The Ark of Captaincy

Although someone born to meander rather than lead or follow, the question of captaincy in life, politics and cricket is to me still one of the most fascinating yet indecipherable. The Art of Waugh or Gandhi’s mediation over muscles? An arm around the shoulder or a boot up the behind? The simplistic answer is, of course, to admit there is no simplistic answer and that all donkeys are different and require different types of lion to paw or roar them into results. That some donkeys are not donkeys at all and even sometimes ex-lions only adds to the complexity.This week has seen Misbah-ul-Haq and Darren Sammy‘s leadership of their national sides thrust into the limelight as they and their charges completed matches, and in the latter’s case a series, against India and Sri Lanka respectively. Neither are perhaps the most likely choices for skipper, but both deserve credit for the way they have led with calm in what could euphemistically be termed challenging circumstances. The cynical may point out it is impossible for Pops Misbah to do anything in a state any more than half a notch above comatose, but since taking over a troubled Pakistan in November 2010 he has won four out of ten Tests and lost only once. He may bat like Jonathan Trott on tranquilisers and have a scorecard largely written in braille, but his calm – the unkind would say dour – personality has been the imodium to the maelstrom of excrement currently swirling around the periphery of Pakistan cricket. This week he even claimed that cricket ‘was never really a passion’, a quote that would usually be damning, but which from the lips of a man who could dead bat his way through the apocalypse, sounds merely like his sensible rationale for captaincy. There are, it seems however, yet more taxing times ahead for the anti-Fridi.

Sammy, by contrast but like almost everyone else on the planet, is a rather more effervescent character than his Pakistan counterpart, but one whose tenure at the helm has been equally beset by off-field problems. Amidst the spitting cobra’s nest of Windies cricket politics, he has been the Indiana Jones, doubtless affected by the forked tongues that have questioned his role as captain and even player, but intent only on leading his side away from whipping boy status. Playing piggy in the middle between Dinanath Ramnarine, the head of the West Indies players association who even managed to have a bust up with the benign Carl Hooper, Chris Gayle, and the WICB itself can be no picnic, but Sammy’s efforts have been comfort food for Windies fans despite the relative lack of ticks in his win column. His side lost the first Test in Kotla inside four days, but for the first three and a half looked as if they might pull off a most unlikely victory, particularly so given the low pitch which seemed wholly unsuited to the Windies’ seam attack. He was perhaps rather too defensive too early as India began their pursuit, but he’s not the first captain to have been bludgeoned into negativity by a Virulent start to a run chase.Would these results have been different if, for example, Afridi or Gayle themselves had been on the pitch and setting the field? Is the upturn in fortunes for Pakistan, and to a lesser extent, the West Indies entirely coincidental and independent of the the actions of their actual two captains? People will have different perspectives on those impossible rhetoricals, but at present Misbah-ul-Haq and Darren Sammy are prowling lions amidst cricket’s legions of silly asses.