The psychology behind the freedom of Bazball

At 81, still working three days a week, Brearley remains full of fascination about people in all their complexities, whether in wider life or elite cricket. How to play, and live, with confidence and freedom? How to wrestle with our natures, not least in the crucible of an Ashes Test?

Understanding human minds has been a life’s work for Brearley, whether as one of English cricket’s most admired captains or as the lifelong student who once set about a PhD entitled The Explanation of Action.

“Why did I do that? Why am I tempted to do that? Am I compelled to do that?” Brearley muses. “There are so many aspects of that question, whether it is a run of form in cricket or in analysis.”

Like most therapists, it was Brearley’s own complexities that he analysed first, such as the dream on the eve of his debut as a Test captain; imagining himself as a snail-like creature on a stage, in the shadow of an extrovert predecessor in Tony Greig. In his struggles with how to give his best out in the middle, Brearley also discovered the ability to eke out the potential in others – famously in 1981 and the Ashes series that would define my childhood watching the sport.

All of which makes him very well equipped to understand how Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum, as captain and coach respectively, have transformed the England Test team in the past 12 months. We rightly laud the liberation and commitment to attack but Brearley believes it has been possible only because of the struggles both men have endured.

“It’s a hypothesis of mine that both were depressed,” he says. “Sam Mendes made a very good film about Stokes and he was very open about it. His father died, the court case [he was cleared of affray in August 2018 after an incident in Bristol the previous September], he lost his pleasure in the game and became depressed. McCullum describes himself as being that way in his early days of captaincy [with New Zealand] and feeling like the whole team around him had lost that spark of enjoyment.

“So I think this attitude now is partly a reaction to that depression. It brings them back to life and others to life, infectiously from them. Intuitively, I do think they know themselves through those experiences and recognise if it is happening in them or other people.”

It has brought a remarkable change in form, and mood, but what impresses Brearley most about Stokes and McCullum is that they are three-dimensional and not just cavalier. He loves McCullum’s idea of connecting England’s cricketers with the child within them – the playful little boy who fell in love with the game – but it must be balanced.

“We can be in touch with the childish or childlike part but it also needs some maturity, steadying down,” he says. “In every area of life, if you are too excitable, manic, over the top and you ignore the drawbacks, then there is something lacking in your ability to change and grow.

“In Stokes, I am told he was the biggest trainer of all the England team. Playing Tests in India, they were given the chance to have a rest in Dubai but he stayed in Bombay to practise on a turning wicket against spin. So it’s not just devil-may-care.

“Stokes is pretty shrewd as well as adventurous. He makes good decisions on the whole about changing the bowling and field positions, the technicalities of the job.

“He’s got the bowlers willing to agree that they will bowl to an attacking field and they don’t mind too much about going for runs. That’s a big change in [James] Anderson and [Stuart] Broad, terrific bowlers who have always had a quarter of an eye on their analysis. He’s done that with his energy and personality.

“And they are less scared of losing than we were. But sometimes it won’t work out and you can get people on your back. [Garry] Sobers in 1968 against England declared and set 215 to win in about three hours and they had only three bowlers, no Wes Hall or Charlie Griffith. They lost by seven wickets. Sobers, probably the greatest all-rounder there has ever been, was vilified. They held it against him for the rest of his career.”

He believes that Stokes and McCullum are smart enough to know the importance of variation, especially in a series, beginning on Friday, which is likely to be hard fought. “There are different virtues too; honourable ways of playing for a draw, like [Mike] Atherton with his ten-hour 185 against South Africa [in 1995],” Brearley says. “Sometimes you have to change, to integrate different styles. But I like the overall attitude and it’s amazing how quickly they have turned things around.”

Brearley muses on this, and much more, in his new book, a work in which he dances between cricket reflections and his work in therapy.

It is remarkable how he juggled twin careers, working as a nursing assistant in a clinic in north London for two winters between cricket seasons. Pursuing psychoanalysis, Brearley would lie on the couch as a patient and trainee before heading off to play for England.

Some scoffed. “I don’t want any of your egghead intellectual stuff,” Geoffrey Boycott once snapped at him in the dressing room. But while Brearley’s wife once said that “there are two Mikes, the cricketer and the psychoanalyst”, he believes they have closely informed each other.

Captaincy and therapy overlap. “When is it helpful to challenge, or be more empathic? When do you confront? If they are offended, do you persist? It’s all connected, the art of it, like captaincy.”

Brearley did not make his Test debut until he was 34, averaging 22.88 in 66 Test innings without a century, but his reputation was made in that Ashes summer of 1981 when he was recalled as skipper, taking over from Ian Botham. Bob Willis had lost his role as strike bowler, caught between speed and accuracy; Botham could not find his venom with the ball. Brearley understood that he had to work very differently with each.

“With Bob, if you tried to gee him up too forcibly, he might start to think he wasn’t very good,” Brearley says. “But if you did that with Botham he would bristle with anger and bowl with more energy. A different psychology.

“Bob came into Headingley with everyone saying, ‘Just bowl as fast and straight as you can’, like you might say in a village match. He came charging down that hill and got it just right.

“I felt Botham was trying to make a determined effort to swing the ball, but he was stepping in. I teased him about it, calling him the ‘Side-Step Queen’. He started bowling the old way, hitting the ground hard, doing everything rather quickly.

“Such talent, such a gifted cricketer with such a wholehearted attitude, like Stokes. Stokes is the better batsman, Botham the better bowler but wonderful cricketers, wanting to attack not just with their own play but the tactics of the team.

“Botham was unlucky enough to become captain with all those Tests against the West Indies, easily the best team in the world at that time. Stokes has been luckier.”

A deep thinker who, early in his career for Middlesex, would write Shakespeare’s sonnets on his hand and learn them by heart in the field, Brearley writes about how he could often feel unprepared or unconfident, recalling another dream of a bat turning to rubber in his hands.

I wonder if he would have thrived under this England leadership? “I would have been a better batsman at Test level if I had not been inhibited, unsure of myself,” he says. “Even the courage I had was a bit stiff-upper-lip – an effort and a tension in it and it did not allow for the transition to something freer.

“I admire in Stokes and McCullum how they do not show their disappointment or disapproval of others in the team. I’m afraid I sometimes did. Often the very best players haven’t had that empathy with those struggling or those not so gifted but I have a sense that these two are capable of being in touch with it.

“Take Zak Crawley. He’s had a pretty rough time on the whole. He has tried to let the new ball go rather than lunging at it or driving too early without losing the things he has. They have shown faith to quite an extreme extent. He’s fortunate but has a talent and they have backed it.”

Brearley will be at Lord’s for a couple of days for the second Test, observing with his usual curiosity. He will contemplate not only the cricket, the ebb and flow of a series he thinks England can win by a whisker, but how the players grapple with patterns of technique and thought.

“I remember with Derek Randall, Doug Insole [the then England selector] said to him, ‘You’ve got out twice for nought hooking before you’ve even got the pace of the pitch’. Randall replied, ‘Well, it’s my nature’. And Insole said, ‘Well, you had better think about your nature’. Which is a good answer.

“We all revert to default positions, especially at times of stress, falling back into our various traps. Reconfiguring our world is painstaking, never-ending work.

“But the problem comes that if you think about it too much it is inhibiting and makes you self-conscious, like the centipede thinking which leg it has to put in front of another. How to be reflective, but free ourselves at the same time. That’s one of the fascinations about sport and it comes into everyday life and therapy.”

– Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind by Mike Brearley is out now (Constable, pounds 22)