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

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The problems begin when the teller, instead of productively directing the doer, scolds, harasses and berates it, which turns the doer into a sulky rebel, or a nervous child. One trick used by athletes to cope with it is to develop mantras, or simple mental routines, to be deployed at high-pressure moments. Ostensibly a cricket book, but there's plenty here that could transfer across to management in general. Second, understanding the people of the opposition and ensuring your own preparation meets the challenge that needs to be overcome. Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel.

Brearley, noted for getting the best out of the players around him, has a lot of interesting things to say about how to handle individuals, how to run a team, how to ensure you yourself are doing the best job you can. The original premise was that some of the things Mike picked up could transfer to other fields - I think they already were but there was a shortage of literature about it. How does one balance the long term vs short term, deal with the experienced and novice, democracy versus control, individual requirements vs teams etc? The man is likeable and his prose is as pleasant as you'd expect from a Cambridge graduate, but the book is not the fireworks it's made out to be.It is, he says, a book of second thoughts, a second bite of the cherry: not only the original experience, but a new take on it. Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

In Robert Icke’s recent production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Andrew Scott gave a heartbreaking portrayal of the Danish prince as a man unable to escape the frenzy of his own brain. The structure of this book, instead, has something of the messiness and unpredictability of an hour on the couch, but with a decent, fallible man whose psychoanalytic training hasn’t shorn him of his capacity for irony and scepticism – both of which are frequently turned towards psychoanalysis itself. It is quite the surprise when his wife (Mana Sarabhai, the daughter of a prominent Indian psychoanalyst) turns out to be his second. It is gentle-paced but scattergun, insular yet enthralling, and precisely written but often vague as it entwines a reappraisal of his cricketing life with his Sisyphean quest to understand himself, his passions and how his decisions have affected others.This book can be read quickly just be reading the bold type; Brearley has so many useful truisms that to have them identified in bold type would help to cut to the chase. There is no black magic box revealed here though – no off the wall theory and practice of how to manage people.

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. He shares his vibes on traits such as positive outlook, self motivation, team motivation, ability to lead from front and by an example, and more importantly good decision making abilities which he thinks are the key and necessary ingredients in defining the role of a good captain. It is hard to think of any other sportsman – or come to it, any other philosopher or analyst – who makes for such agreeable, such stimulating, such warm, company. There is lots here to enjoy for a keen cricket fan although the level of detail in certain chapters I found tedious (specific field settings to different types of off-spin bowling). A few years later, Brearley inspected a batting glove of Ian Botham – never guilty of under-hitting the ball – and was amazed to see its fingers almost unmarked by the bat.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.