by Sach Mukherjee
Saturday, December 15, 2001 Nasser Hussain is the best cricket captain in the world. If this claim sounds far-fetched, it is worth reminding ourselves what his team has achieved. Home victories over Zimbabwe and an astonishingly inept West Indies side may not count for too much, but beating Pakistan and Sri Lanka away most certainly do, especially Sri Lanka. Pakistan may be inconsistent, mercurial; the Lankans are anything but. They are a steadily improving side boasting arguably the greatest slow-bowler ever to play the game, some superb batsmen and a very non-subcontinental attitude to fielding and discipline. At home they have been very hard to beat for a few years. The Australians could not do it; nor could India a few months ago. And at the time of writing England, with no less than five first-choice players missing, have India on the ropes, at home.

And all this without a single conventionally great player. Since the retirement of the Gowers and the Bothams (the `Sky generation') England have not produced a true worldbeater with either bat or ball. No offence to any of the players since, but none of them has been a McGrath or a Tendulkar. Through much of the nineties this translated into bad results, and this in turn led to an often depressed and depressing dressing-room atmosphere. It's not easy to do battle with the likes of Ambrose and McGrath, Lara and Waugh with so little weaponry.

Hussain's secret lies in his ability to resist trying to copy the opposition. Competitive sport is inextricably linked to the imposition of will, the expression of ego. Even when playing a flamboyant opponent in a game of pool, it can be a mistake trying to match him if, in doing so, you lose sight of the real goal - to win. But it is never easy to separate this game of one-upmanship from the match being played, the battle from the war. And to scale this up to a team level is harder still. By and large Hussain has achieved this balance, an ego-less focus on the result and nothing else. His one failure in this regard was this year's Ashes: By trying to match the frenetic pace of the Australians, England played right into their hands. But his on-field thinking is right up there too – the way in which he contained Tendulkar on the third morning of the Ahmedabad Test was a masterclass in tactics.

Steve Waugh is a fine captain, but he has never been tested at the helm of a weaker team; Stephen Fleming is also very good, but his New Zealand side has yet to achieve the results, and man-for-man it is arguably stronger than England anyway. In the end it is hard to separate a captain's performance from his players', which makes comparisons perhaps impossible to justify objectively.

There are many reasons for England's extraordinary renaissance in the last few seasons but Hussain's leadership is the most important factor. When you're done playing there are several cricketing countries in need of a good coach, Nasser!

Sach Mukherjee is a postgraduate student studying Engineering at Churchill College, Cambridge. He grew up in England and India and admits to having rather a mixed view of most cricketing controversies.

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