England’s Greatest Cricket Captains

The captain in cricket, more than in any other sport, is integral to the team, how it plays and crucially its chance of success. Time will tell if Ben Stokes’ appointment will be a success, and if it even tempts England fans to use any free bet offers to back their team to win a test series.

Yes, a captain needs a team around him, but he is the one whose personality, on and off the field shapes the team in his image. It is his performance, not just with the bat and ball, but with his tactics and man-management that will have the biggest effect on tipping the odds for a game and a series into his team’s favour.

With Stokes’ appointment, it is a good time to look back at previous test captains, to see who managed to make the step up a success, and who couldn’t adapt to the extra pressure and responsibilities.

It is hard to compare like for like as you go back into the realms of history. The game has changed so much, and though a great captain should be such in any era, stats need to be looked at carefully, when you consider the pitches games were played on, the quality of the opposition and the number of games that are played. If you look at the captains with the most victories you will almost always be dealing with the most recent incumbents by dint of the amount of cricket that takes place in modern cricket.

Joe Root

Joe Root is the perfect example. Though it went wrong at the end of his tenure, Root led his team to more test wins than any other Englishman in history, with 27 coming from his 64 tests. He was however captain for more tests than anyone else, and Michael Vaughan managed 26 victories despite only captaining the side 51 times.

In which case a better judgement is the win percentage each captain managed while in the job. The caveat still exists of course that people would have been captain at times when the England side was at different stages of its development and of differing quality. To be frank, no matter how good a captain you are, you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.

Michael Vaughan

The captain with the best win percentage in recent times is the aforementioned Michael Vaughan with a very impressive 50.98 % (compared to 42.19% for Root). Vaughan would be many people’s vote if only for his performance in what is, in all likelihood the greatest series in England’s history, the 2005 ashes series.

Andrew Strauss

Another player whose stint as captain is almost defined by an Ashes victory, this time when his side retained the urn on Australian soil in the 2010/2011 series. It was the first time England had tasted success in Australia for 24 years and served to put a seal on his time as captain. Winning 24 of his 50 tests, he has a winning percentage of 48.00.

Nasser Hussain

If you study the statistics on captains, it will tell you that Hussain won just 17 of his 45 tests in charge giving him a win percentage of 37.78. That doesn’t begin to tell half the story, however. The right-handed batsman took over the reins when English test cricket was on its knees, and in partnership with Duncan Fletcher managed to get it back into shape. A lot of what his successors Vaughan and Straus achieved can be put down to the solid foundations that Hussain put in place.

Mike Brearley

Talk to anyone who was captained by Brearley and almost to a man they will tell you he was the best captain they ever played under. As a player, certainly, on the international scene, Brearley was not world-class, but his man-management skills were second to none. We are unlikely to ever see his like again, but his cerebral approach to the game was a thing of pure joy, and he was able to not just get the most out of each individual player, but out of the team as well. Pleasingly, this is borne out in the statistics. He led the team a total of 18 times, winning 18, losing just 4 and drawing 9 giving him a win percentage of 58.06 comfortably the highest of any England captain.