Kevin Pietersen ensures Andrew Strauss endures the shortest honeymoon period in history

I've heard there's an England cricket scout here today, so please don't score 355.

By Jonathan Liew in The Telegraph

11:12PM BST 12 May 2015

“Andrew. Well firstly, congratulations on your new role in English cricket. I’ve got to start off with the Kevin Pietersen situation.” As honeymoon periods go, it was laughably brief. Eleven words, to be precise. But as Andrew Strauss made his first public appearance as the new director of English cricket, perhaps the absence of a cordial welcome suited him down to the ground.

After all, in his first three days in the job, he has somehow managed to sack a coach, sack a Test vice‑captain, sack a Twenty20 captain, and sack a batsman who had already been sacked. At this rate, Strauss will be the only employee left at the England and Wales Cricket Board by Christmas. 

Besides, as the man himself put it, this is a sport moving quickly. While Strauss held court on the balcony of the Lord’s pavilion, across town at the Oval Kevin Pietersen was still batting. In the time it took Strauss to give his first interview of the day to Sky Sports News, Pietersen had gone from his overnight 326 to 351.

The dozens of journalists, photographers and assorted hangers-on began to suspect that perhaps they had gone to the wrong ground.

Instead of watching a batting masterclass by one of the modern greats of the sport, we were listening to a man in a sensible shirt and cufflinks giving a seminar on team synergy. Try selling that to the lucrative Indian television market.

^{A bright-eyed Andrew Strauss divulges ECB wisdom at Lord's}

But then, trying to take on Pietersen in a public relations battle is like trying to take on an octopus at Twister. You will never win. Even though it was Strauss and his boss Tom Harrison who had taken the step of meeting Pietersen for dinner on Monday night, they still managed to come out of it looking worse: like the famous Granita pact, if it had ended with Gordon Brown punching Tony Blair’s lights out.

In a way, Strauss and Harrison were desperately unlucky to have their big day out overshadowed by one of the batsmen of our lives playing one of the innings of his life. But somehow, the longer they spoke the less sympathy you felt for them. The ECB responded to Pietersen’s triple century with a humongous double standard.

• KP's England rejection: as it happened

Firstly the issue of “trust”, a word to which Strauss kept returning. In fact, he used it so often it was almost as if he was reciting the rehearsed spiel of a prewritten PR script, not that we would ever accuse him of that.

And so important did Strauss appear to regard the issue of trust that you began to wonder whether he had stumbled upon some undiscovered secret of the game, a Moneyball-style performance metric that would blow the sport wide open. “Yes, we lost 2-0 to New Zealand and our batsmen failed miserably. But on the plus side, Chris Jordan let Jos Buttler borrow his garden shears, so it’s been a good week on the whole.” 

How are you supposed to build trust, anyway? Perhaps, in retrospect, the whole idea of Pietersen going back to Surrey and scoring runs in county cricket was a complete red herring. What he and Strauss clearly needed was a weekend in Snowdonia: trekking over the hills, taking it in turns to fall backwards and catch each other, sharing their deepest and darkest secrets by the campfire.

Instead, Strauss’s idea of an olive branch was to invite Pietersen to join his one-day cricket advisory panel. History does not record whether this offer was made before or after Strauss told Pietersen he did not trust him, but either way it was the equivalent of not inviting someone to a dinner party, and then asking him if he knows a decent recipe for Dover sole.

“He’s got some very strong views on one-day cricket, and I think it would be madness not to try and get that information out of his head,” Strauss said, inadvertently hinting at some form of invasive surgery.

^{Kevin Pietersen's innings at the Oval – more interesting than a team synergy lecture}

Beside Strauss, Harrison was nodding vigorously. Harrison seemed impressive at first glance. He looked his interlocutors in the eye, admitted that mistakes had been made over the handling of Peter Moores’s sacking, announced his magnanimous intention to “draw a line” under the whole sordid Pietersen affair, whilst obviously ruling nothing out.

Evidently, Harrison was presenting himself as the smooth-talking antidote to scattergun chairman Colin Graves. County chief executives joke among themselves that “ECB” presently stands for “Explaining Colin’s Behaviour”.

