Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind

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Turning Over the Pebbles is not as other memoirs. On the one hand, Brearley reveals little of himself. Who does he vote for? How does he spend his days? What of friendships and enemies? On the other, he reveals everything. We know who he is now – or, at least, in our own minds, we think we do. Yet for all those acclaimed man-management skills, this cerebral man, whose three-week stint as a carpenter’s mate was spent reading Anna Karenina, struggles with practicalities. “Making things with grandchildren is usually beyond me,” he laments. Brearley says it is hard to measure the value of leadership and intersperses his own experience of being a psychotherapist and captaincy of Middlesex and England. He speaks about the many challenges of leadership and the many qualities and skills required to deal with the most coveted job for any sportsman - the leadership of his national side in the sport of his choice. Particularly interesting is the fact that these skills and qualities don't sit well with each other and therein lies the balancing role. How does one balance the long term vs short term, deal with the experienced and novice, democracy versus control, individual requirements vs teams etc? Sun Tzu had a fair bit to say that was relevant beyond feudal warfare tactics. Machiavelli’s observations on ruling a renaissance city state also have some wider applicability. There is unity, of a kind, in all this, but one needs to put oneself in Brearley’s hands to let him reveal it – and himself – in his own way. His reminiscences of the neglected Cambridge philosophers with whom he had once studied (John Wisdom, Renford Bambrough) will be new even to those who have heard all his tales of playing with Gower and Gatting. His gentle explanations of the theories of the philosophers and psychoanalysts who influenced him – Ludwig Wittgenstein and Marion Milner among them – are accurate and accessible without feeling in the least dumbed-down.

Papineau argues that there are no conscious decisions in batting: the ball moves too fast, and the intentional system of the brain too slowly, for the batsman to do anything but react instinctively. The brain’s reflex, or “action-control” system is in charge. The same is true when a tennis player faces a serve, at least in professional tennis. What the batsman can do is prepare his instincts by deciding on a strategy before stepping up to the crease. It's divided into different chapters that each cover a different topic that Captains should think about from selecting the team to examining the pitch before the game. I think the first half was definitely stronger than the second half and I found my interest waning towards the end. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

Despite a reprinting in 2001, the book does feel a little dated. Perhaps some chapters or details could be added about more modern captaincy, particularly with rule changes and the arrival of T20. The title of this book comes from a remark made about Brearley’s conversational manner by an American sports journalist. Brearley, he wrote, spoke “as though he had been turning over pebbles, searching for the clearest, most precise [...] opinion to plop into the pool of conversation.” Brearley’s accounts of half a life in sport followed by another half as a psychoanalyst share that quality. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Brearley is not unaware of these problems. The penultimate chapter contains a long, self-lacerating discussion of whether he should have left more out, the better to avoid a book that is “undisciplined, vague, jumping from one thing to another, incoherent…”. Well, quite. It is a painful passage to read, a digression on whether his digressions should have been cut that ought itself to have been cut, and is itself full of digressions. At one point (more than one point, actually) Brearley reminds us of how much effort he has put in: It sounds contrived, but Brearley’s skill as a knowing – although never self-deprecating – narrator makes it work. He admits to being regarded as an “odd fish” in a testosterone-fuelled dressing room, whether taking his blokey teammate Fred Titmus to see Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (“Fred was taken with it”) or bearing the brunt of Geoffrey Boycott’s temper: “I don’t want any of your egghead intellectual stuff,” the Yorkshireman growled at him. As Mike Brearley sits in the basement room where he has psychoanalysed patients for more than four decades, shelves filled with the works of Freud and other experts in the human condition, he readily calls on all that wisdom to dissect the “Bazball” transformation of the England team and preview the looming Ashes. “I am looking forward to this series as much as any,” he says cheerfully. This year I've come down with another bout of captaincy at a club that I like and with lads that I respect, and where I think I have earned the respect I didn't have the last time. I thought it might be best if I got a different perspective on captaincy, and that's what led me to this book.The Art of Captaincy definitely requires the reader to be familiar with certain nuances of the game which come with years of engaging with the game. However, Brearley's strength lies in bringing out the people side of the game and how the game is shaped by the motivations, strengths and weaknesses of the players. There are three clear take aways from this book.