Mike Brearley

All England cricket captains have their moment in the sun. During Test matches, their tactics - in particular field placings and bowling changes - come under minute scrutiny. As a result, England captains can and do become national headline news, lauded or vilified, according to circumstance.

In the century-and-a-half since England began playing Test cricket, eighty-two men have captained the side. Most have faded gracefully into history, taking their triumphs and disasters with them, remembered by cricket buffs but forgotten by everyone else. A handful, however, have retained a resonance in the popular imagination – their names, for better or worse, preserved for posterity: Douglas Jardine, the architect of ‘Bodyline’ in the 1930s would be one. Another is Mike Brearley, apotheosised as the inspirational tactical genius behind England’s never-to-be-forgotten victory over Australia in the 1981 Ashes. Brearley will be coming to Sherborne on Saturday 17th May to discuss his latest book, Turning Over the Pebbles, and, no doubt, to regale us with some good cricketing anecdotes while he’s at it.

Mike Brearley had an unusual career for an England cricket captain. A high-scoring batsman and successful captain at Cambridge University in the early 1960s, he played first-class cricket only intermittently in his twenties between stints as a philosophy don at Newcastle University and in California. He played his first Test Match in 1976 at the age of 34 and was appointed captain the following year. Reappointed to the captaincy in 1981 after Ian Botham’s resignation, he engineered a remarkable turnaround in England’s fortunes. Aided and abetted by a reinvigorated Botham, England won three Tests on the trot, including the famous victory at Headingley achieved after England had followed on, to beat Australia and win the Ashes. Retiring from cricket in 1982, he trained in psychoanalysis, a discipline in which he has worked ever since.

Turning Over the Pebbles is Brearley’s ninth book, the best-known being his 1987 best-seller The Art of Captaincy. Pebbles is the memoir of an intelligent, thoughtful and erudite man who also happened to be a very accomplished cricketer, looking back over his life from the vantage point of late maturity. There is much to enjoy as Brearley discourses learnedly about the classics, philosophy, literature, music and much besides as well, of course, as cricket and psychotherapy. The Marxist cricket writer C.L.R. James, in his book Beyond a Boundary, posed the question, ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ He would, one suspects, have been happy to endorse Brearley’s standing as a cricketing savant with all the advantages conferred by a deep cultural and intellectual hinterland.