• Tom Harrison, the ECB's hatchet man

Obviously, no guarantees could be given about Pietersen’s future. No player, after all, has a divine right to a place in the side. Unless, of course, your name is Alastair Cook, who a beaming Strauss confirmed as captain for the Ashes series this summer.

And obviously the England team need “stability”, as Strauss put it shortly after removing Moores as coach, Ian Bell as Test vice-captain, Stuart Broad as Twenty20 captain and recommending a new selection system.

^{Strauss develops a trusting relationship with a reporter}

Obviously we want to “broaden the audience” of English cricket, Strauss said, whilst shutting the door on English cricket’s single most electrifying talent of our generation. And obviously we want cricketers “who can think for themselves”, Strauss enthused, whilst laying out the job specification for a new coach who will be told not to pick Pietersen.

The most alarming trait of today’s ECB is not the hypocrisy, but the doublethink. They really do seem to believe that you can have one rule for the captain and one rule for everyone else. That you can tell a player to go and score runs in county cricket and then turn him away when he does. And that there is nothing especially untoward in any of this, and anybody who says so is probably a splitter or a Piers Morgan fan or something.

Perhaps it is a little unfair to blame Strauss for all this. He has, after all, inherited someone else’s mess, and is clearly addressing it with the best of intentions. But from his first appearance in office, one thing was manifestly clear. The ECB’s real issue of trust is not with Pietersen but with us.

'A bad captain can make a great team look ordinary'

Sambit Bal in Cricinfo

India's youngest and most distinguished captain on the importance of honesty, transparency and inspiration when leading a side

To measure Tiger Pataudi by his captaincy record is to do him no justice. His true contribution lies in his seminal influence on Indian cricket: the manner in which he lifted it from its abyss of diffidence and negativity and instilled a belief to contemplate victory. He took over the reins as a 21-year-old in the fourth Test against West Indies in 1961-62, and went on to lead in all but six of his 46 Tests. He brought to the captaincy a tactical boldness and an originality of thinking rarely seen in India. Long before Clive Lloyd unleashed four fast bowlers on the world, Pataudi employed four spinners, doing away with the tokenism that characterised Indian new-ball bowling back then.

"A captain has to be honest, to the team and to himself. It should be obvious that the best interests of the team should be top of his agenda"© PA Photos

You once famously said that captaincy is all about either pulling from the front or pushing from behind. We could begin with an elaboration.

What I meant was that you had some captains who were great players themselves - [Don] Bradman, [Garry] Sobers, [Richie] Benaud. They led by the sheer force of their performance. Then there were captains like [Mike] Brearley, [Ray] Illingworth, myself to an extent, who were not the best players in their sides. We had to push the team from behind, get the best players to perform to the best of their ability. Bradman and Sobers walked ahead and others followed. Inspiration flowed from their performances. Whereas a captain who is not a terribly inspiring performer himself has to rely on extracting the maximum from his best players.

Would you say a non-performing captain has a much tougher task because of his over-reliance on others?

Brearley may have averaged less than 25 with the bat, but his great success lay in the way he brought out the best in Ian Botham. Brearley didn't lead in the field, he didn't go out and score 190 and say, "Now you follow my example." He coaxed and cajoled the others to perform. Bradman didn't need to do that. He went out and won matches with his own bat. Sobers wasn't the greatest of captains, but he just did everything himself. In my case, I had to get the best out of [Gundappa] Viswanath. He was our best batsman for a long time. I had to push him to give his best.

And how did you do that?

The first and most critical thing is to make a player realise his true worth - sometimes players themselves don't know how good they can be. Then you make him realise his importance to the team, how the team depends on him, and how he will let his side down if he doesn't perform at his very best. It's not very complicated really, but small things do make a big difference. As I said, you either get the team behind you or in front of you.

There is a management principle that a leader needs to be different things to different people. Doesn't captaincy require similar role-playing? Friend to some, guide to some, father figure to some and taskmaster to some? 

