COLUMNISTS 
In The Art of Captaincy, Mike Brearley, the most cerebral cricketer of his generation, muses on the qualities of leadership. Great captains, he writes, must command respect but they must also possess that indefinable quality called “charisma”.
So what am I to make of the stocky young man lounging towards me in a checked shirt, jeans and a beige jacket? Andrew Strauss, England’s cricket captain, is running late for lunch. He offers a cheery apology and takes a seat at our table at the back of Plateau, a modish restaurant in London’s Canary Wharf.
Strauss has been in the vicinity signing copies of his mini-“autobiography”, Testing Times (Hodder & Stoughton), hastily completed after this summer’s triumph in a see-saw Ashes series against Australia. Mildly irritated (maybe it is jet lag, having arrived early that morning from Boston), I test him with a fizzing delivery outside his metaphorical off-stump. Do you think we were lucky to win the Ashes?
Strauss, 32, plays a straight bat. “No, not at all. It surprises me that people even say that. Cricket boils down to crucial periods of play. In a five-day Test match there will probably be two sessions that define which way the game goes. In three games, we won those crucial sessions.”
Ah yes, but what about the statistics? Australia’s batsmen scored more centuries (eight to two); their strike bowlers took more wickets at lower averages; and they had arguably the best player (Ricky Ponting, Australia’s captain). Do the stats lie?
“They often do,” replies Strauss. He cites Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s influential 2003 book about baseball. Lewis’s premise is that the statistics typically used to gauge player performances – stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting averages – are relics of a 19th-century view of the game. There are, in fact, more empirical measures.
“In cricket it’s exactly the same. Your batting average is not the be-all and end-all,” says Strauss, too modest to point out that he scored more runs than any player in the recent Ashes series and made the highest single score (161). “What is crucial in cricket is doing it under pressure when the team needs you to do it. That’s your value to the side.”
I am beginning to get a feel for the England captain’s leadership qualities: an understated, unflappable manner and an ability to wear down the opposition through a steady (if not relentless) accumulation of runs.
Our waiter brings Strauss a Diet Coke, and takes our orders. England’s skipper plumps for the risotto and the prawn tagliolini. I opt for the mozzarella and tomato, followed by the sea bass.
We will return to the importance of teamwork during our two-hour conversation but first I want to come back to the subject of Australia and Strauss’s reverence for the Aussie fighting spirit. Does he believe they have superior sporting DNA?
“There’s definitely something about the way they’re brought up, about the way they play their sport at a lower level that makes them hard to beat ... there’s a huge amount of self-belief there, deep down in Australian culture, I suppose. If you go back to the ... ”
Convicts? I venture, forgetting momentarily that Strauss’s actress wife Ruth is Australian.
“Yes, the whole convict thing. They’ve got a point to prove. I’m not going to say because they’re convicts, but just the fact that’s the way they’ve always had to be ... they’re hard-wired to be good at sport.”
But so is Strauss, who spent part of his childhood in Australia. Born in 1977 in Johannesburg, the son of an insurance broker, his family left apartheid South Africa soon after and moved briefly to Melbourne before finally settling in the UK. Strauss was only seven and a half. Any trace of a South African or Aussie accent has long since disappeared, erased by a solid middle-class upbringing and an education at Radley, the public school outside Oxford, and Durham University, where he studied economics in between sessions in the nets.
Strauss was a talented sportsman, playing cricket, golf and rugby at school. But he attributes his rise to the top to a relentless work ethic that, he says, is not shared by all his English counterparts.
“You start playing first-class cricket in England and you think, ‘OK, I’m Barry Big Pants,’ and you’ve got your shiny tracksuit and your new bats. [But] the system doesn’t produce battle-hardened cricketers. It’s one of the issues that prevents us from being the best side in the world.”
When, as an adult he returned to play in Australia, he was struck by the contrast. “Almost by default they think you’re crap unless you prove otherwise. I’ve never been sledged [insulted by the opposing team] as badly as I was playing club cricket out there. Though the one thing that really got me was that they weren’t interested in excuses. Whereas in England you go, ‘The wicket wasn’t playing very well today’ – and your teammates would go, ‘Yeah, it was pretty tough, I don’t even know how I got the runs’ – the Aussies would go, ‘He was crap, he should have got a hundred’, or something along those lines. It’s a very different kind of mindset.”
