The Art of Captaincy

On the technical side of cricket you have the coaches, the physios, the selectors, the players, and you also have the most important player on your team, the captain, which is probably the hardest job of all.

You might think it's easy being a captain. After all, all you have to do is choose whether to bat or bowl first, choose the batting order and choose the fielding positions and choose who bowls. Simple, but it's one of the toughest and most demanding jobs in the game. If you make the wrong choice at the toss, you may come to regret it. Take Nasser Hussain at Brisbane in 2002 in the first Ashes test. He won the toss, made the wrong choice, bowled first and Australia reached 364-2 at the end of day one. Or if you put the fielders in the wrong positions. It's very well putting all your fielders on the boundary to prevent the fours and sixes, but then it's just easy for the batsmen to hit the ball gently and get a couple whilst the fielder has to run in. On the other hand, if you set all your fielders inside the circle, then the batsmen can just hit you over the top for the boundaries. And if you pick the wrong bowlers, you're going to get smacked around the park, you can't set a field for poor bowling. If you've got to pick death bowlers, are you going to pick the economical but non-wicket taking bowlers or the expensive and wicket-taking bowlers. The captain has to be the man who decides which is which.

Which is why the captain has the most difficult job on the field. If the team does badly, then the captain is one of the first to get the blame, but if he gets it right then he is praised, but what makes him good? A good captain is thinking 100% of the time about how to stem the run flow and which bowlers to bowl, and he will usually figure out something which will turn things around if it is going wrong. If a batsman's best stroke is too hit the call through cover then he can put a fielder in the cover region of the pitch, if a batsman's weakness is playing spin bowling then he can put on his spinner. A good captain will know exactly what to do in certain situations. Take Michael Vaughan for example, he is regarded by many as the best captain in the world for the reason that he can turn around a losing position. Take the England V New Zealand game in the final Commonwealth Bank Series group match for example. New Zealand were soaring at well above the rate in the first few overs of their run chase, but Vaughan took off the expensive bowlers, changed the field to make it difficult for the Kiwis to score and Vaughan turned around a seemingly losing position into a victory.

Good captains know what is the best for their team, a good captain won't keep his field the same for the whole innings, or keep on the expensive bowlers and not take them off, he will change the field nearly every ball if he needs too and hope to compromise the batting team's performance, he will put on his more economical bowlers and he will know exactly what to do. He can win the game or lose it by his decisions out in the middle, which is why even the best teams would be nowhere without a captain. The job of a captain is the most difficult on the pitch and only the best can pull it off, and in those tough situations, you can easily tell the men out from the boys.