First and foremost, a captain has to be honest, to the team and to himself. It should be obvious that the best interests of the team should be top of his agenda. His team-mates must feel in their hearts that the captain's personal interests come below that of the team. We have had one or two captains who were always more concerned with their own performance.

Would you care to name them?

No, I wouldn't want to go into that, but people will know who I am talking about. When you have a captain who is more bothered about his own performance, it's difficult for him to get the loyalty and respect of his team-mates. Particularly in the Indian context, where there are so many internal dynamics operating, the captain has to be absolutely transparent. At no stage should any player feel discriminated against or feel that there is a bias against him. If a captain is honest and transparent, he can take harsh decisions without creating any ill will. The other thing is to always pick your best team. Pick the best batsmen, pick the best bowlers. It doesn't matter who you are playing or where.

So you are saying team selection should not be based on conditions or opposition?

Absolutely. I have never believed in the horses-for-courses theory. Harbhajan [Singh] will get you wickets on a green top and Kapil Dev will get you wickets on a turner, because they are both good bowlers. A bad seamer will not get you wickets on a green top and a bad spinner will not get you wickets on a turner. I played four spinners because they happened to be the best bowlers around. I had no Kapil Dev, so playing a seamer just for the sake of balance was useless.

And you wouldn't be concerned if a couple of them were difficult characters?

That's what a good captain is all about. If he thinks that the player has ability, it's his job to manage his personality. Every team has a couple of difficult characters - in my time there were a few. Salim Durani was one. I felt I couldn't handle him very well.

Why would you say that?

Because I felt I couldn't get the best out of him. He was an extremely talented cricketer who lacked a certain amount of cricketing discipline. We tried to organise it - me and a few other senior players. But we didn't succeed. He did well, but a man of his talent could have been made to perform much better.

Do intuition and instinct play a role in captaincy? Or is it mostly about method and strategy?

To start with, the fundamentals have to be solid. Intuition comes with experience. Over the years you acquire a certain knowledge and hindsight which help you to play to a particular percentage. You instinctively know that certain things will happen in certain situations and you make your moves. But your basic analysis and basic strategy have to be correct. Most of all, you need to be a good student of the game. Many things could go wrong even if you do the right things because a lot depends on how others perform. But if your basics are wrong, you've got no chance.

"A captain can't make a player perform beyond his ability. That's impossible. But very often, players are performing at only 50% of their ability. A good captain lifts that up to 80% and 90%. And I think Brearley got Botham to perform at 100%"

And the captain must seize the moment…

Yes, the sooner you are able to see the moment, the sooner you act. Sometimes moments come and go. Good captains, experienced captains, know to utilise the smallest openings. Sometimes two overs can change a game.

Is this ability to recognise a moment, see an opening, a gift of nature or can it be developed?

You have to be alert and you have to be thinking all the time. And to be a thinker, you must be familiar with cricket history. Reading a bit of cricket literature, knowing about great players of the past helps. Unfortunately, not many modern players read anything.

Do you think that stunts their growth?

I will say reading helps. It broadens your vision. It gives you perspective. Perspective does not come from watching television.

To be fair to them, modern players have very little time.

Oh, they have plenty of time to do ads. If you want to, you can find the time.

Would you say education plays a critical role in making a successful captain? Is it a coincidence that some of the great captains have been well educated? Imran Khan, Richie Benaud, Brearley, yourself...

Education is important, I wouldn't say it is mandatory. Education gives you some kind of depth, an outlook on your own life and life outside. It makes you less parochial. But there have been exceptions. Lala Amarnath was a good captain and he wasn't highly educated.

But isn't there something called a natural cricket sense, an inborn feel for the game? Most of us thought Tendulkar would be a natural captain.

Great players don't necessarily make great captains. The trouble with natural cricketers is that they never have to think about the game. Everything comes so easily to them. You ask them to coach somebody and they wouldn't know what to do. They have never had to learn, never had to study. Everything is so instinctive for them.

You became captain at 21. How well acquainted were you with the history and traditions of the game?

