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Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind

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The psychoanalysis came later, after three years as a lecturer in philosophy. In retrospect, however, everything seemed to point towards a career in psychoanalysis. Brearley links his life experiences, his academic training, and his wide reading with this eventual profession. “This valuing of the examined life,” he writes, “is what most obviously links literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis.” In another place he says, “In moves towards complexity or simplicity, music and analysis can mirror each other.” Brearley draws a comparison between Greg Chappell’s advice and that offered by the postwar British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, who said that an analyst should strive to be “without memory or desire”. In life, as in sport, worrying about what might happen or has happened comes at the expense of attentiveness to the present and its satisfactions. Psychologists who study insomnia refer to the problem of “rumination”: when the would-be sleeper can’t sleep, he worries about the consequences of not sleeping, which means he can’t sleep. Over-deliberation is recursive. He writes in this new memoir, Turning Over the Pebbles, that he had “by then developed a technique organised around a fairly sound defence, a somewhat limited range of strokes, and a rather tight kind of courage against fast bowling.” That combination of judicious self-praise and candid self-criticism is entirely characteristic of his style, both during his sporting career and afterwards in his rather unexpected choice of post-retirement vocation: psychoanalysis. The Art of Captaincy definitely requires the reader to be familiar with certain nuances of the game which come with years of engaging with the game. However, Brearley's strength lies in bringing out the people side of the game and how the game is shaped by the motivations, strengths and weaknesses of the players. There are three clear take aways from this book. There is unity, of a kind, in all this, but one needs to put oneself in Brearley’s hands to let him reveal it – and himself – in his own way. His reminiscences of the neglected Cambridge philosophers with whom he had once studied (John Wisdom, Renford Bambrough) will be new even to those who have heard all his tales of playing with Gower and Gatting. His gentle explanations of the theories of the philosophers and psychoanalysts who influenced him – Ludwig Wittgenstein and Marion Milner among them – are accurate and accessible without feeling in the least dumbed-down.

If you are planning to act on instinct you had better ensure that your instincts are compliant with your plan. The philosopher David Papineau, who spoke at the same LSE event as Brearley (his thoughts also developed into a book: Knowing The Score, on philosophy and sport, was published earlier this year), tells a story about the former England batsman Mark Ramprakash. It’s a pity that Brearley doesn’t explore the same story in On Form – perhaps he felt that Papineau had claimed it – because it touches on the core psychoanalytic question of how much we know about what we desire. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Brearley says it is hard to measure the value of leadership and intersperses his own experience of being a psychotherapist and captaincy of Middlesex and England. He speaks about the many challenges of leadership and the many qualities and skills required to deal with the most coveted job for any sportsman - the leadership of his national side in the sport of his choice. Particularly interesting is the fact that these skills and qualities don't sit well with each other and therein lies the balancing role. How does one balance the long term vs short term, deal with the experienced and novice, democracy versus control, individual requirements vs teams etc? Those years of training are crucial. A sportsman can only rely on instinct when he stands on what Brearley calls the “secure base” of technique. Freedom must be earned: the more meticulously that performers work to improve their skills, the greater ability they have to make good decisions unthinkingly. My favourite expression of this principle comes from the conductor, Carlos Kleiber, who told a student: “With good technique you can forget technique.” On Form refuses to settle on a theme, or to develop an over-arching argument. Instead, it wanders aimlessly from topic to topic, each of which has a vague connection, if you have the patience to identify it, to the question of what it means to be in or out of form, although what they really seem to have in common is that the author has given some thought to them over the thirty or so years since his last book.

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Brearley in later life earned a reputation as a lecturer on leadership and a speaker and advisor to business leaders, and his book is spoken of as a source for anyone searching such knowledge. This is what I expected when I set out to read it. I have read wonders on this book as a sort of key to psychological management of teams and people, and Brearly being described as almost a guru. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.Papineau argues that there are no conscious decisions in batting: the ball moves too fast, and the intentional system of the brain too slowly, for the batsman to do anything but react instinctively. The brain’s reflex, or “action-control” system is in charge. The same is true when a tennis player faces a serve, at least in professional tennis. What the batsman can do is prepare his instincts by deciding on a strategy before stepping up to the crease. Yet for all those acclaimed man-management skills, this cerebral man, whose three-week stint as a carpenter’s mate was spent reading Anna Karenina, struggles with practicalities. “Making things with grandchildren is usually beyond me,” he laments. The title of this book comes from a remark made about Brearley’s conversational manner by an American sports journalist. Brearley, he wrote, spoke “as though he had been turning over pebbles, searching for the clearest, most precise [...] opinion to plop into the pool of conversation.” Brearley’s accounts of half a life in sport followed by another half as a psychoanalyst share that quality. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

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