There is a broad consensus that Joe Root will be a good captain but there are no guarantees. There can be surprises – in both directions.
Take Nasser Hussain. When Mike Atherton resigned in 1998 Hussain was a candidate to take over but the majority reckoned he was too (delete as appropriate) grumpy/hot-headed/introspective/selfish/unpopular for the job. Instead Alec Stewart was appointed for 15 months before Hussain was finally given the reins in 1999. Whereupon it soon became clear that Hussain was a sharp, intelligent captain on and off the field – though he could still be rather grumpy now and again. After his first overseas tour as captain, a potentially volatile one to Pakistan, he was even praised for his diplomacy as well as his tactical nous.
Take Keith Fletcher, Hussain’s first county captain, and universally regarded in the 70s and 80s as a superb leader of Essex, where he was proactive, adventurous and shrewd. When succeeding Mike Brearley as England captain in 1981 he was, by contrast, excessively cautious when leading the side against Sunil Gavaskar’s India in a series which did its best to annihilate Test cricket as a spectacle. He adopted a similarly conservative approach when England coach.
At a lower level two of the best captains I played under in first-class cricket, Brian Rose at Somerset and Graeme Wood in Western Australia, were considered – before their appointments – to be unsuitable since they were so self-absorbed. One can never be sure.
One simple, solid piece of advice stands the test of time. Be yourself. Geoff Miller once explained the pitfalls after his experience of leading Derbyshire. He followed the South African Eddie Barlow as captain and initially he tried to emulate him by being an effervescent, belligerent, disciplinarian constantly bellowing at his team-mates. This was not the real Miller and he soon had the good sense to realise it is not possible to sustain an act in a cricket dressing room. Too much time is spent there.
Root takes on the job with minimal training so even his team-mates will be curious to see how he goes about his business in July. The only other candidate with captaincy experience was Stuart Broad. He led England in two T20 World Cups and it is hard to gauge how significant that evidence is since it is such a different undertaking. However England’s record in those tournaments, in which the team never threatened to progress to the semi-finals, would not have enhanced his CV.
Whether Root graduates to the white-ball captaincy, thereby emulating the career path of Virat Kohli, remains to be seen. There is an argument that being a T20 captain is even more taxing than being Test captain out on the field. In T20 cricket there is no time to think and every decision is irreversible. In Test cricket there is often the chance to retrieve a situation after a tactical error.
A decade or more ago the prevailing wisdom was that there should be one captain for all formats since the authority of the Test captain might be undermined when responsibilities are shared (as it happens this was the view of Hussain and Miller). This thinking led to the appointment of Kevin Pietersen as captain of England in 2008 since Andrew Strauss’s one-day credentials (especially in T20) were not compelling.
Now there is a different outlook. The need for a captain for all formats, which was always a dubious aspiration, seems to have diminished; indeed there may be a virtue in sharing the load. In the short term Root will surely be in the best England white-ball teams but there is no urgency for him to captain them. For the Champions trophy this summer Eoin Morgan will be in charge. Beyond that there is the possibility of Jos Buttler, the current vice-captain in white-ball cricket, taking over if Morgan has faltered.
So it may be best for Root to concentrate on the Test team for the time being. Here there are interesting issues. There has been much written about England’s “new generation” – and some of it has splurged out of this laptop. There is the notion that, to Trevor Bayliss’s delight, Root with Ben Stokes as his sidekick will oversee an England team eager to play their Test cricket with fresh freedom and aggression.
This is exciting; it is also easier said than done. It requires a very good team to play with abandon and to be successful. The best ones – like the Australians under Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh – score runs rapidly and are as miserly as Scrooge with the ball.
But it is not just the captain and coach who dictate the approach of a Test team; the selection policy is obviously relevant and here there will be an intriguing teaser for the new regime. There is a good case for England’s top three to be Alastair Cook, Haseeb Hameed and Keaton Jennings in the next Test with Root reverting to No4. That trio at the top of the order may be regarded as the best available but they are not the most dynamic.
So does one pick the best players or those that fit the pattern of play one craves? My inclination would be the former. A trickier problem may be handling a bowling attack, whose key men, Broad and Jimmy Anderson (835 Test wickets between them) are probably past their peak, something for the new England captain to ponder as he strums his guitar in the Caribbean.
