Shubman Gill and the Magic Captain Theory

The idea that one person can revolutionise everything belongs to old cricket. The modern game has moved on, and is smarter at using resources.

UK readers can get their copy of the book here:

India hasn't just lost runs, they've lost years. They have lost people who have been there and done that. This team will not have R Ashwin, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, or Mohammed Shami. Not to mention Cheteshwar Pujara or Ajinkya Rahane either.

By the end of some of those careers, a lot of people on the internet had very strong views around their cricket. But I don't think anyone really ever questioned their inherited wisdom. Yes, they might have disagreed with certain decisions, but these are people who had lived very full cricket lives. They had been all around the world, lived through scandals, through chokes, through incredible victories, had lies made up against them, and seen about everything that you could see on a cricket field.

What India have just lost is something the business world would call ‘institutional knowledge’. Yes, some of the younger players might make more runs, but they can't actually overcome that other part. The issue that most people will have at the moment is: can Shubman Gill be a good Test captain? That comes back to the way we think about the ‘Magic Captain Theory’ in Test cricket, that this one person is going to unite everyone and make brilliant strategic decisions. The real question that we should be asking is: on the worst days, does Gill have the support around him that he needs to lead this side?

If you've been online since the World Test Championship final finished, you would probably have noticed a lot of people saying, ‘Look, Steve Smith left the field and suddenly Australia didn't take any wickets.’

Let's call this the Magic Captain Theory. For many people, Smith is seen as such a tactical genius, that by not being on the field, it meant that Australia suddenly couldn't get any more wickets. So just on a whim, I looked up the captaincy records of Smith and Pat Cummins.

Turns out that Cummins actually has a slightly higher win percentage than Smith, although it's almost exactly the same.

But look at what this Australian team is. Usman Khawaja certainly thinks a lot about cricket. Travis Head was made a state captain at a very, very young age. Marnus Labuschagne thinks a lot about the game and tells people a lot about the game. Alex Carey has been a professional athlete in two sports. Plus you then have Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon who have like hundreds and hundreds of Test wickets between them, and lots of experience. Of course. Smith would usually add to all of this mix. But this is a very old, smart, wise, professional cricket team. They can handle one mind not being there.

I've watched this chase three times, and Cummins certainly cycled through a lot of different, but equally ineffective, strategies. One of the things with Cummins is, he doesn't do it in a dramatic way, unlike Ben Stokes for example. But Cummins has a lot of qualities that the English captain doesn't.

There's no doubt that in the WTC final, the pitch changed and the Australians didn't get enough help from the surface, and because of that they just did not create enough chances. Sometimes that's just how it goes. Because Smith was off the field – and there's certainly a big part of the internet who believed he's a tactical genius – this was suddenly seen as the reason for the defeat.

When Smith was captain, I don't remember that many people talking about his incredible strategy. He certainly has huge knowledge when it comes to Test cricket, and understanding strategy, and everything else. And if he had been on the field, he would have come up with other thoughts. He also likes to tweak the field occasionally as well, especially when Cummins is bowling.