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| Euclid: Captain of Geometry |
They say a
captain is only ever as good as his bowling attack. Well, maybe. But how good is a
bowling attack? Is this ability a fixed property, like the hardness of diamonds, or can
the captain get the most out of a bowling unit by deploying them wisely,
setting good fields, responding quickly to circumstances, and generally helping
the bowler find rhythm and confidence? Surely a bowling attack has a range, like tuning in a radio. The skipper has to try to eliminate the hiss and crackle of bad performance.
Yet it seems to
me also that a captain’s way of affecting things negatively (the game as a
whole, I mean, not just the bowling attack) probably outweighs his ability to affect
things for the better. That’s because his chances of influencing things
positively are constrained more tightly by the abilities of the players (getting
5% more out of Joe Bloggs is futile if you need James Anderson to solve your
problem), whereas things can become infinitely negative if a captain’s
decisions are atrocious and his (or her) team become so demoralised that they
lose any pride in their performance, all their resolve and drive. Glass ceiling, bottomless
cavern.
Some of
this occurred to me while watching the Ashes’ opening exchanges, although, in
many ways, captaining a club team and a national team are as night is to day.
The Test side will have a huge support staff around to enable the skipper to
concentrate on on-field matters (in theory, anyway), exactly the way it should
be, although there may still be some ego-massaging, some coaxing and cajoling
to do for the likes of Alastair Cook and, especially, Michael Clarke.
Anyway,
where the similarities between club captaincy and international captaincy are
most alike – assuming you don’t have a fully-fledged media pack on your case
night and day – is on the field. Yes, the weaponry you have at your disposal is vastly
different, but the principles of engagement and the nature of the conflict, remain,
in the abstract, the same, whatever the level. Bat versus Ball.
So, after
this Jonathan Trott-taking-guard of a pre-amble, I suppose I should re-velcro
my pads one final time, scratch one last line in the dirt, and elaborate upon what I
believe to be the crux of The Art of
Captaincy (apologies, Mr Brearley) when it comes to tactics. Hopefully, it might help provide a way
of tackling an at times very difficult job for young captains (the better you are, the more
difficult it feels because the more you perceive), who may
occasionally feel swamped by all the information that has to be processed and the personalities to be looked after. You need to think quick – with clarity and as
little noise as possible – so I would suggest the following might be a fruitful place to concentrate your attention...
First and
foremost, then, I believe the captain has to
properly and fully understand the precise balance of power between bat and ball
at any given time – which of course is constantly and subtly changing (the
good captain perceiving this like cattle sensing rain, ‘ahead of the game’, the
mediocre one doing so reactively, when the scoreboard makes it unquestionable)
– and then must act accordingly. Decisively. Projecting strength (or solutions)
as much as possible. Which
brings me on to the second point: once the balance of power is grasped and
adjustments have been made (to the field, to the bowling, to the plans), he
should not allow that to affect the manner, behaviour and alertness of the
team. As Shane Warne once said, if you turn up at a game halfway through, you
shouldn’t be able to tell what the state of the game is from the body language
of the players.
Of course,
all of this should not be a leadership responsibility that falls squarely and
solely with the captain. Managing the mood of the group is largely a
distraction for the captain and in a good, united team ought to be
self-policed. You need strong characters – be they quietly determined or vocal
and boisterous – dragging the team through, giving the captain the headspace to
think about the front lines, and, yes, little gee-ups to individual bowlers while the group
thermostat is set by others.
So, to
fully understand the balance between bat and ball is to imply understanding
several other things (par score for the conditions; the relative statistical or
abstract strength of the two sides; if not a knockout, the league situation and
the implications of different results, etc). But right at the coalface you must
deal with the next ball going down, and to do that you must also understand its
‘geometry’. This is the information that the captain must process: What is the point
of release (angle on the crease and the height)? What line is being bowled?
What swing is there? Is there any seam movement? What is the response off the
surface, bounce-wise? How is the batsman holding the bat: soft or hard hands;
closed or open face, hitting straight or square? And beyond the ‘geometry’ is
the intent: How hard is he hitting it? How aggressive is he generally? And how
is he responding to the unfolding match situation?
