Cricket / Andrew Hughes / 10 December 2009 / Leave a comment Bet Now View Market

Captaincy is one of those cricket skills that is tricky to measure, and yet it can be crucial to the outcome of a game. Andrew Hughes asks what qualities a good captain needs and assesses the current crop of international skippers

Who's the best captain in the game today? And why? It isn't an easy question to measure because the only statistic that we can use is percentage of games won, which doesn't really tell us a lot. Was Clive Lloyd a better captain than Mike Brearley because he won more games? Maybe. Maybe not. Cricket fans talk a lot about captaincy, but few people seem to agree on what makes a good captain.

I think a captain needs three qualities. The first is tactical know-how. A captain is like a chess player, always thinking three or four moves ahead. They have to be able to read a pitch, to set a field, to think up plans on the hoof. A coach might be able to help before the game, but out on the field, players look to their captain for a tactical lead and a good skipper is always trying something, never letting the game drift.

Then there's man-management. This doesn't mean balling people out or delivering rousing speeches at the lunch break. And it doesn't mean that silver-tongued communicators should be preferred to gruff, more reticent types. Whether a captain is a smooth-spoken public school boy like Mike Brearley or a plain speaking Aussie like Ian Chappell, they've got to have some grasp of what makes their players tick and how to get the best out of them.

Finally, there's calmness under pressure. This doesn't mean standing motionless at second slip wearing a big pair of shades and chewing gum all day. At some point the team will be under pressure and players, no matter how experienced, will look to their captain for guidance. At those times, the skipper needs to set the tone, to show that everything is under control.

So having drawn up our shortlist of qualities, which of the current crop of international skippers scores most highly? At the moment, we've got a mixed bunch. There's a couple of veterans in Graeme Smith and Ricky Ponting, both regularly lampooned, sometimes by their own compatriots for their captaincy shortcomings. Neither score particularly highly in any of the categories.

Chris Gayle certainly does the calm thing convincingly. Tactically, he is rather defensive and not all that impressive. Where he scores highly is in the man management category. He clearly understands his players, he can relate to them and they to him. For all his shortcomings, he is the best captain the West Indies have had for a while, simply because he will be able, from time to time, to drag a performance out of his players that more dictatorial characters would not be able to.

Then there are the new boys. Mohammed Yousuf really hasn't had the job long enough to make a judgement. The same probably goes for Kumar Sangakkara. He has a sharp cricket brain but it is too early to tell whether he can cope with captaincy and whether he can transfer his personal attributes to the job. Andrew Strauss's calm leadership this summer was exemplary, keeping the show on the road when it looked as though it could all fall apart.

But the two best captains around at the moment are M S Dhoni and Daniel Vettori. Both have difficult jobs to do for completely different reasons. Dhoni is charged with winning every single game that he plays; Vettori with getting a team that is forever six players short to produce performances that are more than the sum of their parts. They have different methods. Dhoni is a kind of Gayle figure, popular with his players, calm in a crisis. Vettori is more thoughtful, having learned from one of the best captains of the modern era, Stephen Fleming.

Both are in action during the next few days. On Thursday, Vettori leads New Zealand in the final and deciding Test of what has turned out to be a thrilling series against Pakistan. Without Shane Bond, the home side lack a cutting edge and are [3.9] outsiders for victory. And on Saturday, India hope to recover from a sloppy fielding performance against Sri Lanka by winning the second Twenty20 in Mohali, a game for which they are the [1.8] favourites.