England’s response to this has been to bring in foreign “imports”. Four of the team’s likely top six batsmen in the coming Tests against South Africa were born there (Strauss, Kevin Pietersen, Matt Prior, and Jonathan Trott), though in fairness Strauss and Prior arrived in the UK when they were young.
Our food arrives and, pausing to reflect, I decide we have much in common. I am an opening batsman-turned-national newspaper editor whose task is to motivate talent and manage large egos (though I am at a loss to identify the Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff of the Financial Times). This brings me to the chaotic circumstances in which Strauss took over as captain in January 2009.
His predecessor Pietersen resigned after just five months when a rift with Peter Moores, the then team coach, became public. At the time Strauss had only just recovered his batting form, having suffered a crisis of confidence as bowlers worked out how to starve him of runs, chiefly by depriving him of his favourite shots square of the wicket.
He had served briefly as England captain before his dip in form. But now he was back in charge with a Test series against the West Indies only a week away, and the team and management were confused and divided. The new skipper sought advice from team psychologist Steve Bull, who had done a lot of corporate work, including how to deal with conflict within organisations.
Toying with his risotto, Strauss says that the team under Moores had become too “coach-led”. Players were micromanaged on everything from throwing technique to hydration levels. From now on, he decided, players would have to take more personal responsibility, especially on the field. Coaches, while still vitally important, would be “consultants, not schoolteachers”.
The theory took time to work out in practice: the West Indies series ended in a frustrating 1-0 loss, partly because of one poor batting performance and an overly cautious approach by Strauss on the field. But, aside from a humiliating loss at Headingley, the approach worked this summer in the Ashes series. More challenging will be next month’s Tests against the teak-hard South Africans, currently ranked the best team in the world.
Strauss’s emphasis on teamwork is compelling but how does he manage individual stars such as Pietersen or Flintoff, the burly beer-drinking all-rounder from Lancashire? The captain turns cagey, aware that the slightest deviation from script could end up in a tabloid column.
“Pietersen is a genius at what he does so to try to get him to conform to what other people do is dangerous and possibly will take the sting out of him ... One thing that maybe he hasn’t done as well as he could is that he’s got people where he wants them, and then he’s got out, whereas some of the really great players, such as Viv Richards [the legendary West Indian], would go on and get 250. So he will improve in that respect but I don’t want him to play the really responsible innings all the time. We’ve got others who can do that.”
And how about Flintoff, a Falstaff in flannels, who is said to have ribbed his captain over his public school background. (Strauss’s dressing room nicknames are “Lord Brocket” and “Muppet”.) Is Flintoff a responsible member of the team?
Strauss hesitates. “I wouldn’t say that was his greatest strength but he cares a lot. He’s very passionate about playing cricket and he’s always had a great affinity with the crowd and the supporters, which is very, very helpful. Every time he comes on to bowl, he lifts the crowd, which in turn makes it more difficult for the opposition. So he’s definitely one of those characters who come along very infrequently.”
The England captain’s defensive strokes are impeccable. So I shift tactics and ask him about his strengths and weaknesses. Surprisingly, he opens up.
“My strengths are definitely to be able to think reasonably clearly under pressure, and I think I’ve got a pretty good feel with players. I can empathise with what people go through,” he says, adding that the hardest thing of all is telling a player that he has been dropped.
And the weaknesses? “I think I need to be better organised, maybe forward-planning a bit more than I have previously. And that’s very important because in English cricket you play the series and then play the next series when it comes along. In corporate circles, that would be madness.”
The idea that Strauss is disorganised is mildly amusing because he is so compact at the crease. “It’s actually true ... but this year’s been a great learning process because we didn’t just have the Ashes. It was my benefit year, which takes up a huge amount of time. And we were moving house, with a young family.”
Still, Strauss was organised enough to find a ghost-writer to help him finish the book. The script does feel rushed, I say. I miss compelling portraits of great players such as Ponting. Strauss looks slightly crestfallen. It is time for another short-pitched delivery.
Why, I ask, is he so po-faced in the book about Allen Stanford, the Texan banker who enticed English cricketers to compete in substandard conditions in the Caribbean for a $1m a man match-winner’s fee and who now faces multiple counts of fraud?
