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Cricket: the great captains: Studies of eight great captains of cricket history;
152 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1971
4 people want to read
About the author
John Arlott
144 books7 followersLeslie Thomas John Arlott was an English journalist, author and cricket commentator for the BBC's Test Match Special. He was also a poet and wine connoisseur. With his poetic phraseology, he became a cricket commentator noted for his "wonderful gift for evoking cricketing moments" by the BBC.
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September 10, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads # Cricket
This book, reads today like an elegiac mural on the walls of cricket’s long pavilion. It is a book written at a particular moment, before one-day cricket had conquered the imagination, before Kerry Packer had redrawn the economic boundaries of the game, before television made a captain a global face, and long before the IPL transformed leadership into part-brand, part-strategy, part-psychological warfare.
I got hold of this in 2012, after Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s World Cup triumph, after Steve Waugh’s ice-blooded dominion, after Ricky Ponting’s ruthlessness, Hansie Cronje’s dark fall, Nasser Hussain’s stubborn grit, and Sourav Ganguly’s combative renaissance of Indian cricket!! Back then, it was like to recognise how far the definition of “great captain” had shifted.
Yet in Arlott’s prose, one also finds the timeless essentials of leadership: vision, nerve, intuition, man-management, and the ability to transform a team into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Arlott was already the poet laureate of cricket commentary, with a voice that could carry both gravitas and mischief, and this book is in many ways an extension of that artistry. He selects eight captains — men who shaped cricket not only by their tactical nous but by the moral and cultural weight they brought to the game.
They are all, inevitably, men of a certain vintage: the likes of W. G. Grace, Arthur Shrewsbury, Warwick Armstrong, Percy Chapman, Douglas Jardine, and others who commanded not just teams but entire eras.
Reading about them is like reading Plutarch’s Lives transposed onto the cricket field: great men, great virtues, great flaws, their stories part-strategy manual, part-character sketch, part-historical chronicle.
When Arlott writes of W. G. Grace, he is not merely describing a captain but inaugurating a mythology. Grace’s command was not only tactical but also symbolic: he was the personification of cricket’s Victorian self-confidence, its imperial swagger, its sense of destiny. Grace was not a democratic captain; he was an autocrat, a colossus around whom everything revolved. For Arlott, this was greatness, even if it was dictatorial.
By contrast, Arthur Shrewsbury represented the meticulous artisan, the professional who brought method where there had been instinct, who balanced individual artistry with collective rigor. Each portrait is not merely of a leader but of a social type, a cultural representative of an England in transition.
Then there is Douglas Jardine, still a polarising figure when Arlott was writing, and still one now. Arlott treats him with the seriousness due to a man who changed the moral debate around the game. Jardine’s Bodyline tactics were not just about winning but about redefining the permissible limits of competitiveness. To Arlott, Jardine was cold, precise, unbending — the archetype of the ruthless leader whose ends justified his means. Whether one admires him or condemns him, his greatness lay in his capacity to impose his will on both his team and his opponents.
Reading these accounts in 2012, the contrast was startling. For by then, cricket had seen captains who could not be reduced to mere archetypes of ruthlessness or authority.
Steve Waugh, for example, brought a philosophy of mental disintegration that went beyond Jardine’s machinations, yet tempered it with a capacity to back his men to the hilt, to create a culture of invincibility rather than merely a tactical plan.
Ricky Ponting, in turn, was the inheritor of that culture, his greatness lying less in originality and more in sustaining the machine, marshalling resources, and extending dominance.
Dhoni, at the other end of the spectrum, was almost anti-Jardine: inscrutable, detached, unflappable, leading with silence and calm rather than rhetoric and rage. For Indian fans, his World Cup win in 2011 was proof that a captain did not need to embody colonial swagger or ruthless antagonism; he could be a poker-faced small-town man who knew how to marshal talent and maintain equilibrium under pressure.
Arlott’s captains were primarily English, with Armstrong as the large-bodied Australian exception, and they belonged to a world where captaincy was not yet about media handling, franchise politics, or multicultural dressing rooms. Leadership then was exercised in the long shadow of class, empire, and amateur-professional divides. Percy Chapman, for instance, comes across as the amateur who delighted in camaraderie, in leading through bonhomie rather than authoritarian command.
