It’s all in the mind
Just as psychoanalysis informs other forms of psychotherapy, Brearley thinks test cricket has much to teach the shorter game. “Twenty20 is very exciting, and good things can happen in it, but it’s important to keep test cricket too. The skills derived from test cricket can underpin the Twenty20 skills. And a greater range of cricketing ability and personality is revealed through five-day cricket than it is through Twenty20. There are parallels to each of these points in the comparison between psychoanalysis and things like CBT.”
It’s a persuasive comparison, but not one that will guarantee test cricket’s survival. “Maybe it will turn out that test cricket has no long-term future,” he admits. “Certainly the ICC will have to be careful not to make it too routine. Pitches will have to be much better for the game than the recent ones in the West Indies and Chester-le-Street. But we have to persuade people that many valuable things take time. You can’t speed up the St Matthew Passion.” Brearley points to the critical drubbing that Joseph Conrad received for his novel Chance (1913), and Conrad’s own riposte, published as part of the introduction to the second edition, in which he wrote: “No doubt by selecting a certain method and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out on a cigarette paper. For that matter the whole history of mankind could be written thus if only approached with sufficient detachment. The history of men on this earth since the beginning of ages may be resumed in one phrase of infinite poignancy: They were born, they suffered, they died… But in the infinitely minute stories about men and women it is my lot on earth to narrate I am not capable of such detachment.” Psychoanalysis, Brearley says, “tells stories in similar depth, with repetitions from different points of view… These things take time, as does test cricket.”
In Prospect magazine, Edward Marriott interviews the man who went from being England’s reputedly most cerebral cricket captain, to one of the country’s leading psychoanalysts: Mike Brearley.
