Reviews

The Cricket Captains of England, 1979-2025 By Vic MarksFairfield Books, HB, 208pp, £20

Leaders of men

Richard Hobson says a follow up does justice to its model

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Alan Gibson’s The Cricket Captains of England is one of the celebrated books about our sport. To accept the challenge of writing a second volume demanded courage as much as time, judgement, imagination and skill. Vic Marks has taken on the baton and run a competitive leg. He was a logical choice, a friend of Alan, who covered his formative years in the game for The Times, and then of his son, Anthony, the BBC’s Somerset commentator. Alan became a West Country man despite a Yorkshire birth and he and Marks both gained Oxford degrees. Respect was mutual.

Marks has known all of England’s captains to some degree since Gibson’s cut-off point of 1977. He played under four of them, then after retirement became one of the shrewdest, most sympathetic observers of the game. He might well be the best summariser Test Match Special has had.

Dressing room insight elevates the first third of the book. Mike Brearley was much more competitive than popular image has it, he reveals, while David Gower was angrier and harder-working. Referencing Gower around the Graham Gooch/Micky Stewart regime, Marks suggests he “had only to raise an eyebrow or offer a couple of sardonic syllables for them to smell gross insubordination.”

This is one of many neat lines and any barbs tend to aim at officialdom. Peter May, he suggests, was stuck in a time warp as captain in 1961 let alone in 1988 when he resigned as chairman of selectors. On Kevin Pietersen he places blame on the appointment rather than the player. He dissects the episode expertly having predicted problems at the time.