Previous experience desirable

In the course of his entertaining tour round the captaincies of national cricket teams, Michael Jeh asked for my thoughts on the England captaincy, a request from my vulpine friend to which I'll gladly accede because I've been meaning to write a bit about Andrew Strauss for a couple of months.

One of the reasons I think Strauss has been quite a success is that he is in a way a traditionally-selected captain, which some of his immediate predecessors certainly were not.

The English view has always been that the captaincy is just as much a specialist position as opening the batting or bowling leg-spin, and that it makes more difference to the performance of the team to have the right man in place than for any of the other positions. With the possible exception of the mid-1950s, England have not had a team packed with superb players since before WW1. There have been times, though, when they have achieved much better results than they looked on paper to deserve - and those times have been when they have had fine captains.

It is the captain who decides what strategy is to be followed and what tactics to employ in carrying it out, and he needs to be given the kind of tools he is comfortable with using. The selectors therefore have to know what tools he wants, so it is pretty pointless deciding on what tools he is going to get before knowing who he is. That doesn't mean the selectors simply let the captain nominate his team, but if he says he intends to neutralise a certain left-handed batsman by bowling off-spin outside his leg stump, the selectors better provide him with an off-spinner or two.

The players also have to be enthusiastic about following their leader if the team is to get anywhere. He thus needs to command their respect, partly as a player and cricket tactician but much more as a man. Particularly on tour, a captain has a lot to do off the field, gauging morale and fitness and putting in train actions to improve both as well as dealing with a load of official nonsense.

It's quite a job description, and it's quite a gamble pitching someone into it unless you have strong evidence that he can fulfill it.

So the traditional way was to make sure that potential England captains spent a season or two as county captains, if necessary by leaning on certain counties to give them the job, which used to be fairly simple because it was quite possible to play two-thirds of a county season as well as playing for England until about the 1990s. Nowadays, however, becoming an England regular just about rules you out of county competition and therefore obviously out of county captaincy. In order to get county captaincy experience, you need to be at a county which has an urgent need for a captain but be a late enough bloomer or have enough competition as a player not to get picked up by England.

Strauss was a good county opener who had been made captain early by Middlesex in the wake of Mark Ramprakash flouncing off for more money south of the river. He was doing a pretty good job as captain as well as scoring quite a few runs as an opener but seemed unlikely to play for England other than very occasionally, given the obvious permanence of the new Vaughan-Trescothick pairing. Then an injury to Vaughan and a spectacular debut put him on the path to England regular-ship, and eventually the captaincy, for which his county captaincy had been useful preparation and shown him capable of the job – and he has had the success which largely eluded the two of his three predecessors with no previous experience of captaincy, let alone that of a county, Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen.

They were made captains mostly because they were the team's star player of the moment, and there were thoughts that they would get huffy if they didn't get the job and stop performing well. Duncan Fletcher has since admitted that he was quite wrong to push for Flintoff rather than Strauss on those grounds, and frankly I can't see it ever being right to confer the captaincy as some sort of reward for being the best player in the team.

There's nothing wrong with the team's best player being captain, but he has to possess both a cricket brain and a fair old ration of people-management skills to go with his playing ability. Flintoff could manage people but was as likely to lie awake at night thinking of field settings with which to dismiss Jacques Kallis as he was to refuse another beer. Pietersen thinks a lot more about the game than he's probably given credit for, but he is gauche and tactless and so desperate to be loved that being the kind of leader who can take hard decisions and have them willingly accepted is way beyond him. Both failings would have been exposed much earlier if they had attempted to captain counties.

As to the Australian perception that England are somehow weird because former captains regularly play under their successors, it is actually Australia who are the weird ones. I can't think of any other country where it isn't perfectly normal for ex-captains to play on: currently Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Ramnaresh Sarwan, Mahela Jayawardene, Shoaib Malik and Shakib al Hasan are playing for their predecessors along with Pietersen. And Shaun Pollock played on for some time after the appointment of Graeme Smith. (I'm not going to rake through New Zealand history for an example, though there must be some, and there's little reason to suppose that Stephen Fleming would have had any difficulty playing under Daniel Vettori if he had wanted to carry on.)

Strauss will not be the last ex-county captain to get the England job: there will always be the odd county which has to appoint a promising young player, and the odd such captain will later make it as an international; currently Yorkshire's Andrew Gale is a Lions regular and must therefore be at least tapping on the selectors' door and Surrey have appointed Rory Hamilton-Brown, who is certainly a promising talent though not yet obviously destined for higher levels.

But more and more England are going to have to develop their captains in what ways they can, like Michael Vaughan, who captained the U-19s and then the Lions (in their former guise as England A). The selectors have twigged that Alastair Cook is probably going to be opening the innings for the next ten years and is likely to have to be captain at some point because there is no-one else with the seniority or experience, so they have been giving him as many opportunities as possible, including the recent tour of Bangladesh which Strauss sat out.

On the field, Cook's inexperience definitely showed – but with any luck he learned enough from his stint to have an idea of what he will have to improve on if he is to be a decent England captain. As always, though, experience will be the key.