The Captains’ Tales

As 2008 slipped icily into 2009, several bookmakers reckoned England to be slight favourites for the forthcoming summer’s Ashes battle. Despite series defeats to South Africa at home and India away, England seemed to be making progress under the new leadership team of Kevin Pietersen, the captain, and Peter Moores, the coach. The fact they travelled to India at all, given the then recent terror attacks in Mumbai, said a lot – or so we thought – about Pietersen’s ability to unite a squad in adverse times.

Australia, meanwhile, had come to the end of an era, with the retirements of Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Justin Langer, Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden, which looked to have left Ricky Ponting, the Australia captain, bereft of ideas and yearning for a bygone era. Having been the best team in the world for more than a decade, Australia lost in India and then took on the new pretenders to their crown, South Africa, on home soil. Ponting set South Africa 415 to win in Perth, but never looked like stopping them, losing by six wickets. In Melbourne he scored 101 and 99 leading from the front, but again Australia lost the match and, with it, a home series for the first time in 17 years. ‘Is Ponting still the right man for the job?’ people asked. In England the cry went up: ‘Bring on the Ashes!’

But a week is a long time in international cricket. As Australia bounced back to salvage pride in Sydney, England were in danger of imploding, Pietersen forced to resign and Moores sacked following a relationship breakdown. The image being beamed into English living rooms from Australia was of Mitchell Johnson, the impressive left-arm quickie, being mobbed after flattening Graeme Smith’s stumps to clinch a dramatic Test with ten balls remaining. Johnson, together with Peter Siddle, who resembles a rough-around-the-edges Craig McDermott, symbolises the future of Australian fast bowling and the cupboard is not as bare as perhaps we thought. Brett Lee and Stuart Clark were both missing from that Sydney Test attack, too, of course.

In England, the papers were running riot. Pietersen had gone on holiday apparently wanting Moores out. He had tried to force the hand of his employers and it backfired. Captains should run cricket teams, but they have to work with the coach and not issue ultimatums. Your colleagues will have weaknesses and make mistakes; they might do things you don’t agree with; but a good captain has the skills to make the best of a situation and the integrity to effect change in the appropriate fashion.

In many ways the Pietersen saga sharpened the focus on the role of the captain. His drive, dedication and passion, all of which he possesses in abundance, are ideal qualities for a captain. But his fellow players, it seemed, tolerated him rather than respected him as leader, even perhaps suspecting the captaincy was more about what was good for him than what was good for the team. If self-awareness is important for a captain, having an awareness of how you’re seen by others is more so.

In Mike Brearley’s chapter I quoted a passage from his introduction to the reprinted The Art of Captaincy. To me, it is the best summing-up of what qualities are required to be a good captain.

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.

But, for now, let’s focus on the 16 men featured in this book, whose captaincy decisions over the last quarter of a century have so richly embroidered the already great tapestry of Ashes history. I hope their stories, as refracted through the lens of a former English county captain, have entertained but also shed new light on the challenges of leadership. For me, it has been a fascinating process and one that has shifted many preconceptions I had about them as captains.

I chose the context of the Ashes in which to study them because it is the pinnacle of the purest form of the game, where the glare of the spotlight is most intense. I wanted to find out more about them as leaders. What were their strengths and weaknesses? Why and how did they hit upon a course of action? How did the job affect them? To what extent did they think they had moved their team forwards? What had it meant to them? And, simply as a fan of England cricket, I wanted to hear first hand what it was like leading our country against the ‘old enemy’ and on the biggest stage.

Moreover, and as a sort of endgame, I wanted to find out what the perfect captain might look like and, if possible, who out of all these leaders was indeed the best. A hybrid England captain, for instance, might well be perfect if he had the following strengths: Willis’s honesty, Gatting’s bulldog spirit, Gower’s charm, Gooch’s work ethic, Atherton’s selflessness, Stewart’s professionalism, Hussain’s passion and tactical nous, Brearley’s ability to get the best out of individuals, Flintoff’s all-round playing skills and Vaughan’s fearless inspiration.

His Australian opposite number, meanwhile, would no doubt possess Hughes’s good humour, Greg Chappell’s in-built knowledge of the game, Border’s toughness, Taylor’s tactical feel, level-headedness and communication skills, Waugh’s patriotism and ruthless streak, plus Ponting’s competitiveness and run-scoring prowess.

