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Despite a reprinting in 2001, the book does feel a little dated. Perhaps some chapters or details could be added about more modern captaincy, particularly with rule changes and the arrival of T20. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? I worried at the text like a dog at a bone. Did you know that the word “worry”, originally the Old English wyrgan, derives from the Proto-Germanic wurgjan, meaning “strangle”? I don’t suppose you did, and nor did I, till, worrying at it, I looked up the word in the online etymological dictionary.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Turning Over the Pebbles is not as other memoirs. On the one hand, Brearley reveals little of himself. Who does he vote for? How does he spend his days? What of friendships and enemies? On the other, he reveals everything. We know who he is now – or, at least, in our own minds, we think we do.

It sounds contrived, but Brearley’s skill as a knowing – although never self-deprecating – narrator makes it work. He admits to being regarded as an “odd fish” in a testosterone-fuelled dressing room, whether taking his blokey teammate Fred Titmus to see Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (“Fred was taken with it”) or bearing the brunt of Geoffrey Boycott’s temper: “I don’t want any of your egghead intellectual stuff,” the Yorkshireman growled at him. England captain Mike Brearley (centre) leaves the field as spectators rush on at the Oval on August 29, 1981, in London. Those years of training are crucial. A sportsman can only rely on instinct when he stands on what Brearley calls the “secure base” of technique. Freedom must be earned: the more meticulously that performers work to improve their skills, the greater ability they have to make good decisions unthinkingly. My favourite expression of this principle comes from the conductor, Carlos Kleiber, who told a student: “With good technique you can forget technique.” Mike Brearley’s new book began as at talk he gave at the London School of Economics in 2012 on what it means to be “in the zone” – the mental state of intense focus and absorption in the task at hand, experienced by athletes and other performers at moments of peak performance. Afterwards, encouraged by friends, he wrote up his thoughts, and the more he wrote, the more he thought. The result is a book that roams far beyond its starting point, without getting anywhere in particular.He writes in this new memoir, Turning Over the Pebbles, that he had “by then developed a technique organised around a fairly sound defence, a somewhat limited range of strokes, and a rather tight kind of courage against fast bowling.” That combination of judicious self-praise and candid self-criticism is entirely characteristic of his style, both during his sporting career and afterwards in his rather unexpected choice of post-retirement vocation: psychoanalysis. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

The title of this book comes from a remark made about Brearley’s conversational manner by an American sports journalist. Brearley, he wrote, spoke “as though he had been turning over pebbles, searching for the clearest, most precise [...] opinion to plop into the pool of conversation.” Brearley’s accounts of half a life in sport followed by another half as a psychoanalyst share that quality. As Mike Brearley sits in the basement room where he has psychoanalysed patients for more than four decades, shelves filled with the works of Freud and other experts in the human condition, he readily calls on all that wisdom to dissect the “Bazball” transformation of the England team and preview the looming Ashes. “I am looking forward to this series as much as any,” he says cheerfully. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Sun Tzu had a fair bit to say that was relevant beyond feudal warfare tactics. Machiavelli’s observations on ruling a renaissance city state also have some wider applicability.There is unity, of a kind, in all this, but one needs to put oneself in Brearley’s hands to let him reveal it – and himself – in his own way. His reminiscences of the neglected Cambridge philosophers with whom he had once studied (John Wisdom, Renford Bambrough) will be new even to those who have heard all his tales of playing with Gower and Gatting. His gentle explanations of the theories of the philosophers and psychoanalysts who influenced him – Ludwig Wittgenstein and Marion Milner among them – are accurate and accessible without feeling in the least dumbed-down.