The position of a captain in cricket is unnecessarily shrouded in an odd mystique. A cricket captain, it is said through some tortuous logic, is different from a captain in any other sport. Thus a cricket captain has also to be an active and important member of the team. A cricket captain wears the player’s cap and the thinker’s hat. He is player, strategist and tactician all rolled into one. This in terms of leadership and organization does not quite make sense. For one thing, leadership is not about being at the front: it is about thinking and planning, which demand perspective and objectivity. Neither of these two can come to a person who is in the thick of battle on the field. It is time thus to take the cricket captain off the field. The man who leads the team on the ground will be a mere field operator, much the like the skipper of a football team. He will only be executing plans that have been worked out by the ‘real’ captain behind the scenes. Under these circumstances, having a different man to lead the team on the ground for different matches will not sound as sacrilegious as it does when John Buchanan makes it today. Indeed, it is possible to have a situation where a different player would lead the team on the field in different sessions. The mystique around the captain will disappear.

A simple rule for running an efficient organization is that one person should not perform more than one function. Translate this principle into the cricket field and it means that a player should only be a player, a captain should only be captain. A violation of this rule results in pressure on individuals and the consequent decline in performance. A player-captain combination also produces prima donnas, which create major problems in any organizational structure. Let the players do the batting, bowling and fielding and the thinker do the planning off the field. All this may appear as too alien to the cricket purist (or even to those who are lamenting Sourav Ganguly’s loss of captaincy), but the winds of change are blowing over the cricket fields. That wind will make the ball of cricket swing in various unexpected ways. Twenty20, and its popularity, are products of the change affecting cricket. Others will follow. Refashioning the definition of a cricket captain is another radical change. Mr Buchanan has taken a step in the right direction. Pioneers never make a virtue of patience.