In my introduction, though, I set myself the task of finding the best captain of each team since 1981 and I now feel better placed, as a starting point, to rule some out. In an ascending ‘ranking’ order, with my own potted thought processes and reasoning before – one by one – removing them to reveal the final shortlist, I have eliminated the following:

The hero of England’s Ashes victory in 2005, Freddie Flintoff was appointed captain for the Ashes tour of 2006–07 when he was still recuperating from a serious ankle injury. He was never 100 per cent fit and had no answers to a Ricky Ponting-led Australian side hell-bent on revenge, losing 5–0. More ‘one of the lads’ than a natural captain, his side was too friendly and he had too much on his plate to make a real impact as a leader.

A free-spirited player for whom captaincy came too early in his international career. Hughes felt the scars left by Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket more acutely than many others and never fully earned the respect of the returning superstars of the Australian game, especially Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh. Had no answer to Ian Botham at Headingley in 1981 and was totally out-captained by Mike Brearley.

I learned he was a much better captain than I had thought him to be. His honesty was a star quality and remains so in his commentary work. He cared deeply about England doing well, and his ratio of seven wins from eighteen matches, at a time when the England team was affected by the ban on South African tour rebels, compares favourably to many others. His captaincy mindset was too negative for my liking, however, and tactically he made too many mistakes in the Ashes of 1982–83.

Brilliant in 1984–85 in India and in the Ashes of 1985, he was walked all over at other times in his captaincy career. He believed in an inclusiveness and sharing of ideas, which was to be applauded, and he gave his players freedom to choose their own paths, a principle he applied universally to his cost. A lovely man with a mischievous sense of humour, he didn’t have it in him to get tough when he needed to.

My favourite player when I was growing up, but he was always more of a batsman than a captain. He had a tremendous appetite for preparation and practice and enjoyed a terrific record as a batsman while at the helm, but he was guilty of being a bit of a sergeant major and often struggled to empathise with the needs of lesser or different players.

Stewart led a side to Australia in his image: committed, hard working, professional and realistic. He competed hard but never dared to dream that England could win, which sadly rubbed off on his team. Held similar beliefs to Gooch but was a bit more flexible in his approach and his attempts to empathise with players.

Scored a hundred in each innings of his first match as captain and was by some distance the best Australian batsman of his generation. Thrashed the West Indies in his first series in charge but lost 3–0 to Brearley’s England in 1977. Never got to build his own team the way his brother Ian had in the early 1970s because of the split caused by Kerry Packer’s World Series. As a captain, he took a long time to fully emerge from his elder sibling’s shadow.

Gatting was the last England captain to win the Ashes Down Under (2–1 in 1986–87), but those two Tests were his only victories in twenty-three attempts. He was a far better captain than those statistics suggest but latterly in his reign controversy and Gatting were constant bedfellows. A bristling, positive player who captained in the same style.

Atherton captained England more than any other player, often holding the team together single-handedly. The captaincy probably came a touch too early for him, but more significantly he was hamstrung by the system. In Ray Illingworth he had a chairman of selectors at odds with his vision of the future and he rarely had a fully fit bowling attack with which to work.

A prodigy as a player, with a fiery competitive side and a sharp cricket brain, Ponting was identified early as being the man to take over from Steve Waugh. Already a World Cup-winning captain before he became Test captain, Ponting continued the good work of Mark Taylor and Waugh until he came unstuck in the Ashes of 2005. He got stronger from that experience and whitewashed England 5–0 in 2006–07 as Australia equalled their own 16-game winning streak, but has looked less impressive without Warne and McGrath bowling for him. Another defeat in 2009 would represent an indelible stain on his legacy, but were he to win in England without the great names of the recent past – a challenge he is relishing – Ponting could yet be considered as being the best of the lot since 1981.

So this leaves three men on either side, all of whom in my opinion have special captaincy gifts: Brearley, Hussain and Vaughan for England and Border, Taylor and Waugh for Australia.

