England's chances hinge on Clarke

English people always fear the worst. Especially when Australia win a Test match. We always reckon that an England win is an improbable gift from the gods, while an Australian win is the natural course of events.

So after Australia won the second Test at Lord's, humiliating England in every facet of the game and bringing the series level at 1-1, we English imagine an Australia dressing room full of bristle-jawed he-men with an almost obscene amount of confidence. England's capitulation has made Australia unbeatable and unbearable.

We superimpose our fears onto reality. The fact is that one cricketer in the Australian team is distinctly ill at ease right now. He is anxious, slightly over-determined to do well and slightly over-concerned about failure. He's not a squad player or a second-change bowler in fear of his place: this is a twitchiness right at the heart of the team.

The captain, Michael Clarke, has yet to impose himself on the series as a player. True, he won a first-rate toss and asked Mitchell Johnson to bowl fast and gave him a few slips to bowl at - but there's a slight shortfall in the runs department. And as a captain he's a batsman first. Like most of them.

"Target the captain." That's what the great West Indies sides of the 1980s announced before every series. It was always a bit of nonsense - did they try less hard against the other batsmen? But they liked the captain to know that he was a marked man. They believed the path to a team's downfall lay through the captain's weaknesses.

And in two matches Clarke hasn't delivered. In the defeat in Cardiff he scored 38 and 4, the last particularly disappointing as he needed to set the tone for a long match-saving innings. In the victory at Lord's he managed 7 - on a first-innings featherbed, a rather noticeable failure to cash in - and an irrelevant unbeaten 32 as Australia pushed for a declaration.

So he'll be eager to make a personal contribution at Edgbaston when the next Test starts on Wednesday. Perhaps too eager. And he'll be aware that England are aware. In other words, there's a potential fault line running right through the Australian team and it's the form of the captain.

The trend of most modern sports has been to take as much responsibility as possible from the actual players, leaving them responsible only for their own performance. The captain in football is a mere shouter, a passer-on of coach's instructions. That's also true in both codes of rugby. If the captain has a bad game the whole team doesn't fall apart. American sports don't have captains in any demanding sense of the term.

The captain of a Ryder Cup golf team doesn't even play. The same is true in Davis Cup and Fed Cup tennis. It's believed that the burden of playing and leading would be too great. But in cricket, and especially in Test cricket, the person who makes the crucial on-field decisions and many of the important off-field ones must also play. In most cases this is a batsman, whose successes and failures can be totted up. A Test captain must - quite literally - stand up and be counted.

The Australians traditionally protect the captain from such scrutiny by pretending that he's not really a leader. They're just a bunch of great cricketers and great mates and one of them has to do the job. That can backfire: Kim Hughes fell apart in the Ashes series of 1981, and the serial failures of Ricky Ponting - as captain rather than batsman - were never properly addressed. England wouldn't have won the Ashes in 2005 with Shane Warne in charge. Ponting's implosion at Trent Bridge settled the series.

The translation of a good batsman into an inspirational leader is by no means inevitable and all modern Test teams are aware of it. So they target the captain. All captains now carry a double burden. They need runs for the team total, but they also need runs to make their leadership effective.

Sachin Tendulkar may have been the greatest batsman of modern times (all times if you're Indian), but he failed to make a success of his two spells of captaincy, eventually resigning.

The idea is that a captain's failure with the bat dulls his decision-making powers and creates a destructive atmosphere in the dressing room. But it doesn't always. One leader finished a series with an average of 17.62 and is regarded - at least in England - as the greatest captain that ever drew breath. That's Mike Brearley, who oversaw Ian Botham's revival in 1981.

It's doubly intriguing because Brearley's reappointment as captain followed the collapse of Botham's form during his own brief stint in charge. Even when he is at his most confrontational in television commentary, none of Botham's colleagues dare ask him how many Tests he won as a captain. The answer is none. Targeted first by West Indies and then by Australia, he found himself hamstrung by leadership - until he resigned.

When a captain is in a rich run of form as a player he is usually at his best as a leader. It follows that a captain's wicket has double value: it stops him batting and it also stops him leading effectively.

So if England have a hope of turning around the deeply traumatic defeat at Lord's, it lies with Clarke. If he's worried about starting his trigger movement too early or picking his bat up too high, his mind's not there when you need an extra slip or a killer bowling change. The whole vibe of the team changes.

Destabilise the captain and you destabilise the team. Sometimes, anyway. That knowledge is one more sack on the captain's back. So if England can induce that edge and cling on to the chance the series changes again.

Maybe.