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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. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. 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.
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. 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.” 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? 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.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. 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. 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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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.The title of this book comes from a remark made about Brearley’s conversational manner by an American sports journalist. Brearley, he wrote, spoke “as though he had been turning over pebbles, searching for the clearest, most precise [...] opinion to plop into the pool of conversation.” Brearley’s accounts of half a life in sport followed by another half as a psychoanalyst share that quality. 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. 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. If you are planning to act on instinct you had better ensure that your instincts are compliant with your plan. The philosopher David Papineau, who spoke at the same LSE event as Brearley (his thoughts also developed into a book: Knowing The Score, on philosophy and sport, was published earlier this year), tells a story about the former England batsman Mark Ramprakash. It’s a pity that Brearley doesn’t explore the same story in On Form – perhaps he felt that Papineau had claimed it – because it touches on the core psychoanalytic question of how much we know about what we desire.
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