The Summer Field

124 certainly of the England team, as representative of the national game, was supposed to stand for more than winning, as Gilbert Smith argued. Men were forever judging a captain, the same as the captain had to judge his players, or as Jardine described them in The Field in July 1934, ‘human and therefore fallible elements’. The captain’s equivalent of the selectors’ meeting minutes was ‘the captain’s mark book’. Captains rarely even admitted to such documents, whether as aids to the payment of talent money or for deciding who to keep at the end of the season. No matter how genuinely friendly a captain was with players over a drink, he had the lone task, maybe unappreciated even by his employers, of estimating his players truly. Brian Sellers recalled that he distributed talent money: “It was hard to assess sometimes; 35 could be as invaluable as a century on occasions.” The Hampshire captain Desmond Eagar, who in an article in the Southern Daily Echo in December 1951, admitted to keeping a ‘mark book’, said the same. A captain might ask a batsman to ‘have a go’, to make a few runs quickly and riskily; or a bowler might do well without luck. The averages (‘a curse’, wrote Eagar) were never subtle enough to capture a player’s value. Yet, as Eagar added, the ‘sports-minded’ read averages avidly. Eagar’s contemporary at Leicestershire, Charles Palmer, noted that spectators with the least knowledge (or even non-spectators who read ‘a potted Press version’ of a match) were the captain’s critics most often. Captains, then, were defenders of studied excellence against the uninformed, hypocritical and absent. Even some players might take the side of the narrow-minded. Writing in the 1985 Yorkshire yearbook Sir Leonard Hutton – an England but never a Yorkshire captain – pointed out, without naming anyone, the potential for problems from ‘the cricketer who always knows his average without having to consult a newspaper’. In fairness, selfish average-mindedness was understandable. People tended to believe what was in a newspaper. The better your average looked, the likelier you might stay in your job, even in a losing team. Or, especially in a losing team, because selectors would – for the sake of keeping their own jobs – want to rid themselves of the worst-looking players. The captain alone had the job of winning, besides doing well as a player. Because ‘the margins are so small’ between winning and losing, as Luke Sutton recalled as a former Derbyshire captain, the winner had to have more things go right than the loser. A right thing could be in God’s hands – ‘when you want it to rain or not to rain, it does’. More usually someone from your team ‘put his hand up’, to use a 21 st century sporting cliché: ‘Someone comes up with runs,’ Luke Sutton said. A captain was like the factory foreman between the shift workers and the white-shirted managers; needed, yet a butt for both. The captain had to manage players, to convince them to do something that might not be in their best interests; bowl on a hot day, or leave to the newcomer the chance to bowl at tailenders. Or rather than being a manager, telling others what to do, the captain was a leader, setting an example by serving others. A captain might go in to bat for ten minutes before an interval, ‘to Captaincy and Command