. ‘The Aussies associated such fields with Bodyline and with Trevor Bailey bowling two feet down the leg-side to save a match in the 1950s, but actually we were trying to bowl them out and it was an attacking move. I probably only needed six on the leg-side, but I could get away with seven and I knew it would rile them. I did it to Greg Chappell once – it might have even been in a county match – and I remember him looking absolutely disgusted as I moved another one across.’
Jaded after four consecutive winters spent touring, and needing to stay in the country all year round to pursue his training in his chosen field of psychoanalysis, Brearley declared he would be unavailable for future tours and was replaced by Botham for the summer’s series against the West Indies in 1980. Brearley’s international career seemed over, but Botham, who played nine of his first ten Tests as captain against the West Indies, losing two series, failed to record a win as captain and fatally notched a pair in the second Ashes Test at Lord’s to complete a miserable run of form. It had deteriorated to such an extent that during his 12 Tests as captain he averaged 13.14 with the bat and 33.08 with the ball compared to 40.48 with the bat and 18.52 with the ball in the 10 Tests prior to his appointment. Botham resigned just as he was about to be pushed. The England selectors knew Brearley would not be available to lead England to India in the winter, but their goal was a short-term one: to reverse England’s fortunes and win the Ashes. Brearley was the outstanding candidate. The England cricket team was at a low ebb and its players in need of a lift to their collective confidence. Brearley was in good form with the bat, having scored four centuries in June, but more importantly there was a good chance he could improve the collective mindset of the players and their subsequent output. Psychoanalysis was his field after all.
The value of captaincy is always difficult to judge because its skills are too subtle to measure. There have been statistics on runs and wickets since willow first struck leather, but a captain’s contribution is more intangible. Occasionally, you move a fielder to a strange position and he takes a catch the next ball, which counts on your ledger for a short while, but there are just as many occasions when the ball flies to the gap that fielder has just left and people are cursing you. More significant is when a captain spends time with his players and is able to shift their thinking in a positive way. Your players need to know you care about them as individuals. If they’re struggling, it helps if you can empathise with the struggle. Sometimes you’re better off listening, other times suggesting solutions, but hopefully at the end of a conversation your player has got a clearer idea of how he wants to move forward. At the very least he will have got stuff off his chest and if, as a captain, you’ve been engaged and attentive he’ll feel reassured that you’re both on the same page regarding his issues. These chats might be formal but often work better when approached more casually over dinner, in a bar, perhaps on a golf course. The skilful captains create a safe environment where the player feels comfortable to have the conversation in the first place, without fear of recrimination or of losing his place in the team.
In many ways, the captain is a lot like a psychotherapist and it was no surprise to those who played under Brearley that this was his chosen field away from the game. He took the time to get to know what made his players tick, listened to them and then crucially came up with the appropriate mode of response. While some captains adopt one persona, he was able to change, depending on the situation and the needs of the player in front of him. There is no point being too cuddly if the player needs a firm hand, nor conversely is there any point hammering a player if what he needs is a metaphorical arm round the shoulder. Brearley’s flexibility in his modes of response and recognising when to play what role was his great strength and why those who played under him single him out as the best. ‘He was a brilliant man-manager, with the knack of relating to people whether they came from my background, a university background or a public-school background,’ said Gooch. Willis, meanwhile, said: ‘I admire him very much. He was a very tough, motivated leader whose man-management was outstanding.’
From the Australian camp, his opposite number in 1981, Kim Hughes, describes him thus: ‘When you look back at him, he couldn’t field and – being brutal – struggled with the bat at that level. But he was fantastic in his other skills and I’m sure had a tremendous influence on the likes of Gower, Willis, Botham and Gatting. He’s certainly one of the best captains I’ve ever seen.’ In the reprinted The Art of Captaincy, Brearley discusses the qualities that are required for captaincy and leadership.
These universal but also complex and individually characterised qualities are inherently in tension with each other . . . We could speak of the antinomies of leadership – passion and detachment, vision and commonsense, an authoritarian streak and a truly democratic interest in team and points of view. One requires conviction, but also the capacity not to rush answers but to be able to tolerate doubt and uncertainty.