“I didn’t defend the process at all ... What I defended was us turning up there ... If you’re going to take his money then you’ve got to expect what you’ve signed up to.”
I pull out a copy of his book and quote from a passage in which he says Stanford could not be blamed for the fiasco. So who was to blame?
“I’ve got to say the ECB [England and Wales Cricket Board],” says Strauss, sheepishly, “but there’s not a huge amount I can say on this unfortunately.”
Why not?
“Well, because I am employed by the ECB, but I think everyone realises the mistakes, and lessons, hopefully, have been learnt.”
Strauss acknowledges money is changing the game. The Indian Premier League, which features the world’s best cricketers in a 20 overs format, is shifting the balance of institutional power in world cricket away from England and Australia to the Indian sub-continent. It is also putting pressure on the five-day Test match format, long seen as the finest expression of the game.
Strauss defends Test cricket but stresses that it must be a “product” that people still want to watch. “The world’s changing. Things are getting quicker in life, people’s attention span is getting shorter. We all love the Test game but I don’t want to be playing in front of empty stadiums with no one watching on TV.”
England’s captain may not be able to quote Tacitus like his august predecessor Mike Brearley; nor does he share the bloody-minded pugnacity of, say, Ray Illingworth or Brian Close. He is a diplomat with inner steel, a Gentleman with a Player’s attitude, so to speak. Those all-round qualities, combined with a commercial nose, make him very much a cricket captain for our times.
Lionel Barber is editor of the Financial Times
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Le Plateau
Canary Wharf, London E14 5ER
Roasted butternut squash risotto and wild mushrooms followed by tiger prawn tagliolini with a crab bisque £22.00
Tomato and buffalo mozzarella, basil and rocket followed by sea bass, choucroute, palourde clams with parsley and white wine £32.00
Bowl of spinach £4.15
Diet Coke x 2 £6.30
Caffè latte x 2 £6.30
Total (including service) £77.50
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Matthew Engel on England’s foreign-born cricket legends
The old rule, enforced until the 1990s, was that no one could play cricket for Yorkshire unless they were born in the county. The England selectors have never been so picky.
The England team has been captained by men such as Colin Cowdrey and Nasser Hussain (both born in India), Ted Dexter (born in Italy), Freddie Brown (Peru), Gubby Allen (Australia, ye gods) and even Mike Denness (Scotland).
Cricket spread across the globe because Britain had an empire, and anomalies were a consequence of that. The British moved across the world, produced children and sent them back home to be educated in cricket-playing public schools.
More recently, the likes of Hussain came to England when their families migrated. Indeed, 20 years ago it looked as though by now the England team would be populated by second-generation migrants from the West Indies. But most turned to football instead.
It is the South African connection that has all along proved the most fraught and controversial. Its modern incarnation began when Basil D’Oliveira, classified as “coloured” under the apartheid regime, came to England in 1960 to find the opportunities denied to him at home. Eight years later, he was named to tour the country of his birth and was barred by the South African government, leading to that country’s 20 years of sporting isolation until apartheid was dismantled.
In that time, a stack of South African whites followed in D’Oliveira’s footsteps. Some discovered that having British-born parents or grandparents gave them the right to British citizenship, and thus a potential back door into another Test team.
Long before Andrew Strauss, two of them became captains of England: Tony Greig and Allan Lamb. Greig flamed out quickly by leading the walk-out to join Kerry Packer’s schismatic World Series Cricket. Many followers of the game had never trusted these incomers, and that increased the suspicion. Their rasping accents and their (rather unEnglish) skill and athleticism seemed to go with a certain light-footedness.
What no one expected was a second post-apartheid invasion, which next month is likely to lead to four members of the top six of England’s batting order being South African-born (and all white too) – for a Test series in South Africa. Oh, what fun the local fans will have with that when the braais are lit and the Castle Lager starts flowing.
One of them, Kevin Pietersen, switched sides overtly because he felt the post-apartheid quota system, designed to repair the years of racism, discriminated against him. He is not a man with much sense of history, empathy or irony. It is a situation that will offer a strange undertone to the sport on offer.
Matthew Engel is an FT columnist and former editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanac
