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Published: 14 April, 2011
by MATTHEW LEWIN

Former England captain Mike Brearley took to the crease at Burgh House, to discuss cricket tactics – and psychoanalysis 

ALTHOUGH the England cricket team came back from the World Cup with their tails between their legs, they did at least give us some excitement – losing to Ireland for example, said Mike Brearley, the most successful cricket to captain England ever in modern times.

Mike, speaking in Hampstead at a Burgh House “Lifelines” evening last Thursday, pointed out that the team had taken the Ashes against the Australians this season and said that the later reaction in the press was unfair. 

“The schedule they faced in the World Cup wasn’t easy,” he said. “They had a lot of injuries and changes of personnel, although that can’t be the full reason.”

Mike, 68, spoke earlier about how he had inherited his love of cricket from his father, Horace, who was also a cricketer of note – as well as a master at the City of London School where the young Brearley was educated.

He went on to Cambridge to read Classics and Moral Sciences and also excelled in the university’s cricket team, playing as captain for two years.

Around this time he played his first games for the MCC, joining a tour of South Africa in 1964. 

“I was aged 22 and very naïve when I went there,” he said. “It was also before the main opposition abroad got going. I was, however, very shocked by what I found. People had told me that sporting links with South Africa were going to change things there, but that just wasn’t the case.” Later in his career he was a vociferous opponent of playing against apartheid South Africa.

Mike played for Middlesex for 11 years, during which time he led the team to victory in the county championship four times. But it was only in 1976, at the relatively advanced age of 34, that he was first selected for the England team.

He got a call to say that someone had dropped out, so he headed straight for London and a match against the West Indies, then by far the best team in the world.

“It was the fastest bowling I had ever faced in my life,” he said. “We had about an hour to bat before the end of the day and Dennis Amiss was carried off the pitch to have seven stitches put into his head.

“They had to send out what we call a night watchman, and he took a very, very long time to appear. Finally, out came this very inoffensive and delightful slow left-arm bowler from Yorkshire called Fergus Carrick, who was almost quaking with fear. 

“I went to meet him as he came onto the field and heard that Pat Pocock, who should have been the night watchman, had disappeared into the toilet somewhere, so poor Fergus was forced to come out. It reminded me of a line from Beyond the Fringe: ‘The time has come, Perkins, for a futile sacrifice in this war, and you Perkins, are it’.”

Mike went on to   have a stellar career as England’s captain, playing in 39 Test matches, 31 of which he captained, winning 17 and losing only 4.

His personal Test match batting average was just 22.8 runs, but he was a truly outstanding captain, his praise from all direction including the word’s intuitive, resourceful, sympathetic and clear thinking. One opponent, Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg, said he had “a degree in people”, and an ability to draw out the best from his players.

“You can’t be any good as a captain unless you’ve got some idea about tactics and strategy and are interested in that, and unless you know when to change the bowling and roughly what field to set,” he explained.

“Then there’s the more intangible business of how you get the best out of people – it’s a mixture of firmness and telling and listening and consulting, and some ability to see people as different and treat them differently without the whole team feeling that there’s not too much injustice.”

He also spoke about the historic third Ashes Test at Headingley in 1981 when he was brought back to captain the team after a disastrous period during which Ian Botham had been captain and lost every match (mostly against the then almost unbeatable West Indians). Botham then went on to win that third Test almost single-handedly, as well as the next three, with amazing batting and bowling performances.

Mike recalled: “I think he was a bit inhibited when he was captain, and my coming back enabled him to relax and enjoy himself again.”

When Mike retired from cricket in 1982 he decided to train as a psychoanalyst.

“I got interested in it when I was doing philosophy,” he explained. “I read Freud and my unfinished PhD was to have been on the explanation of emotions. 

“So it started as an academic interest, and while I was at Cambridge I joined the Samaritans – I don’t quite know why – and I found that I could listen to people. And they didn’t quickly ring off, on the whole.”

How does he react to the widely held view that psychoanalysis is outdated and unscientific? 

“I think that what sounds outdated about it is that it isn’t quick – and people want things quicker nowadays, with quick explanations and quick fixes and solutions. There is something to be said for that, but, on the other hand, you wouldn’t think that you could improve the St Matthew’s Passion by making it shorter, or War and Peace.”

• Biographer Michael Holroyd is at Burgh House on April 28 in the next of the Lifelines series, 7.30pm, £12, 020 7431 0144, www.burghhouse.org.uk