Hussain dragged England up from ninth in the world table to become a respected force in the game, enjoying tremendous success especially on the subcontinent. In Ashes battles he came up short, losing 4–1 on both occasions to Steve Waugh’s stellar side, and he never made an Ashes hundred as captain. He was a good motivator, particularly of the previously unfathomable Andy Caddick, but his brusque manner did not endear him to all. ‘Nasser was more like a schoolteacher with us,’ said Flintoff. ‘He was a very passionate captain and very astute, but he did it with a style I didn’t particularly like. He was confrontational and put a lot of undue pressure on the lads at times.’

Hussain makes no apology for challenging his players’ standards; he demanded more and most of the time he got more, paving the way for Vaughan’s more relaxed style. Tactically, according to Alec Stewart, Hussain was the best. ‘He had a great feel for the game and always seemed to be one step ahead of the opposition whether it was field placings or working batsmen out,’ Stewart said. ‘In terms of his man-management, because of his passion, volatility and desire to win, he wasn’t always the most popular person.’

Ruthless in the execution of his strategies, which often involved radical field placings, and often insecure about his own worth in the team – yet simultaneously not that bothered about being liked – there are distinct parallels between Hussain and one of the iconic Ashes captains, Douglas Jardine. Jardine’s run of poor batting form, indeed, led to his offer to stand down before the third Test in 1932–33, much as Hussain sounded out Gough and Atherton about his own future in 2000. Both were hugely driven men, from across the generations, and you can bet Hussain would have gone for a bit of ‘bodyline’ if he had captained in Jardine’s day. He was a fine captain, especially given the dirty job that his own age presented him, but in an Ashes context his team’s record means the best he can get from me is bronze.

In contrast to Hussain, both Vaughan and Brearley were Ashes winners, the latter a serial one. Brearley’s achievements in 1981 were all the more remarkable because he was drafted in from outside the team for the third Test, winning three out of the next four to take the Ashes 3–1. He transformed a team that had forgotten how to win, and like an alchemist extracted super-human feats out of Ian Botham, whose demeanour under Brearley contrasted so markedly from his own time at the helm.

The ultimate test of captaincy in the field is to defend low targets and he did so remarkably at Headingley and Edgbaston, although he did benefit from having Botham and Willis, still England’s two highest Test wicket-takers, at his disposal. ‘Mike’s field placings on the last day at Edgbaston in 1981 were magnificent,’ said Botham. ‘I don’t recall him missing a single trick. With so few runs to play with, yet needing to take wickets regularly, the situation was very tricky. If you kept fielders up around the bat to take the catches, you gave batsmen undeserved runs, which always upsets the bowler. Spread the field out to stop the runs and you missed the chance of taking the catches that could swing the match your way.

‘The way Mike set the field he was able to do both. He was able to put pressure on the batsmen and fill them with fear and trepidation even when he permitted himself only four fielders in close catching positions and had the rest spread almost around the boundary. The batsmen found their most productive scoring strokes were blocked everywhere they looked. It must have appeared that England had twice as many fielders out there. It was an object lesson in the art of field placing.’

Brearley’s calmness and quiet confidence transmitted through to his players and he could get inside players’ minds like the psychotherapist he later became. He could never seem to apply the motivational magic to his own game, however. He never scored a Test hundred and averaged only in the early 20s. As great a captain as he was, in this current era he wouldn’t have got into the team, which rules him out as my top choice.

Michael Vaughan would be my pick as England’s Ashes captain of the last 28 years. While England’s sudden resurgence under Brearley was more dramatic, Vaughan’s building of a winning team does not suffer by comparison for being more gradual. Brearley’s early wins were against a much weaker official Australia side coming to terms with the losses of senior players to Packer’s World Series Cricket. He then beat a Kim Hughes side in transition, whose best player, Greg Chappell, stayed at home; Vaughan beat a full strength (apart from when McGrath stepped on the ball prior to the start of the Edgbaston Test) Australian side, which had been the best in the world for a decade and was captained by a leader who had already lifted the World Cup.

Like Brearley, Vaughan threw more of his energies into his team than his own batting but unlike Brearley he could produce with the bat when needed. Australia feared him as a player after his three hundreds in 2002–03, and he lit up Old Trafford with a sublime hundred in 2005 that spoke volumes about his intent. Vaughan beat Australia at their own game. He not only pulled performances out of key players but with a steely Jardine-like conviction he also inspired the whole group to follow an aggressive game plan. When the crunch matches got tight, moreover, Vaughan never wavered for a second. ‘If we had lost our leader in 2005, the result of the Ashes would have been very different,’ said Trescothick. Vaughan, therefore, is a match for Brearley as a captain; as a player, he was in a different league.