I had very little idea. I was lucky that the senior players were very supportive. Polly [Umrigar], Jai [ML Jaisimha], they were all very experienced. I borrowed a lot from them. And then I learned. I had captained Sussex previously, but that was a different ball game. Then I captained Delhi. But captaining an Anglo-Saxon side is different from captaining India. The politics here are so convoluted. It takes a little while to get used to.

Captaining India is surely not one of easiest jobs in cricket...

Oh, it's a unique problem in itself. But I was lucky that one or two senior players were retiring at the end of the West Indies tour [1961-62]. And a lot of us were youngsters at the time, going abroad for the first time. Those players stuck with me. Besides, seniors like Vijay Manjrekar, Bapu Nadkarni and others also supported me. There were one or two voices that were sort of unhelpful.

Isn't there a serious case for giving captains and coaches more powers?

Yes, certainly. The captain needs the backing of the board. They should take him into confidence and tell him that we are giving you full charge, get these guys to perform or they are out. I was lucky I got the full backing of the board. But very often captains don't get that kind of backing, and they are hesitant to take strong steps and that hesitancy can be seen very easily in the dressing room. There has to be coordination and cooperation among the captain, board members and selectors.

Did you always get the team you wanted?

Oh, almost always. I got the XI I wanted. You have to make some compromises on the 14 to keep a few people happy. But that was okay. Except when Vijay Merchant was the chairman of selectors. He couldn't even explain why he wanted to change the team. If he had given proper reasons, people would have understood, but he had no reasons.

It was suggested that Merchant's animosity towards you was rooted in his differences with your father, and that he got even by using his casting vote to keep you out of the side in 1971.

I think he found fault with me from the beginning. And a lot of his decisions made no logical sense. I never got the impression it was because of my father; I think it was more personal. The moment I was gone, all the people I wanted in the side were back in the team. All the young fellows he had got when I was captain were gone and the senior players were brought back.

That leads to the question whether the captain should have a greater say in the team selection. Should he have a vote?

The captain's inputs must be seriously considered. And if a captain can have a good understanding with the selectors and reason things out with them, he can have the team he wants. That was true, by and large, in my experience. But no, the captain shouldn't have a vote. It could lead to serious acrimony.

Does a non-performing captain have a place in modern cricket? 

I doubt it very much. Cricket has changed a lot in [recent times]. Not that the quality of cricketers is any better. You would not find an allrounder like Botham today or a fast bowler like [Fred] Trueman. But yes, it has become much more competitive and physically challenging. Not that you could carry a passenger even in those days. You had to contribute something and Brearley did contribute. A lot, in fact. He got Botham's act together. And Botham did play like six players put together in that series [1981 Ashes]. If a captain can do that he certainly deserves a place. So for Brearley to find a place in the side today, you first have to find a Botham.

What do you think Brearley did with Botham?

He talked to him, and he must have talked to him in a way Botham understood. A captain can't make a player perform beyond his ability. That's impossible. But very often, players are performing at only 50% of their ability. A good captain lifts that up to 80% and 90%. And I think Brearley got Botham to perform at 100%. That's phenomenal. I saw those matches. Botham was an inspired cricketer.

"Gavaskar brought pace bowling back into Indian cricket. Kapil's performance in his first few matches was terrible. But Gavaskar showed faith in him" © PA Photos


Going back to an earlier question: different players need to be handled differently. So obviously a captain has to be different things to different people.

Of course. If a player had the kind of ability Botham had, you had to treat him specially. If you treated him like a mediocre cricketer, his performance would be mediocre. You had to give him a little more freedom.

If you were his captain, would you mind if he went to a nightclub the day before the match and came back at 12?

If he came back at 12, I would be very happy [laughs].

A captain can't create talent. But he can lift the spirit of an ordinary team. Motivation is very important. Without it, a good team can become very ordinary. Richie Benaud was a great motivator. He was a great performer himself, great bowler, brilliant fielder, and he had the team behind him. I got to know him very well because we sometimes shared a flat in London. He was the sort of captain whose very presence lifted the spirit of the team. Even when he was injured and not playing, his presence in the dressing room motivated his players.

What about Clive Lloyd? Some say he wasn't so good tactically.