Brearley, armed with all these qualities in varying degrees of tension, was thrown back into the breach for the Headingley Test of 1981. He was appointed for three Tests at his own instigation (the selectors were prepared to hand him the reins for the four remaining Tests), in contrast to Botham, who had effectively been on trial one Test at a time from the outset of the summer. The job might have been a familiar one, but Brearley was starting 1–0 down with a bunch of players who had forgotten how to win. He was going to need all his powers of motivation and call upon all his knowledge of the human psyche to turn England around. ‘I felt strongly that one major problem for the team must be the blunt fact that they had played twelve consecutive Tests without a win,’ he observed at the time. ‘A sequence such as this means inevitably that the expectation of success fades. Such expectation makes a big and infectious difference.’
This job of restoring confidence and raising expectation started with his predecessor. As Botham remembers: ‘He said to me “Do you want to play or do you want to be left out?” Left out? Me? I thought he was crazy until I suddenly realised that he knew full well that I wanted to play. It wasn’t a serious offer. It had been a gesture, acknowledging the fact I’d had a hard time and that being in the limelight might not be that easy for me.’
Botham was, of course, to return to centre stage in a matter of days. To what extent Brearley was responsible for Botham’s resurrection is debatable. Importantly, however, theirs was a relationship that had brought previous success and in which Botham felt comfortable. As Brearley freely admits: ‘I was in no sense a rival.’
From a tactical perspective, Brearley gave Botham a longer spell in the first innings than Botham would have given himself, the result of which was Botham’s first five-wicket haul since the match prior to his appointment as captain. And Brearley had the knack of chiding and goading performances out of England’s talisman in a style that few other captains would get away with. ‘He was an old man, standing in the slips complaining about his feet aching, and all the while telling me to bowl properly,’ Botham recalled. ‘And I don’t know what it is, but I took stuff from him that I’d clip others round the ear for.’
‘I didn’t find Botham difficult,’ Brearley said. ‘At that time he was close to a genius on a cricket field. He was a wonderful cricketer and you often had to give him his head. He was unselfish, he was cooperative and always wanted the best for the team. He was attacking in his mentality as well as in his play. He always wanted more slips and short legs, but it was always constructive. Occasionally, I wanted a mid-off or someone back on the hook and had to temper his attacking enthusiasm, but he was very helpful and on many occasions he carried the team, particularly in 1981.
‘It is easy to fall into one of those two extremes – let him do whatever he likes or rein him in completely – or to oscillate wildly between the two. The ideal is that you can move between the two without being too authoritarian or too cuddly and achieve some degree of consistency so people know where they stand and you appear straightforward. But I was Ian Botham’s first captain for England, don’t forget. He was much easier to captain than he would have been seven or eight years later.’
Brearley added this last caveat perhaps aware that other captains have found Botham difficult to manage. David Gower was seen as being too lenient with him, particularly in the West Indies in 1986, while Graham Gooch’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ regime was too inflexible to accommodate a senior figure who had earned the right to be treated differently. My guess, though, is that the Brearley/Botham partnership would have worked at any time in Botham’s career. If you imagine at one end of the captaincy scale you have tough, ‘lead-from-the-front’, uncompromising captaincy (Border, Gooch, Ian Chappell) and at the other end you have laissez-faire, liberal captaincy (Gower), Brearley would occupy the middle ground but have the flexibility to slide along the scale in either direction as a situation or a personality dictates.
Brearley had a natural instinct for when to toughen up and when to take a step back and allow players a chance to express themselves. Look at the way he was when Botham was cutting loose at Headingley. Far from telling Botham to get his head down and ‘bat like your life depends on it’, like other captains might have done, Brearley visibly encouraged him to go for his shots, laughing at his mistimed heaves and gesturing that he should have attempted to hit it harder. Conversely, he was not afraid to get stuck into his star performer when he had the ball in his hand. And he recalls at the time, ‘I brought Ian on, with a rather caustic comment, I think, about not just floating the ball up like a middle-aged swing bowler.’
Brearley was a captain who was very much in charge, but one of his strengths was his ability to take on board lots of different advice from a variety of sources, filtering out the bad and using the good to the team’s advantage. When he took over for the Headingley Test in 1981, he was out of the loop, having been charging around the country playing county cricket. He needed to get up to speed quickly, so he sought reliable sources of information. He was lucky to have good lieutenants and sounded out Graham Gooch (‘a keen observer of cricket and cricketers’), who informed him that England, while possessing the best players in the country, were not playing near their best, had got sloppy at practice and needed more direction.
