Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind

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He just seems to enjoy the feeling of having the ball on his strings,” said the former world number one Mats Wilander, in wonderment. In The Art of Captaincy, his treatise on leadership and motivation, he draws directly on his experience of man-managing a team, which included a pugnacious Ian Botham and Geoffrey Boycott, to explain what it takes to be a leader on and off the field. How does one balance the long term vs short term, deal with the experienced and novice, democracy versus control, individual requirements vs teams etc? I have always felt we can learn a lot from sport and sportsmen/women, their worlds are mere projections of our own onto a stage, but unlike most human beings, their actions are analysed by millions, sometimes hundreds of millions. Reality is more complex; our reasons for being trapped are more deep-seated, and the ways in which resistance to insight and to change occurs are multiple.

I'm not going to dress it up as a 'Management and Leadership' book, but I've read it only for my purposes.It is not patronising or superior, it is not centred around one individual or event but radiates outwards in a manner at once inclusive. Some of the player anecdotes do belong to a bygone age though, as Brearley himself notes, many problems that we regard as modern nuisances are age-old.

The various developments that have taken effect in the game of cricket in the modern era has ensured that the captains have it tough on them compared to the captains who played the game during years prior to the decade of 1980-1990. Notwithstanding this there are many very interesting anecdotes, especially for those who remember cricket and cricketers of the 70's and 80s'. By this point in the memoir, we have heard enough to feel confident – more confident than he himself appears – that in him, if in few others with an education in philosophy, the subject has proven to be what Socrates claimed it was: “a preparation for dying”. Brearley links his life experiences, his academic training, and his wide reading with this eventual profession.In another place he says, “In moves towards complexity or simplicity, music and analysis can mirror each other. The common ground between Freud and Wittgenstein, and the later psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion who modified some of Freud’s theories is discussed in a refreshingly original way. The various out of the box peculiar tactics deployed by wily captains like Douglas Jardine and Nasser Hussain against the likes of Sir Donald Bradman and Sachin Tendulkar respectively, to contain these run machines vaguely indicate the manner in which the art of captaincy has evolved over time and different eras. Firstly on the up side, it brings out a huge amount of detail and makes one aware of just how broad and multifaceted such a role is, and this is quite expansive to the outlook.

After all, he says, ‘captaining ourselves, like captaining a team, requires a willingness to allow thoughts and feelings their space’. It sounds contrived, but Brearley’s skill as a knowing – although never self-deprecating – narrator makes it work.Wittgenstein’s image of philosophy as a way of showing the fly out of the fly-bottle is unsatisfactory, says Brearley. It’s a pity that Brearley doesn’t explore the same story in On Form – perhaps he felt that Papineau had claimed it – because it touches on the core psychoanalytic question of how much we know about what we desire.

Brearley addresses certain tricky aspects of the game like sledging, appealing which impact the way the game is viewed. Brearley's anecdotes, historical connections all bring in a clear stately aura which we now miss in the T20 era.attains a positive pinnacle through the course of the read with the author emphasizing the importance of developing and maintaining healthy team dynamics and balance.