Mike Brearley on Tony Greig, cricket and psychoanalysis

Mike Brearley is the only England cricket captain to become president of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

While he, a son of liberal North London, led England in the late Seventies and again in the famous Ashes series of 1981, it was though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn had been put in charge.

For a while in the Sixties he was a philosophy lecturer and just played cricket in the university vacations like an old-fashioned amateur. He lectured at Newcastle, and while I was doing my philosophy degree at York we found out that he had also applied for a post there too.

I recall the late Roger Woolhouse, who had got the job instead and was liked by everybody, saying he couldn't escape the feeling that we were slightly disappointed in him.

The whole of this Royal Society of Medicine video, where Brearley talks to Simon Wessely, is worth listening to, but I have picked out the section where he talks about Tony Greig.

This is because Brearley, as ever, is enlightening on his subject, and also because Greig's achievements as a captain and allrounder have been forgotten. His test figures bear comparison with Botham, Flintoff or Stokes.