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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: If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.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. Philosophy didn’t hurt either. Both for what it said and what it provoked in Brearley. Wittgenstein’s image of philosophy as a way of showing the fly out of the fly-bottle is unsatisfactory, says Brearley. “It sounds as though it might be done once and for all simultaneously. Reality is more complex; our reasons for being trapped are more deep-seated, and the ways in which resistance to insight and to change occurs are multiple.” 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. I worried at the text like a dog at a bone. Did you know that the word “worry”, originally the Old English wyrgan, derives from the Proto-Germanic wurgjan, meaning “strangle”? I don’t suppose you did, and nor did I, till, worrying at it, I looked up the word in the online etymological dictionary. 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.

Despite being dated by his experiences in the 1970's and 80's, Brearley is astute enough to make the lessons timeless. His insight into the game is pertinent to every form and to every team, and his examples are enlightening. 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. His philosophical detachment from his 2019 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis makes for a brief but telling episode. In lesser hands, equating his illness-induced disdain for a baked potato with Napoleon’s soldiers dying on the return from Moscow would be faintly ludicrous. In Brearley’s, it is desperately poignant.For Papineau, this is what being “in the zone” is all about: the precise alignment of intention to instinct. It requires immense willpower, because our instincts are unruly, capricious, and easily distracted by passing stimuli. There is always something tugging at the brain, seducing it with the prospect of a pleasurable digression from the plan. 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. On Form refuses to settle on a theme, or to develop an over-arching argument. Instead, it wanders aimlessly from topic to topic, each of which has a vague connection, if you have the patience to identify it, to the question of what it means to be in or out of form, although what they really seem to have in common is that the author has given some thought to them over the thirty or so years since his last book. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Brearley in later life earned a reputation as a lecturer on leadership and a speaker and advisor to business leaders, and his book is spoken of as a source for anyone searching such knowledge. This is what I expected when I set out to read it. I have read wonders on this book as a sort of key to psychological management of teams and people, and Brearly being described as almost a guru.

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. 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. 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 draws a comparison between Greg Chappell’s advice and that offered by the postwar British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, who said that an analyst should strive to be “without memory or desire”. In life, as in sport, worrying about what might happen or has happened comes at the expense of attentiveness to the present and its satisfactions. Psychologists who study insomnia refer to the problem of “rumination”: when the would-be sleeper can’t sleep, he worries about the consequences of not sleeping, which means he can’t sleep. Over-deliberation is recursive. 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.