The charm of Arlott’s book is that he captures these shades with a literary precision — Chapman the convivial, Jardine the grim, Grace the imperial patriarch. But by 2012, leadership had acquired dimensions Arlott never had to reckon with: the balancing of egos in a dressing room full of millionaires, the negotiations with national boards, the omnipresent scrutiny of television cameras, the pressure of three formats and relentless scheduling.
Hansie Cronje’s name casts perhaps the darkest shadow on the lineage of captaincy. If Jardine redefined the ethics of competition, Cronje exposed the fragility of those ethics under the temptations of money. His match-fixing scandal showed that the authority of a captain could be corrupted, that leadership could be a mask for betrayal. Arlott’s romantic profiles of his eight captains, suffused with respect even when critical, would have had to reckon with this kind of modern fall from grace had he lived longer. The very idea of “great captain” now requires a scrutiny of integrity, not just tactical acumen or man-management skills.
Sourav Ganguly, by contrast, epitomised the nationalist resurgence in leadership. If Grace symbolised Victorian England’s confidence, Ganguly symbolised a post-liberalisation India’s self-assertion. His shirt-waving at Lord’s in 2002 was as symbolic an act as any tactical decision, signalling that Indian cricket would no longer be docile or deferential. Arlott’s book, locked in the English tradition, could not have foreseen this form of expressive, theatrical leadership. Yet in its insistence that captains embody something larger than themselves, something of the nation or the era, it provides a lens through which Ganguly’s significance is visible.
Nasser Hussain, too, complicates the Arlottian framework. He was no natural genius, no imperial patriarch, no cheerful amateur. He was, instead, a fighter, a pragmatist, a man who led England out of a culture of mediocrity by sheer grit and defiance. Reading Arlott after Hussain is to realise that greatness is not always about glory but sometimes about rescue, about stabilising a faltering ship and charting a new direction.
By 2012, then, Arlott’s pantheon looked both venerable and incomplete. His eight captains remain important, but the conversation has expanded. One could not write of great captains without including Clive Lloyd, who took a disparate set of Caribbean islands and forged them into the most dominant cricketing machine the world had seen. One could not ignore Imran Khan, who led Pakistan to a World Cup and embodied a mixture of charisma, political savvy, and sheer belief that galvanised a team of mercurial talents. These absences are not Arlott’s fault — he was writing in 1971, before Lloyd’s West Indies dominance, before Imran’s charisma turned destiny — but they remind us that the canon of “great captains” is a living one, constantly rewritten by the demands of history.
Yet to read Arlott is not to dismiss him. On the contrary, his book remains essential because it captures a style of leadership that is foundational, a genealogy of command from which later captains emerged or against which they rebelled. His prose is luminous, his sketches rich, his sense of cricket’s moral and cultural texture acute. What he lacked in foresight he made up for in depth, and the captains he chose still embody eternal questions: how authoritarian should a leader be? how ruthless is too ruthless? how much camaraderie is compatible with discipline? These questions haunted Grace and Chapman as much as they haunt Dhoni and Ponting.
Reading Cricket: The Great Captains in 2012, after India’s World Cup victory, was thus like revisiting an old atlas. The borders had shifted, new nations had appeared, new oceans had been crossed — but the old lines still mattered, still provided the foundations on which new maps were being are drawn. Dhoni’s serenity, Waugh’s ruthlessness, Ganguly’s defiance, Hussain’s grit — all can be traced back to the types Arlott immortalised, even if they have morphed and mutated under modern pressures.
The book is a reminder, too, of how cricket writing itself has changed. Arlott’s was a literary, almost pastoral mode, focused on character and culture, narrated with the calm authority of a commentator gazing across time. By 2012, cricket writing had become more journalistic, more statistical, more immediate, yet also more global, more comparative. To read Arlott is to enter a slower rhythm, to savour the cadences of a writer who treated cricket not as a database but as a human drama unfolding across generations.
Cut to 2025:
When I wrote of Arlott’s Great Captains in 2012, Dhoni still stood at the centre of Indian cricket’s destiny, Steve Waugh had passed his baton to Ponting, and the newer captains seemed yet to prove their final chapters.
Now, in 2025, with Dhoni retired and part-myth, part-mentor, the horizon has shifted again. Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, and Ben Stokes stand as living testaments to how leadership itself has become plural, situational, and more scrutinised than Arlott could ever have imagined.