Nevertheless,
it is primarily the geometry (or is it the physics?) that will allow you to set
a good field, get the angles right, with minor tinkering according to the
balance of power. It is not about asking someone to bowl “good areas” – as Warne’s leg-spinning mentor
Terry Jenner once said, “it’s not where it lands that matters, it’s how it gets
there”. You need a mental picture of
where the ideal standard delivery of your bowler (not his absolute snorter) will come out and what the
batsman will likely do with it. Once you have that picture, then you will
start to get a feel for the types of angles where the ball is likely to go, the
ones that demand of this particular
batsman a greater element of risk (trying to hit it those three yards
straighter or squarer…). You pull them out of their comfort zone and create
opportunity: cat and mouse. It is then down to you to decide how many resources
you can commit to attack.
As any
player who played under me will vouch, I was hugely – and unapologetically –
fussy about the positioning of my fielders as a captain. There would be
occasional outbursts with repeat-offending wandering fielders. Then again, it
could be difficult in the midst of the hurly-burly of a game to communicate the reasoning behind
the differences in positions for two batsmen, particularly when they were both
right- or left-handed (swapping between the two helps the fielder ‘get it’),
even more so if you were not inclined to divulge this reasoning to the batsmen
– which wasn’t always the case, if buttons needed to be pushed and theatre created.
Windy conditions would exacerbate this. The signalling and gesticulations
occasionally got like Rafa BenÃtez working as an airport runway attendant.
But the primary point about the micro-adjustments made throughout the game is this: the captain
might not exactly know at the start of a batsman’s innings where he wants his
angles (in levels of cricket with video preparation, this is less the case, of
course). He will experiment and tinker as the game goes on. It’s guesswork.
All
captains will tell you that the most satisfying moments are when a hunch, off
the cuff, yields an instant wicket. It feels like free money, like winning the lottery. A hunch
is even more satisfying than when a plan works out – and, admittedly, there
isn’t much time for plans in club cricket, which rarely affords the opportunity
for a skipper to get beyond generalities (however sound the principles on which
they’re based) to specifics: “C’mon lads, keep going”; “Let’s just keep wickets
in tact until 30 overs and reassess”; “Let’s bowl on one side of the wicket”;
“Win or lose, always booze”…
A couple of
successful hunches have stuck in my mind – probably because, I think, of the
speed with which I acted upon them (and, perhaps, the rarity with which they
occurred). One was to dismiss the Meir Heath pro of the day, Carel Fourie, in a
low-scoring match at Moddershall. We were defending somewhere in the region of
150 and Fourie and Stonier had taken our derby rivals to 30 without loss inside
around eight overs. Iain Carr had bowled really well without reward, extracting
bounce and seam movement from the surface, beating the bat several times. I
noted that Fourie – once he got down that end after a period facing Shaun from
the pavilion end – was playing with low hands and even perhaps trying to play
slightly outside the line of the ball to cover the swing. There were three
balls left in the over and I suddenly had a picture of him nicking on to his
thigh pad from one that nipped back from Billy’s natural length. So, shouting
vaguely in the direction of the pavilion, I asked for a helmet to be brought
out. There was no acting twelfthers, of course; nor any manager or flunky to do it.
The few spectators that were there were disinclined to move. Rather than let
the hunch pass, I stopped the game while ‘Rick’ Astley – at fine leg but our
regular short-leg fielder – went to fetch his lid, while I offered the umpires some
diversionary flannel as they registered their unhappiness with the delay (their complaints weren’t quite as forthright as an out and out objection. Incidentally, the issue of over-rate penalties is an
interesting one; it’s perfectly valid to want to finish a game before 8.45pm,
of course, but then it seems pointless rushing through a game without tactical
reflection; such over-rate strictures are, I believe, detrimental to developing the art of
captaincy). Anyway, once Astley was in situ, and one of my fielders with psychiatric qualifications had dragged his unhappy mug down to fine leg for the
remainder of the over, Iain came barrelling in, all grunts and chafing inner
thighs, and, two balls later, did exactly what I’d envisaged (I envisage a lot
of things happening; they almost never do!). After that, the door was ajar –
what would have happened if they’d made twenty or so runs, or if, to not waste
those two minutes, I’d waited till the following over? – and the team promptly
burst through it. We won by 30 or so runs, I believe.
