Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

My view is that the best teams have a critical mass of leaders within them. You need that because if you hang your hat on one person to provide the leadership you miss the point about what happens. You cause other people to be lesser leaders than they could be. You want a bunch of people acting proactively to make decisions and solve problems. People are leaders, he suggested, in a variety of ways: inspirational on-field performance, professional approach to training, possession of a socially inclusive personality or a willingness to stand up to voice a dissenting opinion. No single person embodied all forms of leadership. By 1994, he wrote in The Coach , he had come to see captaincy as ‘an anachronistic concept,’ left over from the nineteenth century, when all the games now played were established and when ‘society, business and the family were hierarchical and paternalistic.’ His scorn was directed especially against the ‘absurd’ English system that selected ‘the average player Mike Brearley as the captain and then picked the team around him’. 29 But his attitudes were also at odds with the reality, if not the theory, prevalent in Australia, with its history of respect for the special qualities of leaders from Bradman to Mark Taylor. And yet a philosophy so much at odds with cricket tradition, and pushed to its extreme with the Hockeyroos, was a product of Ric’s own experience, especially in cricket. ‘It was nice to be chosen as captain,’ he wrote in The Coach. He added: It gave me a boost. It often happened to me but even from a young age I think I knew that the most important thing for the captain to do was play well himself. The example one sets is one of the best ways in which the team’s performance can be elevated by the captain. Playing for Western Australia in the 1970s he was part of ‘a talented and resourceful team’ led at different times by John Inverarity and Rod Marsh: ‘while they differed in style and temperament, the team largely went along okay.’ Decisions often resulted from discussion and debate as the game went on: ‘a number of different views contributed to better decision-making and more creativity than only one source of input.’ ‘The primacy of the captain,’ he remarked in the 2009 interview, 72 1993-2002 29 Ibid ., p 55.