The Summer Field

113 Chapter Thirteen Selection and Recruitment ‘Many were trained but few were chosen.’ Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy If dressing rooms are places for keeping secrets, how much more so are the rooms where selectors meet! For a selector to be caught telling tales about who was selected or not, and why, would be an act out of character, or it would suggest that the other selectors misjudged the colleague they chose to trust. Selectors may ‘spill the beans’, because they cannot help gossiping, or to spite enemies, or to please a reporter; if they do, they must take care to stay anonymous, and trust the journalist. Many in cricket who have been selectors make money from memoirs – perhaps several – and know they have to tell interesting stories, else their book will not sell. Yet they know too that if they reveal too much they will offend some and lose the trust of others in the game, even of friends. Hence the cricketers who have spoken most personally about fellow players have not had much to say about selection, because they were never let near it (Cec Parkin in the 1920s onwards); held a senior place in the game but not after retiring (Wally Hammond); had a compulsion to tell stories, which annoyed others, and kept them out of the highest counsels (Keith Miller); or, they had their day as England captain but never, for whatever reason, for long (Geoff Boycott). A chapter in Mike Brearley’s fine book The Art of Captaincy may have given us as close and informed a view of selection as we can expect. With experience as Middlesex and England captain, he pointed out that selectors need confidentiality because they have to make decisions. Any ‘leak’ to the press leaves everyone wondering who betrayed the others – and like ‘spilling the beans’, the very term implies that beans ought to stay unspilled; and words should stay unleaked. Brearley explained confidentiality, without giving many named examples. In short, ‘no one likes to be dropped’. Yet every sportsman will be, unless he retires first. Even retiring is distressing, as for politicians and generals, because they are admitting that stronger, younger men ought to take their place. Every sportsman – like any worker – faces the prospect of losing status in front of his colleagues eventually as his body fails him. Again, ‘dropped’ is loaded with meaning, implying that selectors are sending someone from somewhere higher (the Test eleven) to lower (back to a county, or into the second team). Every workplace runs on selection, including when recruiting, because only a foolish business will interview only one person for a vacancy. If you