That's because he didn't have to do any captaincy. But Lloyd's greatest contribution was his vision. He brought about the most radical tactical innovation when he decided to use four fast bowlers. It wasn't conventional thinking in those days. And he was hugely respected by his players.

Who would you rate as the best Indian captain after your era?

[Ajit] Wadekar had the results. But it has to be [Sunil) Gavaskar. He was as talented a player as Tendulkar and he had a very good cricket brain. He brought pace bowling back into Indian cricket.

In a sense, he was lucky to have Kapil Dev around.

He had to encourage Kapil Dev. Kapil's performance in his first few matches was terrible. But Gavaskar showed faith in him. He wanted a good new-ball attack, perhaps because he was an opening batsman. He saw the talent and he nurtured it. Some people call him a defensive captain, but you have to analyse the circumstances in which he led.

A good captain must have a fair idea about the limitations of his side. I know a lot of Tests are ending in results nowadays and plenty of risks are being taken. I have always believed that you should play to win, but the approach varies from individual to individual. In Test cricket, it sometimes makes sense to ensure that you don't lose the match. To me, one of Sunil's greatest contributions was that he brought professionalism to Indian cricket.

Natural leaders are made in retrospect

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

There is no template for the perfect captain. Some of the game's greatest were not identified as such straightaway


It took five years of not winning and patience before success came for Mike Brearley (centre) and Middlesex in 1976 © Getty Images



So England finished a tour of the West Indies with some widespread areas of consensus. The results were disappointing, the immediate future is dodgy, opportunities were missed and the captain - according to many of the loudest voices - is not a natural leader.

The tour, of course, happened in 2008-09. England lost 1-0. But Andrew Strauss, after that tricky start, became one of the most successful England captains of modern times. Now England are turning to Strauss again, this time as director of cricket, because his leadership credentials are, of course, axiomatic. How quickly people forget views they once vehemently held. Memory is not quite the same thing as intelligence, or even judgement, but it is a good first step on the road towards greater scepticism.

The problem with analysing leadership, especially captaincy, is that people forget how rare it is for successful leaders to stand out as "natural leaders" from the very beginning of their tenure. In fact, the idea of "natural" leadership is usually a retrospective trick - or narrative fallacy - used to make sense of events that, at the time, felt far more contingent and unpredictable.

The most iconic example of great captaincy is also the most misused: Mike Brearley. Perception: Brearley could wander into any team, move gully a bit deeper, and, hey presto, you win by an innings. Reality: by the time Brearley did his Ashes conjuring trick in 1981, he had indeed established a reputation for tactical and managerial brilliance. Crucially, however, that reputation was hard-earned over many years at the coalface. Even more pertinently, Brearley's captaincy could easily have been cut short before anyone noticed how good he was.

Brearley took over as captain of Middlesex in 1971. The seasons of 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1975 slipped by without Middlesex winning the championship. Brearley has privately told me that in those early seasons he often found the job very difficult. Did he have enough support? Results improved, but not always evenly. In that six-year period, Brearley's gift for patience was tested. So was the constancy of Middlesex. As I write this, only one of the 18 captains of England's first-class counties has been leader for six uninterrupted seasons. Clearly there aren't dozens of Brearleys out there, if only clubs would persevere with them. But if Middlesex had been less patient - or, put differently, less anxious to jump at the first convenience - then England could have been deprived of a superb leader.

Which leads to the second problem with analysing captains. Pundits tend to have a fairly fixed idea of what a natural leader looks like, and then judge the incumbent against their own personal template.

To the alpha-male mindset, the captain should be the leader of the pack, the macho hero. To the Machiavellian world view, a captain should be streetwise and opportunistic. To the progressive, leadership relies on novelty and innovation. To the nostalgic, quite the reverse - the answers always reside in the past. To the laissez-faire, he must be relaxed. To the hard man, a captain must rule with fear.

All valid, none essential. There is no one such thing as the ultimate template for a good captain. All good leaders are different. Indeed, a preparedness to be different - rather than copying someone else - is perhaps the only prerequisite for being any good.