Willis filled him in on Botham’s and Graham Dilley’s bowling and recommended Gatting and Gower as slip fielders, while everyone was encouraged to contribute at the pre-match meeting. ‘Boycott started by commenting that we could beat Australia if our bowling and fielding returned to its old standard,’ Brearley recalled. ‘Gatting had spotted that Border goes a long way back early in his innings, while Emburey confirmed, from his contacts with the Victorian players, that all the Australian state sides bowled their quicker bowlers at Yallop. Willey said of Alderman: “He’s quicker than he looks; he hits the bat hard.”’
As for the final team selection on a notoriously tricky Headingley surface, Brearley consulted his senior men: ‘Boycott reckoned the ball would bounce awkwardly and if the cloud stayed it would seam. He added that he normally preferred a balanced side but would be tempted to rely on Willey to bowl spin and play the extra quick bowler. Tests are almost never won at Leeds by spinners. Botham and Gooch, on the other hand, reckoned that the dry crust on the pitch would allow spin from early on.’
Brearley sifted through all the advice that came his way before opting tentatively for the extra quick bowler, thus omitting Emburey. Ultimately, as captain, he was responsible for the final call and had to stand by the decision that he made. There can be no recrimination for the person who gives advice that turns out to be misguided. The buck stops with the captain. The democratic interest in team and points of view is all very well, but the authoritarian streak is needed to take ownership of the final call.
Willis, who had been left out of the original squad because he had a chest infection before proving his fitness, made the starting XI and produced the defining performance of his career in the second innings with 8 for 43. But there were times early in the match when Brearley was questioning the omission of Emburey, over whom Willis was preferred. After the first day’s play, with Australia well placed at 210 for 3, leaving out his Middlesex colleague appeared a glaring error. ‘Back at the hotel, I could not sleep for a long time, brooding over the choice,’ Brearley said. ‘I thought, “They’ve not brought me back for my batting; and now, before the Test’s even started, I’ve made a tactical howler.” Next day I told Emburey I was sorry; we had been wrong to leave him out and that the decision had been mine.’
Kim Hughes declared at 401 for 9 before the Australian pace attack knocked England over for 174. Following on late on the third day, Gooch edged Dennis Lillee to third slip as the nightmare continued. With the game slipping away, Brearley could not envisage the miracle that was to unfold over the last two days. At the end of the third day’s play he recalls: ‘I was certain that we would lose, unless it rained for at least a day.’
At 135 for 7, in the second innings on the fourth afternoon, England were still 92 behind. Ladbrokes famously quoted odds of an England victory at 500–1. Graham Dilley threw the kitchen sink at a few cover drives, which encouraged Botham to open his own mighty shoulders. Soon, they were trading blows, enlivening the Yorkshire crowd, which like everyone else had accepted England’s fate.
It was about this time that I arrived home from primary school. I knew something was afoot and felt immediate concern for my mother’s mental health. She was sitting watching the cricket, a game she’d always thought was incredibly boring. We sat together on the sofa as Botham and the tail plundered 175 runs in just 27 overs. It was box office stuff. When Botham brought up his century, the camera panned across to the players’ balcony where Brearley was seen thrusting a finger in his direction. ‘That’s Brearley,’ I said, a bona fide expert on the game compared to my mother. ‘He’s the guy they’ve brought back because he makes the others play better, especially Botham.’
The next day I resisted the temptation to bunk off school and therefore missed the conclusion to the most amazing turnaround in Test history. Where the fourth day had belonged to Botham, the fifth was trampled all over by the size-14 feet of Bob Willis. Defending just 130, Brearley urged for ‘more aggression, more adrenalin, more encouragement for the bowlers. The Australians will be nervous now.’
He threw the new ball to Botham and Dilley, hoping they could replicate with the ball what they had achieved in tandem with the bat. Willis was relegated to a change bowler and was started up the hill. As Willis recalls: ‘Brearley would admit that mistakes were made in that second innings at Headingley. I had never had any success bowling at the Football Stand End, yet he started me there. I think he was worried about me bowling no-balls but, in the end, when I said I thought I needed to bowl down the hill from the Kirkstall Lane End, he told me to forget about the no-balls and bowl as fast as I could.’