Rohit is perhaps the most “Arlottian” of the three — the genial leader, calm, expansive, his captaincy marked by intuition and a touch of ease. He does not dominate by charisma but by making space for others, echoing something of Percy Chapman’s conviviality, though in a very modern, tactical context.
Kohli, in contrast, belongs with the titanic leaders who stamp their identity on their sides, much as W. G. Grace once did. His fire, his visible aggression, his insistence on fitness and intensity altered the DNA of Indian cricket as palpably as Jardine’s ruthless edge reshaped England’s. For Kohli, leadership was not simply a function of runs scored but of cultural transformation — the cultivation of a side that played hard, loud, and without apology.
And then there is Ben Stokes, perhaps the most paradoxical figure of all: a talismanic player who embodies the heroics of Botham but combines them with the modern ethos of aggressive, collective belief. As captain, he has turned England into a laboratory of risk and spectacle under the “Bazball” philosophy. Arlott, whose book was steeped in notions of discipline, control, and tradition, would have found Stokes’s leadership fascinating, perhaps bewildering, but certainly within the lineage of captains who sought not just to win but to redefine how the game was played.
The modern captain, then, is no longer only a strategist or moral figurehead; he is a media presence, a corporate face, a cultural ambassador, a negotiator of calendars and franchises. Yet the old truths Arlott wrote of still apply: the tension between authority and camaraderie, the pressure of embodying an era’s temperament, the need to inspire men to exceed themselves. Reading Arlott in 2025, one feels not that he is obsolete but that his pantheon awaits its sequels — a gallery that must now include Dhoni’s serenity, Kohli’s fury, Rohit’s ease, Stokes’s daring, and the flickering promise of India’s next generation: Shubman Gill with his composure, KL Rahul with his resilience, and Rishabh Pant with his audacity. The story of “great captains” has only grown more intricate, and Arlott’s book remains the prologue to a saga still unfolding.
In the end, Cricket: The Great Captains is less about tactical manuals than about human portraits. Its limitation is that it cannot speak to the multiplicity of leaderships that emerged in the modern game, but its strength is that it illuminates the eternal essence of captaincy: the burden of responsibility, the balance between authority and empathy, the way a single figure can change the fortunes of a team and, by extension, the self-image of a nation.
Reading it in 2012, one realises that the conversation has grown larger, more diverse, more global — but that Arlott’s voice still echoes, like a commentator whose words linger long after the game has moved on.
This book, reads today like an elegiac mural on the walls of cricket’s long pavilion. It is a book written at a particular moment, before one-day cricket had conquered the imagination, before Kerry Packer had redrawn the economic boundaries of the game, before television made a captain a global face, and long before the IPL transformed leadership into part-brand, part-strategy, part-psychological warfare.
I got hold of this in 2012, after Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s World Cup triumph, after Steve Waugh’s ice-blooded dominion, after Ricky Ponting’s ruthlessness, Hansie Cronje’s dark fall, Nasser Hussain’s stubborn grit, and Sourav Ganguly’s combative renaissance of Indian cricket!! Back then, it was like to recognise how far the definition of “great captain” had shifted.
Yet in Arlott’s prose, one also finds the timeless essentials of leadership: vision, nerve, intuition, man-management, and the ability to transform a team into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Arlott was already the poet laureate of cricket commentary, with a voice that could carry both gravitas and mischief, and this book is in many ways an extension of that artistry. He selects eight captains — men who shaped cricket not only by their tactical nous but by the moral and cultural weight they brought to the game.
They are all, inevitably, men of a certain vintage: the likes of W. G. Grace, Arthur Shrewsbury, Warwick Armstrong, Percy Chapman, Douglas Jardine, and others who commanded not just teams but entire eras.
Reading about them is like reading Plutarch’s Lives transposed onto the cricket field: great men, great virtues, great flaws, their stories part-strategy manual, part-character sketch, part-historical chronicle.
When Arlott writes of W. G. Grace, he is not merely describing a captain but inaugurating a mythology. Grace’s command was not only tactical but also symbolic: he was the personification of cricket’s Victorian self-confidence, its imperial swagger, its sense of destiny. Grace was not a democratic captain; he was an autocrat, a colossus around whom everything revolved. For Arlott, this was greatness, even if it was dictatorial.
