Such was Mike Brearley standing in 1981, his last summer as captain of the England cricket team, that the writer of a letter to the Guardian claimed to have seen him set the field and then "look up at the sun and indicate that it should move a little squarer".
For me, it was a wonder to have a representative of liberal North London occupying the most prestigious position in what can be a very Tory game. It was as though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn were leading England out.
Of his 31 tests as England captain, Brearley won 18 and lost only 4; and in that summer of 1981, he resumed command when England were a test down to Australia. Under his leadership, the team reeled off three consecutive wins, with a previously despondent Ian Botham playing like a cricketing Superman.
His path to the England captaincy, despite his public school and Cambridge background, was not a conventional one. He made enough runs for the university and Middlesex to be picked for the 1964/5 England tour of South Africa at the age of 22, but after that – as a postgraduate student and then a lecturer – he played for Middlesex only in the university vacations, like at old-fashioned amateur.
Brearley showed his mettle in 1968 when the England selectors left the mixed-race Basil D’Oliveira out of their party to tour Apartheid South Africa to avoid a political row. He insisted on seconding the motion condemning the selectors at a meeting of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which was then the game’s effective governing body.
Soon afterwards, he became a lecture in philosophy at Newcastle University, in thrall to the later Wittgenstein like most young academic philosophers of his generation. I spent most of Brearley’s reign as England captain studying the subject at York, and we discovered that he had unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship there.
“I can’t escape the feeling that you’re slightly disappointed in me,” said the man who had got the job instead. We weren’t, but even liberals are allowed to have heroes.
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By the time Brearley retired from cricket in 1982 he was already training as a psychoanalyst, and he was later to serve as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Fans and journalists were interested in how his psychoanalytic studies had informed his captaincy – the Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously said that Brearley had “a degree in people” – but Brearley himself has emphasised that there was an effect in the opposite direction.
In his latest book, Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, he writes:
Playing cricket, and captaining, taught me a lot about what makes players tick, both those on the same side and opponents, and it stimulated my interest in what others and I myself feel, how we respond to pressure, how we impinge on each other, and so on.
There are of course two main features of the job of captaincy – one to do with tactics and strategy, the other to do with human relations. the latter calls for personal qualities of empathy, truthfulness and courage.
But not everyone was convinced. Brearley recalls one patient asking him: “How can a little boy like you, playing latency games with other little boys, have anything to offer a mature woman like me?”
Why an educated man should spend his time playing games is a question that clearly occupied Brearley even before he turned to psychoanalysis as a profession. His first cricket book The Ashes Regained, an account of his first series as England captain in 1977 written with the journalist Dudley Doust, includes a chapter on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the author of Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element of Culture.
This may have nonplussed readers more interested in how Brearley persuaded Derek Underwood to bowl over the wicket at Greg Chappell in the second innings at Old Trafford.
In Turning Over the Pebbles, Brearley discusses the writings of Wilfred Bion and his belief that a game must be played purely for its own sake. Bion wrote in his memoirs:
Games were in themselves enjoyable. I was fortunate not to have had them buried under a mass of subsidiary irrelevancies – such as winning matches, keeping my ghastly sexual impulses from obtruding, and keeping a fit body the for the habitation of a supposedly healthy mind.
For Bion, unlike Brearley, even being captain detracted from the game.
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One of the great things about Mike Brearley’s books are the indexes. His willingness to discuss psychoanalysis, philosophy and high culture alongside cricket produces some striking juxtapositions:
- Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
- Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff;
- counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
- Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
- idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
- Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
- Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
- Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil
- Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris;
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‘The best leaders are great teachers,’ says an article I’ve turned up in the Harvard Business Review, and there was always something of the teacher about Brearley. A photograph that shows him, perched on a windowsill, answering questions at a press conference as England captain could easily be of a friendly young academic leading a seminar.
As captain of Middlesex, he challenged the dressing-room ethos that young players should be seen and not heard. If the county was fielding and the game was in danger of drifting, he would start asking his players, the younger ones included, what they thought he should do.
Some youngsters welcomed this more than others, and I’ve recently heard two of them talk about Brearley’s approach. Simon Hughes, now a cricket journalist, had thought “Why’s the England captain asking me what we should do?” – he rather sounded as though he still thinks that – and felt vindicated when the bowling change he suggested failed to bring a wicket.
By contrast, Mike Gatting, who was a teenager when he made his Middlesex debut, remembered being flustered the first time Brearley turned to him – “But I made sure I had something sensible to say the next time he asked me.” Gatting went on to captain England himself.
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