Prematurely greying, sometimes bearded, always slightly frayed around the edges, Mike Brearley was not a batsman one wrote home about. In 39 Tests for England, his tentative, painfully slow brand of defensive optimism at the crease never yielded a century; indeed, yielded no more than 20-odd runs per innings if his average means anything.
And yet, for five years in the late 1970s, he was an automatic selection for his country. To say that his name was the first pencilled into the team list would be to do him a disservice: it was engraved on a bronze plaque and bolted to the selectors’ door.
The reason was his captaincy. An impressive academic record at Cambridge, where he eschewed the traditional student-sportsman’s subjects of pottery and astrology in favour of moral sciences and classics, are often presented as evidence of a rare mind, followed with the faulty (and fairly snobbish) assumption that it was his intellect that made him one of the best captains in the game’s history.
Ironically, it was a muscle-bound brute who best defined Brearley’s gift: Australian fast-bowler Rodney Hogg spoke truly when he famously remarked that the Englishman had ”a degree in people”.
It was a qualification that made his poor batting all but irrelevant: a truly great captain, who takes wickets with the clarity of his insights and the courage of his convictions, can be more than tolerated as a passenger.
Such an idea is alien to one-day cricket, in which adequate contributions in all disciplines are considered more valuable than high-class specialisations: a utilitarian, faintly Marxist outlook, suited to a game designed for uncritical consumption by the masses.
Usually it works well enough — naturally evolving teams push a leader to the fore, one-day cricket’s equivalent of the floor shop-steward — but the moment the politburo engineers a team from nothing, with no history or nation to give it backbone, the absence of genuine leadership becomes glaring.
Which is why Australia thrashed the World XI in the opening game of the three-match Super Series in Melbourne on Wednesday. In the boxed-in gloom of the Telstra Dome, the world’s superstars had everything except a guiding light: like floats in a parade, they drifted about, huge and imposing individuals, all in search of someone to pull the ropes.
What they wanted was a cricket captain, a Michael Vaughan or Stephen Fleming or Inzamam ul-Haq. What they got was Shaun Pollock, whose last taste of captaincy involved a humiliating public defrocking, and whose record against Australia while at the helm (five wins in 18 matches) was desperate. They may as well have put Brian Lara in charge.
Not that one can hold Pollock accountable for the batting of Team Overkill, and his stern words to the media afterwards showed a man secure in his position and career. In fact, it’s possible he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time: given the wildly disparate players, techniques and philosophies flung together at short notice inside the World XI, a batting collapse was in retrospect the only predictable result.
Still, it was a pity that the Dome was less than half full for Wednesday’s game: Daniel Vettori’s beautiful bowling deserved a bigger audience. (One hopes Pollock and Graeme Smith will at some stage hang him upside down on a hook in the dressing room until he divulges how he has managed to concede just 4.07 per over to Australian batsmen over a career spanning a decade, a strangulation of the highest order in the modern game). It would also have been nice for Australia to receive the applause of their stung and embittered fans for a fighting — if sometimes wobbly — performance.
A dream team in retreat; mauled champions back on home turf; and a six-day Super Test a week away. Enough time for Smith to gain a degree in people? Next Friday is getting more interesting by the day.