The irony of me, a Brit, having to come to Calcutta to meet acclaimed former England cricket captain Mike Brearley, matched his ironic observation that here cricket appears an Indian game, latterly adopted by the British. I have witnessed the fanaticism that revolves around the game here. As such, I was apprehensive that my cricketing knowledge would not be up to scratch as I made my way to The Oberoi Grand for Brearley’s Tiger Pataudi Memorial Lecture, preceded by a deliberately English-styled ‘high tea’.
Thankfully, my fears were unwarranted: our conversation bypassed cricket and somehow concluded with some of life’s great philosophical questions. ‘Do we have a past existence?’ was a question I had not anticipated that evening, nor was a quote from Wittgenstein. But it was territory I felt more familiar with.
Brearley graduated from St John’s, Cambridge, with a degree in Classics and Moral Sciences. Since retiring from the cricket field he has embarked on a career of psychoanalysis and writing. Famously described by Australian bowler, Rodney Hogg, as having “a degree in people”, I was interested to glean whether Brearley’s Cambridge education had left lasting impressions on him. He said it had, and his subsequent lecture answered in the affirmative for him.
Littered with references — from novelist EM Forster to snooker champ Ronnie O’Sullivan; politicians from JF Kennedy to Abraham Lincoln, Brearley described a game which I could finally understand. He described the ‘higher place’ that one needed to reach to ‘be in the zone’ as though he were referring to Plato’s higher plane of existence. He talked of the ‘sensory intuition’ needed of a captain in the Freudian language of children’s primal instincts. He spoke of the agony of decision-making with reference to America entering the Vietnam War. Psychoanalysis is clearly inseparable from the game in Brearley’s mind, and he told me that he saw psychoanalysis running parallel with philosophy in turn.
Mike Brearley shed a new light on cricket for me — one that dressed up philosophers in cricket whites.
Clare Pleydell-Bouverie
