Are fast bowlers historically snubbed for cricket captaincy?

Sport journalist Simon Smale wrote an article recently that asserted that the reason fast bowlers almost never captain Test teams is because they weren’t ‘gentlemen’.

“Cricket, throughout its history, has been a tool through which the upper-middle class have maintained their social standing over the rest, be it across the Empire in Britain’s varied colonies, or at home in class-divided pre-war England,” he wrote on the ABC website.

“The root of this discrimination against bowlers can be found in the old distinctions between Gentlemen and Players that existed in English cricket right up until 1962.

“Generally speaking, Players were bowlers and lower class, while the Gentlemen were batsmen … ”

Can this be true? It sounds plausible enough. After all, there was such a thing as a British Empire, and class seemed to be part of the warp and weft of English life. But does it stack up?

(Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

The origin of the distinction between amateurs (Gentlemen) and professionals (Players) has as much to do with the spirit of cricket as with class distinctions. The amateur ethos emphasised self-discipline, fair play and cricket as an end in itself. Related to this were concerns about gambling, corruption and gamesmanship.

The English scholar Christopher Brookes wrote in his 1978 book English cricket that “the great objection to professionals was that they were believed to be a threat to the sanctity of sport”. In other words, amateurs resisted the commercialisation of culture.

Much of the class distinction argument overlooks the schism between the professionals of the north and the amateurs of the south, which is better understood as a contest between southern romanticism in the form of the MCC and northern pragmatism.

Still, Smale’s charges beg several practical questions. Is it the case that fast bowlers almost never captained the England team? Were amateurs (Gentlemen) batsmen and professionals (Players) bowlers? And what of cricket as a tool of oppression?

Let’s look at the period between 1876 and 1900 to answer these questions. The era of the touring professional XIs stagnated around 1870 after the public lost interest in watching one-sided contests against local pick-up sides. The game then re-formed around the first County Championship in 1873 and the birth of the international era in 1876. The end date, 1900, represents the beginning of the decline of Empire.

Toffee-nosed batsmen and unwashed bowlers?
Is it the case that bowlers were all horny-handed plebeians and batsmen were all upper-class nitwits? The answer is an emphatic ‘not really’.

The results of the 60 Gentlemen versus Players matches between 1876 and 1900 reveal this: the Players won 24 and the Gentlemen won 22, with 13 draws and one tie. The winning margins are also relevant: 13 were quite close, 25 were decided around an innings or more (Players 14, Gentlemen 11), with the rest being relatively comfortable one way or the other.

The point is that winning is based on bowling the other mob out twice. A pattern of results like this would not be possible if one side had no bowlers to speak of.

(Credit: Wolliwoo/CC BY-NC 2.0)

Cricket as a tool of oppression?
If cricket “throughout its history” has been a tool of the upper class to assert its social standing, then we would expect to see it clearly expressed in the choice of the England captain and in the composition of the England team from the very beginning.

We would expect to see a succession of dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons leading England onto the field. Alas, we were deprived of a parade of Lords Throbbing, Parakeet, Circumference and Tangent. Likewise, there were few to take the field that rejoiced in such unlikely names as Tarquin, Rupert, Algernon, Torquil, Rafe, Orlando or – god forbid – Jonquil. We don’t. Instead we have a mere baronet called Tim!

The first England captain, James Lillywhite (1876), is a thick edge to the keeper. Not only was Lillywhite a bowler but he was a professional. He was a tile maker and the son of a brick maker.

The second captain fits postmodern narratives about power in the form of Lord Harris – George Harris, 4th Baron Harris of Eton and Oxford, Governor of Bombay. He was both an amateur and a batsman of sorts.

The third captain, Alfred Shaw, is another thick edge to the keeper. Another bowler, another professional.

Again, what is the overall pattern? The analysis produces this: of the 15 England captains appointed between 1876 and 1900, four were upper class (Lord Harris, Ivo Bligh, Lord Hawke and Tim O’Brien) and three were upper middle class (Albert Neilson Hornby, Allan Steel and Sir Charles Aubrey Smith).

The rest were working or middle class: Arthur Shrewsbury (a draftsman), Walter Read (a schoolmaster’s assistant), William Gilbert Grace (a GP), Monty Bowden (a stockbroker’s clerk), Andrew Stoddart (an undefined species of ‘stockbroker’) and Archie MacLaren (an employee of the Lancashire County Cricket Club).

There is a mix of backgrounds: 20 per cent were working class, 27 per cent were upper class, 20 per cent were upper middle class and 33 per cent were decidedly middle class. So while it is certainly true the majority of England captains in this era were amateurs, the slight majority were working or middle class.

While 60 per cent of this first group of England captains were indeed batsmen, a third were bowlers. One of those, Allan Steel, was an upper-middle-class barrister.

The composition of the early England teams is also revealing. In the first seven series, consisting of 14 Tests, professionals made up two-thirds of the team on average. The professionals included batsmen such as George Ulyett, Graham Barlow and Shrewsbury; keeper Dick Pilling; and all-rounder Billy Barnes. The composition of the England team was pretty much the same in 1899.

Nor does Smale explain exactly why the batsman-captain formula has been the norm throughout the cricket-playing world.

Occam’s razor
Like many things today it is enough for a proposition to be superficially plausible for it to hold. It’s easy to assert that fast bowlers are rarely appointed as captains because of the imperialist roots of the game, and it’s difficult to disentangle the effects of imperialism and class from the shape that things take more or less organically.

Such arguments usually result in a hard-fought draw or, most likely, a match abandoned due to fog.

Ricky Ponting provided the most straightforward answer three weeks ago, speaking on The Front Bar.

He said that bowlers are so intense with their efforts to give 100% for the team that it would have been extremely hard for them to anticipate what could happen in the next over and plan for the other bowlers. And, quite apart from that, nobody would have been able to get the ball out of the hands of someone like Glenn McGrath.