In terms of value added, few managers can match Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. His decisions and the wins that followed have earned Oakland hundreds of millions of dollars (as this article on FiveThirtyEight demonstrates). Despite an emotional temperament, Beane has tried to remove the cult of personality from his decision-making. This is leadership by methodology - thinking, or more accurately calculating, your way to victory.

At the other end of the spectrum stands Sir Alex Ferguson. Anyone who has read Ferguson's autobiography knows that the idea of "copying" Ferguson is inconceivable. His management was founded on the controlling and coercive nature of his personality. Some players seethe with violence. Very occasionally, that survives the transition into management. No leader achieves greatness by punching people. Some, however, clearly benefit from the impression that it would be a grave error for anyone to entirely rule out the possibility of the direct approach. Ferguson ran a pub before becoming a manager. "Sometimes I would come home with a split head or black eye. That was pub life. When fights broke out, it was necessary to jump in to restore order."

Now imagine hearing Pep Guardiola, Roberto Martinez or Arsene Wenger saying that. Inconceivable. Yet all are fine managers.



Despite England's poor finish in the West Indies, there has been no outward sign that Alastair Cook is wilting © Getty Images


Which leads us back to Alastair Cook. It is clear that Cook does not fit some preconceptions of cricketing leadership. He is not restless and ingenious, as Michael Vaughan was. He does not cast a magnetic and charismatic presence over the whole arena, as MS Dhoni does. And yet there have been fine captains who possessed neither of those assets.

Last week, after discussing captaincy in the commentary box, the brilliant statistician Andrew Samson passed me two pieces of paper about the records of two captains, each after 31 Tests in charge. The first read:

Runs: 2478
Average: 45.88
Hundreds: 8
Wins: 13
Losses: 9
Draws: 9

The second read:

Runs: 2792
Average: 60.69
Hundreds: 10
Wins: 6
Losses: 9
Draws: 15
Tied: 1

The first is Cook, the second Allan Border, the man who turned around Australian cricket in the 1980s. (Although, of course, the nature of the opposition should always be taken into account with comparative stats.)

Border had also faced criticism about his manner and tactics. But eventually his resilience and run-scoring provided such an inspiring example that his team fell in step. The two men, so different on the surface - Border was known as Captain Grumpy, where Cook is courteous and self-deprecating - share an epic capacity for endurance. Border outlasted many bowling attacks and, eventually, his critics.

The case against Cook tends to rest on the conviction that he is about to crack, that he can't take much more. This theory is conveniently self-perpetuating because it encourages his detractors to press on with their endeavours. They look eagerly for signs that the strain is becoming too great. This type of thinking contributed to his sacking as ODI captain ridiculously close to the World Cup.

Yet in the West Indies - a patchy tour for England with some poor selection errors - there was no outward sign at all that Cook was wilting. Quite the reverse. His hundred in the third Test was almost faultless.

Many bowling attacks have pinned their hopes on Cook cracking, only to find the wait inconveniently lengthy. I wonder if the detractors of Cook's captaincy will experience a similar story.

The inequity of UK's election results 2015

By Girish Menon

Party	Seats	Gain	Loss	Net	Vote (%)	Change (points)	Total Votes
Conservative	331	38	10	28	36.9	0.5	11.3 ml
Labour	232	23	48	-25	30.4	1.5	9.3 ml
Scottish National Party	56	50	0	50	4.7	3.1	1.4 ml
Lib Dems	8	0	49	-49	7.9	-15.2	2.4 ml
DUP	8	1	1	0	0.6	0	.18 ml
Sinn Fein	4	0	1	-1	0.6	0	.17 ml
Plaid Cymru	3	0	0	0	0.6	0	.18 ml
SDLP	3	0	0	0	0.3	-0.1	.09 ml
UUP	2	2	0	2	0.4	n/a	.11 ml
UKIP	1	0	1	-1	12.6	9.6	3.9 ml
Green	1	0	0	0	3.8	2.8	1.1 ml

The Electoral Reform Society, a campaign group, has modelled what would have happened  under a proportional voting system that makes use of the D'Hondt method of converting votes to seats.