Do Bowlers Get Overlooked As England Captain Because Of The Old Class System?

Derek Pringle offers some intriguing thoughts about why batsmen are almost invariably appointed to the top England job.

- Derek Pringle

Andrew Strauss was surely teasing when he said Joe Root was not the only candidate to replace Alastair Cook as England’s Test captain. But if there really are others you can bet none are bowlers, a breed unlikely to be appointed to cricket’s highest office if they were the only players left standing.

Why is it, in the minds of those who make decisions upon captaincy, are bowlers, especially the faster ones, so often discounted from being candidates? Everyone knows they are cricket’s deep thinkers and, in the longer formats, its match winners, too. And yet you can count the Test captains of England and Australia who have been pace bowlers on part of one hand, so rare has been their ascent to the game’s top job.

With Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff counting as all-rounders, only Bob Willis and Gubby Allen have done the job for any length of time. Big Bob led England in 18 Tests between 1982-84 and achieved a win-rate of 38 percent. Allen, who captained 11 times between 1936-48, won four Tests. Both win-rates are inferior to the leading England captains (all batsmen) yet Willis’ record is pretty decent overall (again mostly batsmen), so ineptness cannot be a factor in their scarcity.

The most successful captain-cum-pace bowler was Shaun Pollock, who succeeded the disgraced Hansie Cronje as captain of South Africa in 2000. Pollock was in charge for 26 Tests and won 14 of them (over 50 per cent). With South Africa’s transformation in its infancy then, he benefitted from having a team containing the best players available rather than one which ticked various boxes, unlike most of his successors.

You would have thought that the West Indies, that cradle of great fast bowlers, might have had someone to rival Pollock’s record but while the quicks there have captained the national team more often than any other major Test playing country, their achievements have ranged from modest to poor.