Steve Waugh’s win-loss record as captain of Australia is second to none and he suffers by comparison to Border and Taylor only because they got there first in Australia’s modern ‘golden age’. Border was the post-Packer pioneer, who re-built the Australian side in his own image, while Taylor then picked up the baton and sprinted past the West Indies to make his team the best in the world. That left Waugh with only India as the ‘final frontier’; and he tasted only thrilling defeat in 2001–02.

Great when his team were in the mire, Waugh was cut from the same cloth as Border while also possessing the same ruthless qualities as the great Sir Don Bradman, who led the 1948 Invincibles. Waugh understood the psychology of batsman-versus-bowler and used Australia’s dominance to intimidate. ‘A lot of people in Australia think Steve had the best team, while Taylor was the best captain,’ said Vaughan. ‘I never saw it that way. He made it uncomfortable for you, even in that over before lunch. He wouldn’t let you have any easy over. He was always testing you mentally.’

From his hundreds in 1989 to his annihilation of Hussain’s team in 2002–03, Waugh’s resolute batting and latterly his leadership were as much features of the Ashes in his era as Shane Warne’s bags of tricks. On the field he left a legacy of invincibility; off it he bonded his players at a deeper level. Waugh took Australia forward, no question, but it’s just that his predecessors had the greater journey.

Allan Border sat in the dressing-room at the MCG, having just lost the Ashes to Mike Gatting’s tourists of 1986–87, and decided enough was enough. He was a tough player who led from the front by scoring bucket loads of runs, but it had not been sufficient to bring home the Ashes. It needed something more, a lot more.

Border’s Australia then won a thrilling last Test in Sydney and while all the Poms wondered what all the misplaced jubilation was about, for it was they who had won the Ashes, it proved a crucial turning point; indeed, Border would not lose another Ashes Test until his very last one at the Oval in 1993, some six-and-a-half years later. ‘Nobody I played with or against taught me more about the game,’ said Warne. ‘His wisdom went beyond the mechanics of how to grip a ball or hold a bat. Border was a streetwise cricketer – he had to be to come through those dark days.’

Border won the World Cup in 1987 and the Ashes three times. Of his 156 Tests he played 153 of them consecutively between March 1979 and March 1994, captaining on 93 occasions. Border saw it all and laid the foundations for Australia’s subsequent success.

Mark Taylor, though, is my selection as Australia’s number one modern Ashes captain. By his own admission, he was not as good a player as either Waugh or Border. And while he didn’t have to overcome the difficulties of Border, neither did he quite possess the record of Waugh. Yet Taylor did oversee the key triumph in the Caribbean to leapfrog the West Indies to the top of the world rankings and he won three Ashes series, the last without Warne for all but the final Test.

Batting-wise, Taylor would not weaken Australia’s best side, and although he would come under pressure from Slater, Langer and Boon he has proved without doubt that he could handle it: his century at Edgbaston in the 1997 Ashes was one of the bravest hundreds under pressure any captain can have scored.

Taylor was a fine communicator who brought out the best in his players. Where Border and Waugh were liked by some, and respected by all, Taylor was liked and respected by everyone. His team played hard but did not resort to the more unsavoury tactics which at times characterised the regimes of the other two. Mike Atherton, his long-time opponent, has him tactically in front of his modern rivals, too.

The main reason Taylor gets my nod, though, is that everything he did was for the good of the team. His decision to bat first in 1997 on damp pitches at Old Trafford and Edgbaston could never be construed as anything but selfless considering the pressure he’d be under opening the batting. Moreover, in Peshawar in 1998–99, he refused to go past Sir Don Bradman’s highest Australian Test score of 334, opting to declare to give his team the best chance of victory. And, finally, he retired at the ideal time for Steve Waugh to take the team forward again. That he conducted himself at the time with an understated dignity and little fanfare surprised no one.

