Skippers Felt The Force Of The Chop In The 80s

The seeming prevarication over the future of Alastair Cook as England captain seems to be based on achieving the right level of sensitivity and timing for what is a major event, though it didn’t always use to be like that. Rewind 30 years to the 1980s and just about any England defeat saw the captain’s head end up on a silver platter with indecent haste.

It may be that the current rumination means that Cook is staying on as Test captain, but that would mean all the clues – the revealing interview he did before the series in India, the spent body language in Chennai during the last Test, the “Joe Root is ready” eulogy – were all red herrings.

There seems to be an obsession these days that you can micromanage change in order to remove the negative emotions but life, especially in sport, is not like that. As Steve Waugh, Australia’s gimlet-eyed captain, was fond of saying during his playing career: “There are no fairy tales in cricket” – a sentiment with which every England captain between 1980-90 would concur.

If that decade was particularly brutal on its England captains, then this one has generally sought to soften any body blows, though the removal of Cook as one-day captain, just a few weeks before the 2015 World Cup, was a throwback to more ruthless times. Perhaps the indignity of that is what drives this careful approach now, Cook having given the captaincy his all despite lacking the telling flourishes and shrewd man-management of a great leader.