When Alastair Cook started at Bedford School, his father bought him a copy of Mike Brearley’s book The Art of Captaincy. A decade later, Cook admitted that he had never read actually got round to reading it. In the autobiography Cook published when he was 24 – he was as precocious in this regard as every other – he explained that as a kid all he cared about was batting, “and I did not want anything getting in the way of it”. If some men are born to the captaincy, and others achieve it, Cook assumed it. It was a corollary of his batting. In the end he led England in 59 Tests, more than any other man in history, but he never seems to have seen captaincy as an art, more a duty. “It interests me,” he wrote, “but it doesn’t drive me.”
The England and Wales Cricket Board eventually arranged for Cook to meet Brearley in 2007. They chatted for three hours, and when they were done Cook decided: “You can take as much advice as possible and talk to as many people as you can but at the end of the day you have to do things your way.” And his way was to take this complicated job and make it as simple as possible, just as he had stripped the act of batting down to three shots: a pull, a cut and a nudge. Another Essex captain, Doug Insole, said that the role was one of “a public relations officer, agricultural consultant, psychiatrist, accountant, nursemaid and diplomat”. Cook decided the most important thing to be was a batsman.
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