So there you have it: an Ashes battle contested between Mark Taylor’s Aussies and Michael Vaughan’s Poms. Perhaps, in addition, these are the two composite teams from 1981 to 2007 who would fight it out:

But what of the 2009 Ashes contest which is so eagerly awaited, on both sides of the globe? At the time of writing, it is perhaps the most deliciously unpredictable series for two decades. Could it even turn out to be every bit as thrilling as the epic of 2005? Will the calm and dependable Andrew Strauss, appointed England’s captain in succession to Kevin Pietersen, lead England into Ashes action and lay to rest his own captaincy ‘ghost’ of 2006–07? Many thought he should have led that trip instead of Flintoff, an undercurrent that was increasingly present in England’s dressing-room on that last tour. Perhaps, in the history books, things might work out well for him.

Flintoff’s captaincy days seem behind him, meanwhile, but what of Pietersen? He has expressed an interest in having another crack at the job some day, but then so did Botham at the end of the 1981 series and the selectors never came knocking again. Ponting, from an Australian viewpoint, is overseeing a side in transition. Forced into blooding a swathe of newcomers at the start of 2009, he demonstrated his own resilience as captain by leading Australia to a notable series victory in South Africa. Reinvigorated by the youthful exuberance of his team, Ponting believes his legacy will be determined by what lies ahead rather than by his achievements in the glorious era of Warne and McGrath.

And what of beyond 2009? There is no doubt the Australian policy of grooming their next captain achieves a continuity and direction that is England’s to envy, as last winter’s Pietersen fiasco illustrates. It makes you think that we can predict with some certainty that Michael Clarke, if not Ponting, will be leading Australia in England in the 2013 Ashes. As for the identity of England’s leader, it’s a case of names in a hat: Alastair Cook anyone?

The amount of injuries England have carried into their last few Ashes Tours, meanwhile, cannot be a coincidence. Angus Fraser sustained a serious hip injury on the 1990–91 tour, while in 1994–95 the England squad was simply decimated by a stream of injuries: six replacements were required. Yet perhaps England’s last two tours have been even worse. In 2002–03 Gough and Flintoff never got on the park, Thorpe didn’t make it to the airport and Chris Silverwood turned up as a replacement, having been bowled into the ground in county cricket. In 2006–07 Giles and Flintoff were never properly match-fit, Vaughan and Simon Jones were injured, Trescothick was mentally shot to bits and Harmison all over the place.

‘We had an unbelievable run with injuries,’ said Duncan Fletcher, the England coach. ‘That’s not an excuse, it’s a fact. We lost our captain, one of our best fast bowlers, our opening batsman before the Tests began, while our spinner and premier all-rounder were fighting back after lengthy lay-offs. If you’d taken away four of their key players – say Ponting, Hayden, Warne and Lee – and we’d been at full strength, it might have been a very different story. That’s effectively what we are talking about.’

After the high of the 2005 Ashes victory, however, there was an opportunity for England’s relatively young side to mount a consistent challenge to Australian pre-eminence in Test cricket. Instead, someone organised tours to Pakistan and India in the same winter and the wheels quickly fell off. If England are ever to be successful again Down Under, they need to start well. Not since 1954–55 has either side come from behind to win an Ashes series in Australia.

The itinerary in the build-up to an Ashes tour needs careful and intelligent planning. The Aussies had a boot camp before 2006–07, even the Stanford All-Stars had a boot camp; England, by contrast, lurch from one series to another and are never right for Australia. Perhaps, ahead of the four-yearly Ashes tour, England’s summer Test and one-day international schedule should be curtailed in mid-August. That would give England’s chosen players the opportunity to rest longer while also creating time to play a series of proper practice matches in Australia. It’s not much to ask of the England and Wales Cricket Board, is it? After all, it is the Ashes – which for cricketers, both English and Australian, is the game’s greatest prize, for reasons quite impossible to measure.

ENGLAND	AUSTRALIA
1 Gooch	1 Taylor^*
2 Vaughan^*	2 Hayden
3 Gower	3 Ponting
4 Pietersen	4 Waugh M.
5 Gatting	5 Border
6 Botham	6 Waugh S.
7 Flintoff	7 Gilchrist+
8 Knott+	8 Warne
9 Emburey	9 McDermott
10 Harmison	10 Lillee
11 Willis	11 McGrath