Becoming the Jo(s)ker...

Can a captain change their spots... and should they bother?

Smile Jos, it might never happen…

A few years ago I arrived at the Wisden Almanack dinner somewhat late and in a dishevelled state. I looked up the stairs and saw my friend and club captain Charlie talking to a small, slight figure with a shock of white hair. They had their backs to me so it wasn’t until I got to the balcony that I realised it was Mike Brearley.

We chatted for a few minutes, long enough to realise that the great man still had the Brearley aura, that sharp sense of presence that comes with a life like his. His voice was soft, his manner kind and warm, but there was something else, too, an authority completely at odds with the appearance of a twinkly old man.

Subsequently I’ve spoken to him for a podcast, read more of his books and heard about him from Geoffrey Boycott. The impression remains: Brearley’s public face was his public face. He was the same way with everyone and he had never changed.

Mike Brearley was one of the few cricketers to whom Geoffrey would let his guard down. Before the final Test of his last Ashes series in 1981, short of runs and perhaps sensing the end, Boycott sought reassurance from his captain. Brearley placed the same arm around him that he placed around Ian Botham before the Headingley game. He soothed Geoffrey towards a less anxious, less cautious frame of mind. Boycott walked out at the Oval and made 137, the penultimate Test century of his epic career.

Boycott and Botham could not be more different as cricketers or as men, but Brearley understood them both. His inherent gifts were suited to his style of captaincy and to his later career in psychotherapy.

England’s best captains since have been the same, in that they played their natural games. Nasser Hussain, Michael Vaughan, Andrew Strauss, Eoin Morgan, Ben Stokes… all did the job as their personality dictated they should. So, arguably, did Alastair Cook and Joe Root, England’s two long-serving Test skippers and, perhaps not unconnectedly, two highest run scorers. Something about their personalities militated against the captaincy role, not for the want of effort. It dragged them down.

And any captain is at least partially a slave to their team. No amount of psychological insight or tactical brilliance can overcome an essential overmatching, of just not quite being good enough. Brearley could handle Botham and Boycott, Vaughan understood Pietersen and Flintoff, Morgan led the most stellar array of white ball talent England has ever put down on a team sheet. But they all benefited from their services, too, their successes were made possible by the brilliance of their players.

Eoin Morgan had that generational team, and the financial muscle and four year plan of Strauss and the ECB. He had the potential of a home World Cup final and he had the pressure of it, too. There was something ineffable about the way that he projected himself. He fused the will of his team as well as the talent. He created something that went beyond just cricket, and when England absolutely, positively, definitely had to do it, when they got that chance of a lifetime with everything on the line, they took it.

Thinking back to the last moment of that final, Morgan’s captaincy got Jos Buttler’s extraordinary athleticism and presence of mind as he gathered Jason Roy’s rocket throw and dived backwards to the stumps. It was the final act of what must have been the most draining of matches – Buttler had not only kept for fifty overs plus the super over, he had played an innings pretty much against type, batting 94 minutes and 60 deliveries for his 59, before batting again in the super over too. Perhaps only Ben Stokes gave more physically and emotionally to the day.

That performance and many others have made Jos Buttler an all-time great of the white ball game. He won his first tournament as captain, the 2022 ICC World T20, an event he and Stokes again contributed to magnificently with the bat. He seemed to have the authority and clarity needed to be an effective captain, but in retrospect perhaps these were the last vapours of Morgan’s era.

He goes to the Champions Trophy up right against it. He has a new coach and a less good team in unfavourable conditions. There is a rebuild coming, and it won’t be McCullum who is sacked if England play as they did in India a couple of weeks ago.

The Baz credo is clear. It’s about enjoying the day ahead, ‘living where your feet are’ and not complicating things. McCullum has told Jos to smile, but is smiling really Jos Buttler’s natural state?

From the outside, no. He is a confidence player, a more insular personality than some of those around him, prone to lows as well as highs. His form has ebbed and flowed with his state of mind across his career, and it is very apparent in his batting. He comes across as a superb vice captain rather than an innate alpha leader. That is no reflection on his commitment or his knowledge, simply on how he is as a human being. He feels the weight of things.

Swaggering about smiling just dosn’t seem to be him, and it feels like a mistake to ask him to try. He’s in bind, too, caught between coaches and eras, holding on as one team fades away and another emerges. It’s transitional and awkward, less than a great cricketer deserves. Does he look at how Joe Root has slipped back into the ranks and scored more runs than ever before? Does that make Jos Buttler wonder? Captaincy is too often seen as some kind of crowning honour rather than simply another specialist function of the team.

Boycott said that he felt for Brearley and his struggles with the bat in international cricket. He averaged 22.88 in Tests and never made a hundred. Mike Brearley is far too intelligent not to have sensed that sympathy from his team, and he once said this of being remembered for his captaincy: “I suppose it’s a bit like you might be a very good teacher of English literature, but actually you really wish you had written the novels.”