By contrast, Arthur Shrewsbury represented the meticulous artisan, the professional who brought method where there had been instinct, who balanced individual artistry with collective rigor. Each portrait is not merely of a leader but of a social type, a cultural representative of an England in transition.
Then there is Douglas Jardine, still a polarising figure when Arlott was writing, and still one now. Arlott treats him with the seriousness due to a man who changed the moral debate around the game. Jardine’s Bodyline tactics were not just about winning but about redefining the permissible limits of competitiveness. To Arlott, Jardine was cold, precise, unbending — the archetype of the ruthless leader whose ends justified his means. Whether one admires him or condemns him, his greatness lay in his capacity to impose his will on both his team and his opponents.
Reading these accounts in 2012, the contrast was startling. For by then, cricket had seen captains who could not be reduced to mere archetypes of ruthlessness or authority.
Steve Waugh, for example, brought a philosophy of mental disintegration that went beyond Jardine’s machinations, yet tempered it with a capacity to back his men to the hilt, to create a culture of invincibility rather than merely a tactical plan.
Ricky Ponting, in turn, was the inheritor of that culture, his greatness lying less in originality and more in sustaining the machine, marshalling resources, and extending dominance.
Dhoni, at the other end of the spectrum, was almost anti-Jardine: inscrutable, detached, unflappable, leading with silence and calm rather than rhetoric and rage. For Indian fans, his World Cup win in 2011 was proof that a captain did not need to embody colonial swagger or ruthless antagonism; he could be a poker-faced small-town man who knew how to marshal talent and maintain equilibrium under pressure.
Arlott’s captains were primarily English, with Armstrong as the large-bodied Australian exception, and they belonged to a world where captaincy was not yet about media handling, franchise politics, or multicultural dressing rooms. Leadership then was exercised in the long shadow of class, empire, and amateur-professional divides. Percy Chapman, for instance, comes across as the amateur who delighted in camaraderie, in leading through bonhomie rather than authoritarian command.
The charm of Arlott’s book is that he captures these shades with a literary precision — Chapman the convivial, Jardine the grim, Grace the imperial patriarch. But by 2012, leadership had acquired dimensions Arlott never had to reckon with: the balancing of egos in a dressing room full of millionaires, the negotiations with national boards, the omnipresent scrutiny of television cameras, the pressure of three formats and relentless scheduling.
Hansie Cronje’s name casts perhaps the darkest shadow on the lineage of captaincy. If Jardine redefined the ethics of competition, Cronje exposed the fragility of those ethics under the temptations of money. His match-fixing scandal showed that the authority of a captain could be corrupted, that leadership could be a mask for betrayal. Arlott’s romantic profiles of his eight captains, suffused with respect even when critical, would have had to reckon with this kind of modern fall from grace had he lived longer. The very idea of “great captain” now requires a scrutiny of integrity, not just tactical acumen or man-management skills.
Sourav Ganguly, by contrast, epitomised the nationalist resurgence in leadership. If Grace symbolised Victorian England’s confidence, Ganguly symbolised a post-liberalisation India’s self-assertion. His shirt-waving at Lord’s in 2002 was as symbolic an act as any tactical decision, signalling that Indian cricket would no longer be docile or deferential. Arlott’s book, locked in the English tradition, could not have foreseen this form of expressive, theatrical leadership. Yet in its insistence that captains embody something larger than themselves, something of the nation or the era, it provides a lens through which Ganguly’s significance is visible.
Nasser Hussain, too, complicates the Arlottian framework. He was no natural genius, no imperial patriarch, no cheerful amateur. He was, instead, a fighter, a pragmatist, a man who led England out of a culture of mediocrity by sheer grit and defiance. Reading Arlott after Hussain is to realise that greatness is not always about glory but sometimes about rescue, about stabilising a faltering ship and charting a new direction.
By 2012, then, Arlott’s pantheon looked both venerable and incomplete. His eight captains remain important, but the conversation has expanded. One could not write of great captains without including Clive Lloyd, who took a disparate set of Caribbean islands and forged them into the most dominant cricketing machine the world had seen. One could not ignore Imran Khan, who led Pakistan to a World Cup and embodied a mixture of charisma, political savvy, and sheer belief that galvanised a team of mercurial talents. These absences are not Arlott’s fault — he was writing in 1971, before Lloyd’s West Indies dominance, before Imran’s charisma turned destiny — but they remind us that the canon of “great captains” is a living one, constantly rewritten by the demands of history.
