Normal man, not flash Harry: why Brook is the right choice to lead England

Even a stopped clock tells the right time once a day, or twice depending on how you interpret analogue time devices. In this same encouraging spirit I am happy to report that English cricket has accidentally made a good decision, one that will play out, for better or worse, over the next week.

This is something we should all be grateful for, even if it is only temporary, even if it begins to look a bit iffy as early as this weekend and Saturday’s second one-day international against Australia. But it does involve Harry Brook and that is generally a good thing.

Frankly, any kind of good thing is worth celebrating as the domestic cricket season retreats towards October, nourished only by autumnal clips of people in jumpers doing end-of-days stuff, village batting, bowling impressions, chilly fingered double-bouncers that people in Australia can laugh at and say: “See, I told you.”

It seems safe to say it now. The summer of 2024 has been the bleakest, most essentially irrelevant English cricket season of the modern age; to the extent it feels like a step change, the moment when this thing really did become obviously beta.

There has been a Weekend at Bernie’s air to it all at times. Here comes the English summer again, the corpse by the swimming pool, carted about the place just to keep the show going, feet dragging along the floor, shades falling off its face, Ian Ward and Nick Knight at each elbow, still talking a great game, still offering a cadaverous thumbs-up. Cricket? Cricket’s fine. Can’t you see its hand waving?

The most notable part has been the completely random series of events. Suddenly it’s T20 finals day. Remember when that was good and vital, before it was decided it just couldn’t be any more? Over to you, 50-over Cup, now excitingly rebranded as farmers v teenagers. Before that we have two no-jeopardy Test series against the undercooked teams of economically marginalised nations, the last outing of the summer basically a beer match at the Oval.

Again the most notable part is how tedious it feels to restate all this, the sense that even tales of decline no longer have any retail value. Earlier this week the big county cricket story was Essex being fined £100,000 for decades of aggressive institutional racism. If that seems low, well, here’s the thing. It is probably the limit of what Essex can absorb without actually going bust. Take that in. Here we have a sport so diminished it can’t even afford to pay for its own racism.

View image in fullscreen Harry Brook surveys the field during the first ODI against Australia at Trent Bridge. Photograph: Andrew Boyers/Action Images/Reuters

And yet there is always life and heat. In the middle of all this England have, almost incidentally, appointed Brook as temporary ODI captain. And while this will change the sum total of zero actual things in the short term, it does also feel, not just fun and intriguing, but salutary, a pointer towards some small part of the bigger picture.

Nobody really knows how Brook as captain will work out. His only senior experience is in the Hundred, and before that an Under-19 World Cup where he made a golden duck in the key collapse against Australia and was then dropped for the seventh-place playoff against New Zealand for disciplinary reasons. So, a start there then.

But it is still a good thing, so much so that in my opinion Brook would be much better off just replacing Jos Buttler outright, given Buttler has had a long go at it and just turned out not to be very good. He also hasn’t played a domestic 50-over game since 2016, which is fair enough, we all have to make a living. But while Buttler is both a celebrity and brilliant cricketer, it is probably time for English cricket to value itself a little more and apply some less indulgent standards.

Either way, Brook gets to lead England at his home ground, Headingley, on Saturday, and there are so many good things about this. Most obviously he’s a brilliant player, with an elegance and clarity about his movements that is so immediately striking.

Australia will of course pepper him with the short ball next winter, which is likely to be utterly absorbing given his natural aggression. Brook’s talent is all about the purity of the contact between bat and ball, the simplicity of his movements that make him seem still even when he isn’t. He is also totally committed to England, loves it, has turned down the Indian Premier League and Big Bash League already, which should be a factor in the planning of the embattled England franchise. But the main thing about Brook, as we reach the end of a column that really should have started with this point, but there’s just so much stuff to get out of the way, is that he’s a normal person.

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And this also matters. Brook is a non-posh, unaffected, non-corporate-speak England captain. Here we have a captain who is likable and everyday, who walks a bit like Liam Gallagher (as all mid-20s northern blokes must at some stage), who, my close sources tell me, came into his first England captain press conference and said: “All right?” then seemed surprised everyone didn’t say: “All right?” back.

It should be said the cliche of England cricket captains as born-to-rule Lord Harris types has never been the whole story. The team that reached two losing World Cup finals in 1987 and 1992 were notably state school. Nasser Hussain was a normal man. Alec Stewart: normal man. Michael Vaughan: normal man (right up to the #justsaying Twitter era).

It is the last 20 years that have really crystallised this as the Age of the Jazzers, the Strauss-Cook red-trouser optics, the talk from Giles Clark of an England captain from “the right kind of family”. This is not by chance. It is instead an accurate reflection of English cricket’s retreat from popular sport to pastime of the privileged, the Waitrose Years when cricket set its price point high on the demand curve, milking the pay-TV pound and making itself, at least in the south, a hidden garden accessible only to those who already know it’s there.

Brook’s life has involved obstacles. It has involved breaking into this world. This is not Ollie Pope, the Surrey pathway made flesh. Clarke’s nauseating gush about families seems quite funny in this context. Famously, Brook’s dad once had to apply to court to get a curfew lifted so he could watch his son play for England Under-19s, the result of a community order for causing criminal damage to a caravan. Giles? Giles! Come back!

A new temporary captain will, of course, do nothing in itself to change English cricket’s basic sense of isolation. Brook’s presence in front of a board covered with adverts isn’t going to shift the feeling the summer sport has become a frightening image from a TS Eliot poem, the eyeless corpse clutching your wrist, bones poking through its chest, just really eager to talk about sponsorship and media rights opportunities.

But here at least is a person who has come into this world from outside. Someone is going to have to lead England’s Test team when Stokes limps off, to become its public face and its vibe. Brook hopefully has the staying power to make a case. Score lots of runs. Don’t get clanged by Josh Hazlewood. Help carry this doddery old cadaver forward just a little longer. No pressure then, Harry.

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