Cricket is surely the most literary-cerebral of our great team sports, and I put this to you even if your acquaintance with the modern game runs no deeper than Kevin Pieterson’s haircuts, the tabloid-friendly antics of Andrew Flintoff or the witty songs of England’s ‘Barmy Army’ travelling support, (Warning: contains coarse language.)

Admittedly, cricket today is played faster, geared more toward television and cheered more raucously than the game watched and eulogised by the great C.L.R. James – one of whose celebrated Manchester Guardian match reports of the 1930s contained the following beauteous observation:

‘What would an Athenian have thought of today’s play? Probably that the white-flannelled actors moving so sedately from place to place were performing the funeral rites over the corpse of a hero buried between the wickets.’

A good day’s cricket always has its longueurs, though, and these are part of the complexity of the game – the judgement of the playing surface, the positioning of the fielders, the batman’s construction of an innings, the bowler’s quest to find a fruitful line. At some key point in my youth, I admit, I grew more fascinated by the delicate psychology of cricket than the hard points of technique: only one among a million reasons, no doubt, why I ended up a writer rather than batting at number three for Durham and England.

When I was a boy England were captained by Mike Brearley, a man so deeply thoughtful that on retirement he became not merely a newspaper columnist but also a qualified psychoanalyst. (The one time I’ve encountered Brearley in the flesh, twenty years later, was at a book launch for his friend the anthropologist Hugh Brody.) In truth Brearley was never quite international-class as a batsman yet as a team captain he had extraordinary gifts of judgement, and his golden hour was the winning of the 1981 Ashes series – ‘Botham’s Ashes’ in legend, when Brearley as returning captain galvanised Botham, the seemingly spent figure whom he replaced, into gargantuan efforts with bat and ball (first at Headingley then ten days later at Edgbaston) that swung a losing series back England’s way.

Still, Brearley himself in print has been charmingly, polysyllabically modest about the change in fortunes he is credited with having masterminded:

‘Such were the margins– not only in the Headingley Test but in all three of England’s wins in the series – that the minutest chances, infinitesimal differences, could have overturned the outcomes.’

One factor about 1981 worth considering in this light is the strange, fractious behaviour of two of Australia’s greatest players, pace bowler Dennis Lillee and wicket-keeper Rodney Marsh, toward their captain (and the team’s star batsman), Kim Hughes. In his The Art of Captaincy, published in 1985, Brealey wrote sympathetically of Hughes as ‘one whose playing performance and peace of mind alike were ruined by his tenure as Test captain.’ And that tenure ended on a stunning, stricken note in November 1984 after Australia had been trounced at home by the West Indies’ then-unplayable pace: Hughes resigned his captaincy at a post-match press conference, breaking down in tears during the reading of a prepared statement.

Brearley’s estimation is supported by one of the finest cricketing books of recent years, Christian Ryan’s Golden Boy: Kim Hughes and the bad old days of Australian cricket, which Orion brought out in paperback in 2009 but which I only got round to devouring this Christmas past – while the England of 2010 cantered to their own Ashes win and another Aussie captain, Ricky Ponting, was made to feel a nation’s displeasure.

Golden Boy is a melancholy story, albeit narrated by Ryan with a good, pawky Australian straightness. It’s all about a finessing young sportsman who rose high and yet plummeted rapidly, having somehow let himself be hassled and intimidated – ‘psyched out’ – of the game in which he excelled above nearly all others. On his day Kim Hughes was a quite godly batting talent, and as a kid-spectator I had no qualms about admiring his game more than anyone’s in the England XI. At the crease he was bold but elegant, fleet of foot, skipping down the wicket to strike at the spinners, going gallantly to one knee for his full-blooded drives.

His great flaw – if we may begin to speak of psychology over technique – was a certain arrogance that saw him frequently surrender his wicket with a highly ill-advised stroke.

Hughes was elevated early to Australia’s captaincy at a ‘moment’ when the big guns of Oz cricket – including the aforementioned Lillee and Marsh – had been lured away by money to play for Kerry Packer’s ‘World Series’. When the veterans skulked back to the ‘official’ national side they weren’t well disposed to the young interloper/whippersnapper Hughes. Lillee reckoned Marsh should be skipper, and so did Marsh. As the team’s tour manager Peter Philpott told Ryan, Lillee and Marsh thought Hughes

‘was a soft boy. They were two hard men and they didn’t have much respect for him. They respected his batting but not his captaincy or him as a human being.’

On a personal level things got distinctly nasty, and Hughes, though assuredly no wimp, had a vulnerable side that had him blinking somewhat in the face of such truculent toughness from his own teammates. Ryan relates that when the Australians took their net practice it was Lillee’s habit to ‘bowl lightning’ at Hughes – a string of bouncers that Hughes sought gamely to resist, though on one occasion he had to be packed off to hospital for X-ray. (The only regret Lillee expressed during or after this mean little war of nerves came after one bouncer sailed over Hughes’ head, Lillee’s comment being ‘Sorry I didn’t f**k in’ hit ya…’)

How did such animosity work for the spirit of the Australian side contesting their half of what came to be known as Botham’s Ashes? Could it have made more than Brearley’s ‘infinitesimal difference’ to Australia’s chances under Hughes? Well, Peter Philpott told Ryan he felt Lillee and Marsh ‘weren’t disappointed at Kim failing.’ When Philpott at one stage approached Marsh to suggest the skipper needed support from his senior pros, Marsh was harsh: ‘He’s got the job. He’s a big boy. Let him stew in it.’ At Headingley, as Australia were cruising prior to Botham’s stunning intervention, Lillee and Marsh even managed between them to lay a £15 wager on an England win at 500-1. Of course, this is not to say the two legendary competitors in any way slacked off in that match so as to pocket their winnings – only that their general attitudes were clearly, extraordinarily unhelpful.

Hughes helped Australia win the Ashes again in 1983 under Greg Chappell’s captaincy, but Chappell then resigned and Hughes, captain once more, met his high noon in two crushing series against a juggernaut West Indies. Lillee and Marsh were off his back by then, but only because both had retired. Hughes had been finished in his own way, and his career tailed away badly, with rebel tours to apartheid South Africa and an undistinguished stint playing for Natal province before his retirement in 1991. Still, I remain a firm fan of Hughes, and I commend Christian Ryan for the value and merit of Golden Boy as a study of both the psychology and the technique of the man and the player.

Kim Hughes declined to contribute to or authorise Ryan’s book, and Lillee and Marsh didn’t want to speak to the author either. But Golden Boy feels thoroughly researched in its conjuring of the bitter enmity that holed Hughes’s Australia below the waterline. Hughes is said today to be good mates with his former tormentors, possibly sharing their evident opinion that big blokes shouldn’t make a big fuss. And that could be a mark of an extraordinary magnanimity from Hughes or, yes, just a wholly ordinary Australian shrug over a beer. But I slightly worry it suggests that Hughes has never lost a certain need to be liked; whereas at the top level of team sport, in captaincy, I do suspect it’s far more important to be listened to.

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