The captaincy

[neville cardus]

Why does it seem always to go to batsmen? The question has been asked before, but I'm asking it with a slightly different point in mind: I don't think bowlers are merely under-represented, or that a fifty-fifty split would be fairer; I think the divide should be roughly what it is now, but with the bowlers in the majority. If captaincy is primarily about what you do when your team has the ball, who better to manage that period than one of the guys who actually do the bowling? (What do they know of bowling who never bowling do?) Quite apart from which, it's fundamentally a more assertive and innovative and thoughtful craft than batting, which is, if we're honest, mostly passive and reactive.

Reactive, yea, and also reactionary -- if my suspicion be true, which is the current order of things is a holdover from the game's feudal days, when batting was the domain of those shiftless "gentlemen" who, in war as in sport, took positions of leadership as no more than their due, with bowling the preserve of the honest yeoman cannon-fodder. Small wonder Karl Marx, after watching a game of cricket, decided that "revolution in England is improbable." Its national game still hasn't reached the level even of bourgeois democracy!

 

[OverratedSanity]

Bowlers have a tendency to overrate their own bowling ability and would bowl themselves into the ground and bring themselves on to bowl even though they aren't the ideal option at that moment. Atleast that's what my theory is. Batsman are neutral and unbiased in that sense.

 

[SeamUp]

I would say bowlers have tended to have been more the wild and wooly go-with-the-flow types who weren't really students of the game but more the athletes.That probably set the precedent in the game.

You only have to look at Shaun Pollock's reign as captain of SA and how tough it was and he was a learned-man. I reckon a bowling captain could over-bowl or under-bowl themselves where as a batting captain looks at it from the outside to make better and calmer judgement. Whether that be at mid-off, mid-on , covers or the slips where the batsman tended to field.

Bowlers also have such an extreme focus on their bowling it could be considered tough to think about another bowler and plan ahead.

 

[neville cardus]

I've heard most of this before, and it's never much impressed me. It seems to come down to the idea (savouring again of feudalism) that these lumpen grocks have very small brains, and can't realistically be expected to exert or extend them.

I'm not sure, anyway, how much of an exertion or extension it is, given that those brains are already trained in and focused on the same domain. It's the batsmen who are working outside of their comfort zone and expertise -- which perhaps explains why the additional burden is so often correlated with a decline in their averages.

 

[neville cardus]

You only have to look at Shaun Pollock's reign as captain of SA and how tough it was and he was a learned-man.

What you'd actually find, if you checked out Pollock's record, is that he had the highest win percentage of any Test captain in South African history.

 

[SeamUp]

What you'd actually find, if you checked out Pollock's record, is that he had that he had the highest win percentage of any Test captain in South African history.

That also has a lot to do with the team behind him too.

I used to watch him bowl and then have to captain and it was rarely his captaincy genius because often he was one of the most moody captains around if his bowling wasn't meeting 'his own' high standards.

Just don't like a main bowler as captain.

In our history, 2 of our best captains have been batting all-rounders in Eddie Barlow and Clive Rice. They were perhaps unique characters but their bowling wasn't relied upon 100% by the team and perhaps their batting brains new what the batsman was thinking to be 1 step ahead.

 

[Starfighter]

The main issues I've heard posed is that bowlers will tend to over or under bowl themselves or others out of desire to get wickets personally / lead from the front / seem to be fair or whatever. Wasim certainly seemed to fall prey to the first, judging from how many late-nineties matches where he seems to under bowl Waqar, while Willis under bowled the expensive but more penetrative Cowans in 82/83 and overbowled the more reliable Botham.
Also I've seen it posed that fast bowlers perhaps will tend to concentrate to hard on bowling to captain effectively when doing so, Willis is usually cited as an example. Spin bowlers maybe less so. Benaud and Illingworth were spin-bowling allrounders and are very well regarded as captains.
Bowlers have also traditionally fielded in the out field where it is perhaps harder to read the batsmen from. I'd be interested to see how someone like Anderson who's fielded a lot in slip would go. While I'd say perhaps he didn't read the game very well at Adelaide, not correcting his length in the first innings, at no point did batsman Root make the same deduction either.
Also a better batsman might know better how an opposition bat is going to react to certain things, but you'd think bowlers who've bowled thousands of deliveries might know that as well.
I think the best argument might be stability - bowlers, especially fast bowlers, are more likely to be injured or otherwise unfit.