The second
occasion was a JCB Knockout final at Checkley. I’m guessing this was in 1998, a
season I skippered between Moddershall's first two titles when, as one of the younger
players in the team, I struggled at times to impose my will on senior players
used to winning or to get them to buy into my fussiness with the field (the pro
and skipper, Addo, had given me, as vice-captain and wicket-keeper, a certain
amount of responsibility with this). I grew tetchy. For various reasons – not
least because two of our best bowlers were infrequently inclined to do so – we
underperformed and it was a steep learning curve. But in this final, against Little
Stoke, the team that would end up winning Division 1A (as the Prem was then
known), we knew the Checkley wicket, generally, skidded on to the bat okay but
didn’t bounce much. Sort of glassy. Glenn Haywood took the new ball for us, a
short, bullishly strong bowler capable of very good pace when he clicked (enough, two years earlier, to
put Richard Harvey in hospital with a broken jaw, as well as demolishing Addo’s
castle and repeatedly sitting Hawk on his backside). I’d set a very
conservative 5-4 offside field: three in a ring each side, one slip, third man
and fine leg. In the third over, Heywood, now loose, suddenly got one to zip
through and bounce. Was it a new-ball wicket? Did I need more ‘proof’ that
there was life in the deck? Then again, it was Tony Dutton, a high-class player
and fixture in the Staffordshire team that won three Championships and two MCCA Knockout trophies between 1991 and 1993. The key man. Immediately, I moved our pro Addo from
mid-wicket to second slip. Immediately, Heywood got one in a similar spot, with
similar bounce, only this time found an edge off the shoulder of the bat that
flew straight into Addo’s mitts, which closed round the ball like the night
closes round a campsite on the Moorlands. Buzzing, on at least two levels.
Now, while
I appreciate you are probably at present standing in front of your computers
and giving me a round of applause, please don’t. Conversely, if you’re thinking
all of this is a bit of long-winded boasting, well, maybe (although I haven’t admitted that to myself, so am not going
to do it to you). But the broader point is to illustrate that it was an educated
guess based on the exact balance of power between bat and ball: the geometry of captaincy. Strip the
game back to that, while keep an eye on the energy-levels and confidence of
your bowlers, and you are focussed on the correct things.
I suppose
all of this is another, fancier way of saying something pretty obvious: captains,
you need to be able to read the game (better). But it is also more refined and
exact than that. If you told ten people – gnarled old veterans or fresh-faced
youngsters – that you need to read the game better, you’d get ten nods of
agreement (or ten like, durrrrrs) but
no-one would be any the wiser. OK, so I
need to read the game better; errrm… You’re simply saying what you need, as an end point, rather
than how it should be tackled, as a
process. This is the process, the details
that add up to the overall story of the game.
Reading the
game. Like any great book, a cricket match can be ‘read’ in many ways. That almost
infinite complexity is part of cricket’s richness as a sport, and often the way
a game is read says more about the temperament of the reader than the ‘reality’
of the match situation. Even so, whether your instincts are to gamble or to sit
in holding patterns and ‘wait for something to happen’, you still need to be
able to base your decision-making on a good reading of the balance between bat
and ball, given the conditions and the situation and the current use of
resources (whether you have bowlers up your sleeve to sustain pressure). And,
as I say, the nitty-gritty of this is the ‘geometry’ (or ‘physics’) of how the
ball is getting down the other end, the peculiarities of the batsman in trying
to deal with that, and – the details that you can alter, or simply get exactly
right and then leave unaltered – the exact angles you place your men to try and
make the game as difficult as possible for the opponent and so, slowly, alter
that balance of power.
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Previous columns for Moddershall CC's newsletter, 'Barnfields Buzz':
BB03: Chris Lewis: Still out in the Cold | The coldest cricket match I ever played
BB04: Sam Kelsall: Role Model | How a 15-year-old's standards inspired a team to the title
BB05: Astle la vista, Baby | Surrealism and hypocrisy with a NZ star
BB05: Astle la vista, Baby | Surrealism and hypocrisy with a NZ star
