Of course, it had to be Joe Root. No quibbling there. Call it what you will: the safe choice, the obvious choice, the conservative choice, perhaps even the only realistic choice.
None of which makes it wrong. A door is the only realistic option for walking through a wall. It would be extremely churlish, and possibly very painful, to choose an alternative on those grounds alone.
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The more interesting question is why Root was such an obvious choice. In succeeding Alastair Cook, Root will become the 43rd man to captain England in Test cricket since the Second World War. Twelve have been all-rounders, one a wicketkeeper. And while Root is about to become the 29th specialist batsman, Bob Willis remains the one and only specialist bowler.
Why might this be? The simple explanation is that captaincy is not just a function of tactics, but leadership. Leadership, in turn, is partly a function of image, which means it is shaped by our preconceptions. And the truism that batsmen make the best captains is one of those maxims that seems to have passed, virtually unchallenged, from generation to generation.
At its heart is the trope that captains should retain a cool head and a broad perspective. We imagine them surveying the game from first slip, or dispensing wise counsel from mid-off, not charging in themselves, sweaty and dishevelled. In his book The Art of Captaincy, Mike Brearley says fast bowlers should be considered "only as a last resort". Donald Bradman believed their "preoccupation with their personal responsibilities" rendered them generally unfit to lead.
Yet it is an idea at odds with other team sports. In football, captains are traditionally centre-halves or central midfielders: physical, heavily involved players. In rugby union, they are mainly drawn from the pack. Only in cricket, it seems, is detachment seen as a virtue.
There is a subtle class prejudice at work, too: a distinction that goes to the game's origins, when the bowlers were grafting professionals and the batsmen gentlemen amateurs. Though it is more than half a century since the divide was formally abolished, the idea persists: batting is an exploit of the mind, bowling of the body.
Yet you could very easily look at it another way. Captaincy is essentially a pre-emptive function: judging where batsmen might score, predicting how bowlers will fare against them. Surely, then, it is more analogous to bowling than to batting, a largely reactive skill. The idea that bowling captains may be better qualified to juggle an attack, identify a batsman's weakness or judge a declaration is largely unexplored.
Brearley points out that two of the greatest captains, Richie Benaud and Ray Illingworth, were bowlers. From more recent eras, I would add Pakistan's Imran Khan, India's Kapil Dev and New Zealand's Daniel Vettori.
But we are still looking at a lamentably small sample size: of the 88 men to captain a Test side this century, only a dozen, generously, were bowlers more than batsmen. Shane Warne never captained a Test side. Nor did Zaheer Khan. Nor, in all likelihood, will Stuart Broad, one of the greatest problem-solvers English cricket has produced. How many more never got a chance?
None of which is to diminish Root in the slightest, a very fine batsman and clearly a very fine man. It is hardly his fault, after all, that there is not an abundance of candidates. Nor is it his fault that to English cricket's overly trained eye he so inescapably looks the part: that he so effortlessly greases a short cut of the imagination that probably says less about him than it does about us.
The Telegraph, London
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