Even the best captains don’t hit upon the correct formula straightaway. Brearley’s rationale about Botham and Dilley being full of confidence was a sound theory. Importantly, for he only had a small total at his disposal, Brearley was shrewd enough to change things round quickly. He asked Bob Taylor, the keeper, and Botham about Willis’s request to come down hill and they thought he should be given his head. Brearley agreed, and the rest is history. Australia subsided from a solid 56 for 1 to 58 for 4 on the stroke of lunch as Willis peppered the Aussies with straight short-pitch bowling. Chris Old removed Border immediately after the interval and Willis took three more quick wickets, including the dangerous Rod Marsh. England now had the Aussies at 75 for 8 and they were on the brink. The match, though, was to have an unnerving twist in its tail, as Lillee, in alliance with Ray Bright, improvised to good effect to add 35 in four overs. Throughout this brief onslaught, Brearley’s calm demeanour was reassuring to his pumped-up colleagues, much as Michael Vaughan’s would be to his England team 24 years later at Edgbaston.
More sound advice, this time from Gatting, who told Brearley that Willis needed to bowl straight at Lillee, did the trick. Willis bowled full at middle stump, tucking up the great fast bowler, who could only spoon the ball to mid-on where Gatting himself held a fine diving catch. Willis, who appeared to be in a trance throughout his spell but who rarely bowled well to Lillee, was glad of Brearley’s concise and specific plan. ‘He sorted my line and length out, changed the field and got Gatt in exactly the right place. He knew how to put the squeeze on the opposition at just the right moment,’ said Willis.
A couple of dropped catches in the slips by Chris Old added to the tension, but Willis knocked out Bright’s middle stump to end the most dramatic of Test matches in the most emphatic fashion. The result of the Headingley Test reverberated around the nation. The country was deep in recession, there had been rioting on the streets of Brixton and unemployment stood at three million. But Brearley, Botham, Willis and the rest of the England team had given everyone a real lift.
As we know now, the fun for England was just beginning. At Edgbaston, in the fourth Test, Australia were cruising at 105 for 4, chasing just 150 for victory. Allan Border and Martin Kent looked comfortable and, with the pitch a lot flatter than had been the case at Headingley, Australia appeared firm favourites to reassert themselves in the series. But then Emburey, England’s most potent weapon in the conditions, got a ball to bounce steeply on Border, who gloved it to Gatting at short-leg. Before the dismissal, Brearley recalls: ‘I had been uncertain whom to bowl at the other end from Emburey. Botham was strangely diffident. He felt others should bowl before him; the ball was not swinging or bouncing – he wondered how he would get anyone out on this pitch.’
Brearley signalled to Willey to get loose, but, having got rid of Border just two balls later, he changed his mind. ‘Now I was confident Botham should bowl,’ he said. This was not the time to pop to the Gents or treat yourself to a coffee, for in the space of 28 balls, on a flat pitch with the ball hardly deviating off the straight, Botham tore through the Australian tail by taking five wickets for one run. He bowled fast and straight and like willing accomplices the batsmen lost their balance to the offside, aimed across the line and missed. At the fall of the last wicket, Botham raced down the pitch, grabbed a stump and, holding it high above his head in celebration, sprinted for the dressing-rooms.
Botham, of course, was then to score one of his very best hundreds to help win the fifth Test at Old Trafford and thus secure the Ashes for England. For Brearley, and the selectors who’d appointed him, it was mission accomplished. Brearley’s innings at the Oval in the sixth Test was a noteworthy one not only because it was his last for England but also because he contributed his first fifty of the series and helped England to save a game in which they had been largely outplayed. He finished the series with 141 runs at an average of 17.63, but, as he himself said earlier, he had not been selected for his batting. ‘Not getting as many runs as I should have done always irked and hurt me,’ Brearley said. ‘I was disappointed in my batting. I got better and better as time went on as a county batsman and I think I was a better player than people saw. John Arlott wrote a piece which was given the headline “Physician Heal Thyself”, which was right – I was better at helping others than I was at helping myself, at least at Test level.’
And that is the crux. Brearley was good at helping others. Some captains lead from the front by example. Others, with a word here, a gesture there and an understanding of the human spirit, can pull performances out of players of which they themselves might not have believed they were capable. Mike Brearley did that consistently throughout his captaincy career, but for one golden summer that skill enabled Botham and Willis to light up the Ashes and inspire a generation.