Yet to read Arlott is not to dismiss him. On the contrary, his book remains essential because it captures a style of leadership that is foundational, a genealogy of command from which later captains emerged or against which they rebelled. His prose is luminous, his sketches rich, his sense of cricket’s moral and cultural texture acute. What he lacked in foresight he made up for in depth, and the captains he chose still embody eternal questions: how authoritarian should a leader be? how ruthless is too ruthless? how much camaraderie is compatible with discipline? These questions haunted Grace and Chapman as much as they haunt Dhoni and Ponting.
Reading Cricket: The Great Captains in 2012, after India’s World Cup victory, was thus like revisiting an old atlas. The borders had shifted, new nations had appeared, new oceans had been crossed — but the old lines still mattered, still provided the foundations on which new maps were being are drawn. Dhoni’s serenity, Waugh’s ruthlessness, Ganguly’s defiance, Hussain’s grit — all can be traced back to the types Arlott immortalised, even if they have morphed and mutated under modern pressures.
The book is a reminder, too, of how cricket writing itself has changed. Arlott’s was a literary, almost pastoral mode, focused on character and culture, narrated with the calm authority of a commentator gazing across time. By 2012, cricket writing had become more journalistic, more statistical, more immediate, yet also more global, more comparative. To read Arlott is to enter a slower rhythm, to savour the cadences of a writer who treated cricket not as a database but as a human drama unfolding across generations.
Cut to 2025:
When I wrote of Arlott’s Great Captains in 2012, Dhoni still stood at the centre of Indian cricket’s destiny, Steve Waugh had passed his baton to Ponting, and the newer captains seemed yet to prove their final chapters.
Now, in 2025, with Dhoni retired and part-myth, part-mentor, the horizon has shifted again. Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, and Ben Stokes stand as living testaments to how leadership itself has become plural, situational, and more scrutinised than Arlott could ever have imagined.
Rohit is perhaps the most “Arlottian” of the three — the genial leader, calm, expansive, his captaincy marked by intuition and a touch of ease. He does not dominate by charisma but by making space for others, echoing something of Percy Chapman’s conviviality, though in a very modern, tactical context.
Kohli, in contrast, belongs with the titanic leaders who stamp their identity on their sides, much as W. G. Grace once did. His fire, his visible aggression, his insistence on fitness and intensity altered the DNA of Indian cricket as palpably as Jardine’s ruthless edge reshaped England’s. For Kohli, leadership was not simply a function of runs scored but of cultural transformation — the cultivation of a side that played hard, loud, and without apology.
And then there is Ben Stokes, perhaps the most paradoxical figure of all: a talismanic player who embodies the heroics of Botham but combines them with the modern ethos of aggressive, collective belief. As captain, he has turned England into a laboratory of risk and spectacle under the “Bazball” philosophy. Arlott, whose book was steeped in notions of discipline, control, and tradition, would have found Stokes’s leadership fascinating, perhaps bewildering, but certainly within the lineage of captains who sought not just to win but to redefine how the game was played.
The modern captain, then, is no longer only a strategist or moral figurehead; he is a media presence, a corporate face, a cultural ambassador, a negotiator of calendars and franchises. Yet the old truths Arlott wrote of still apply: the tension between authority and camaraderie, the pressure of embodying an era’s temperament, the need to inspire men to exceed themselves. Reading Arlott in 2025, one feels not that he is obsolete but that his pantheon awaits its sequels — a gallery that must now include Dhoni’s serenity, Kohli’s fury, Rohit’s ease, Stokes’s daring, and the flickering promise of India’s next generation: Shubman Gill with his composure, KL Rahul with his resilience, and Rishabh Pant with his audacity. The story of “great captains” has only grown more intricate, and Arlott’s book remains the prologue to a saga still unfolding.
In the end, Cricket: The Great Captains is less about tactical manuals than about human portraits. Its limitation is that it cannot speak to the multiplicity of leaderships that emerged in the modern game, but its strength is that it illuminates the eternal essence of captaincy: the burden of responsibility, the balance between authority and empathy, the way a single figure can change the fortunes of a team and, by extension, the self-image of a nation.
Reading it in 2012, one realises that the conversation has grown larger, more diverse, more global — but that Arlott’s voice still echoes, like a commentator whose words linger long after the game has moved on.
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