In the end it is mostly a relic of the amateur batsman / professional bowler divide. You really don't know how someone will go until they try and do it, and of course having a good team and good luck help a lot. Tendulkar was the greatest batsman of our current age and was a poor captain, and Chanderpaul was dire. You might even get a big difference between players of very similar experience. Towards the back end of the sixties Fred Trueman captained Yorkshire and by most accounts was a very good captain, while over the border in Lancashire Brian Statham was apparently absolutely hopeless.

 

[oblongballs]

interesting question.

I was just thinking back to captains in the last 20 years or so for England and we have Root, Cook, Strauss, Freddy, Vaughn, Hussain, Atherton, Stewart, Lamb and Gooch. Only one bowler among them and that too an all rounder. I think Willis was the last full blown front line bowler who was captain.

It is a similar pattern for most seems although Pakistan did have Wasim and Waqar at one stage and Khan is their most iconic captain and he was a bowling all rounder.

SA famously had Pollock and didnt India once have Kumble?

 

[Dendarii]

Also I've seen it posed that fast bowlers perhaps will tend to concentrate to hard on bowling to captain effectively when doing so

I seem to remember Pollock saying that he found it difficult to captain in the middle of a bowling spell as he had to focus on what he was going to do next as well as keep the bigger picture in mind. So that could very well be a major factor, especially since the captain won't have the luxury of taking a break at third man or fine leg between overs.

 

[fredfertang]

I was just thinking back to captains in the last 20 years or so for England and we have Root, Cook, Strauss, Freddy, Vaughn, Hussain, Atherton, Stewart, Lamb and Gooch. Only one bowler among them and that too an all rounder. I think Willis was the last full blown front line bowler who was captain.

The odd stand in apart I think Willis is the only man with no pretensions at all as a batsman to ever captain England

 

[weldone]

I completely agree with NC (and that's a great OP). That's the only reason Ponting had the thumbs-up ahead of a cricketing genius like Warne.

On that note, Ashwin should captain our test side (I'm time-travelling and typing this in the end of 2018 btw).

 

[S.Kennedy]

Who is the most successful bowler captain, all-rounders not included, then? Wasim was border-line all-rounder but I supposed I'd have to say him. Bedi captained for twenty-two matches but was not very successful - Willis wasn't either.

 

[fredfertang]

Ian Johnson?

Although at a pinch he was an all-rounder - Courtney Walsh wasn't though

 

[AndrewB]

The odd stand in apart I think Willis is the only man with no pretensions at all as a batsman to ever captain England

I think that's right: the closest alternatives (at least since about 1900) seem to be Arthur Gilligan and Jack White - bowlers who could bat a bit - and Walter Robins who was a bowling all-rounder.

 

[AndrewB]

Who is the most successful bowler captain, all-rounders not included, then? Wasim was border-line all-rounder but I supposed I'd have to say him. Bedi captained for twenty-two matches but was not very successful - Willis wasn't either.

Willis is never very highly regarded but he did have more wins than losses, unlike the other England captains between Brearley and Hussain.

Pakistan's record under Waqar (+10-7) wasn't noticeably worse than under Wasim (+12-8=5), and he definitely wasn't an all-rounder.

 

[smash84]

Willis is never very highly regarded but he did have more wins than losses, unlike the other England captains between Brearley and Hussain.

Pakistan's record under Waqar (+10-7) wasn't noticeably worse than under Wasim (+12-8=5), and he definitely wasn't an all-rounder.

wasim was definitely a better captain than waqar.

Learned the skills much better from Imran.

 

[Burgey]

I completely agree with NC (and that's a great OP). That's the only reason Ponting had the thumbs-up ahead of a cricketing genius like Warne.

On that note, Ashwin should captain our test side (I'm time-travelling and typing this in the end of 2018 btw).

I think the fact Warne took a banned substance, had been involved with a bookie and couldn’t keep out of the strides of most of the women living in the world’s Cricket playing countries might have had some small part in that decision tbh.

 

[NotMcKenzie]

Such genius is so evident through his commentary.

 

[Starfighter]

The more you listen to Warne commentate the more you're glad he was never captain.

 

[JBMAC]

Bowlers that spring to mind as skippers, Shaun Pollock Bob Willis Ian Johnson Courtney Walsh Ray Illingworth Clive Rice Ritchie Benaud Ian Botham Tony Greig