OF 16 captains who have retired in the last 30 years only Ray Illingworth, the England supremo for three years and Keith Fletcher, Illingworth's predecessor as coach, have gone on to draw up England's team strategy. I am sure that is cause for regret.
This failure to use so much talent can be ascribed, in part, to the removal of the distinction between the amateur and the professional. The old amateurs were thought of as natural leaders and, thanks to patronage and friendships they found niches in administration when they hung up bats, boots and pads.
Now that the Gentlemen v Players concept is only a hazy memory so is the idea that England captains should be promoted to the rank of general as they quit.
In other words the head men of English cricket are prepared to waste the knowledge that captains have accumulated, mainly because there is this daft belief that a man who puts his head above the television gantry rules himself out of consideration for a post on the selection committee. Other countries are cleverer so that both Allan Border and Kepler Wessels have helped pick their countries' Test teams.
Yet there is immense experience among the candidates who have been allowed to escape and who are now too expensive. Tony Lewis who led England in eight Tests, Mike Denness (19), John Edrich (1), Tony Greig (14), Mike Brearley (31), Geoff Boycott (4), Ian Botham (12), Bob Willis (18), David Gower (32), Mike Gatting (23), John Emburey (2), Chris Cowdrey (1), Graham Gooch (34) and Allan Lamb (3) are the candidates; a formidable bunch. (It is too early to consider Mike Atherton, as he walks towards the Press Box and the TV suite.)
That is a total of 202 Tests - or 1,000 days - put to no good use in the 1990s when England were in need of all the help they could get as they floundered from one Test to another.
Apart from Edrich, Gatting and Gooch who did brief service as selectors not one of those men have been able to offer their wisdom to further the cause of the Test side. Much less bring their intelligence to bear on the trickier political subjects like the crisis about touring India.
Gower, for instance, used all his diplomatic skills to persuade Gooch not to go home during the 1986 furore in West Indies. Had he been chairman of selectors he might have solved the India tour problem long before it grew to proportions which no-one with an understanding of the sub-continent can appreciate.
Years of experience has been thrown down the drain, the combined brains of the wisest men in the game ignored. Their experience is amply demonstrated from the television studio and the commentary box but that is little use to England players.
The main cause for the dilemma lies in well-paid TV work. Every time there is a Test in this country you don't have to look far to find Botham, Willis and Gower. They are spreading their knowledge to the couch potatoes.
The car drivers - and the old-fashioned folks like my Uncle Ken who believes television is the work of the devil and only concedes that it is his own birthday if he hears it on BBC Radio Four - can glean an insight into England's fortunes from Test Match Special thanks to Gooch, who has reinvented himself as a pundit without equal.
Not as blunt as Boycott but plain-spoken enough, Gooch tells it the way it is in simple sentences that neither condescend to the listener nor fly above their heads. Frankly I am astonished. Having spent five dreary years hearing him produce enough clics to overload the memory of a main frame computer, I did not think he had any words worth our attention. I was wrong.
Why isn't he telling the same tale in the dressing room? Just as much to the point, where are the rest of the missing captains?
Brearley prefers the rare world of psychotherapy, Denness has gone into public relations, Lamb lives the life of a country squire. Greig, sent into exile after he and Kerry Packer sundered cricket, would have made an imaginative chairman of selectors. He was the captain who insisted that only David Steele had the courage to face the Australian onslaught in 1975. Perhaps he would have had the foresight to bring David Fulton of Kent into the England side in similar circumstances last summer.
Greig is so enthusiastic that he is an inspiration in every aspect of his life; but he has been an outcast since his "act of treachery." It brought us floodlit one-day cricket, coloured clothing and television commentary with bite as well as bigger pay packets for the players. I wish all our captains had been so damnable.
It was the Packer revolution which persuaded sponsors to leap aboard to save cricket from death by bankruptcy. Greig's involvement was crucial. Yet where is he now? Talking, joking and winding up co-commentators, mostly in Australia, and badly missed in the administrative circles of an England game that is, once again, struggling for survival.
I am reminded of this dreadful state of affairs after reading a new book by Botham.
Beefy's great strength is that he never leaves you wondering. The cricketer who hit a six off his first ball in a Test - straight back over the head of Craig McDermott at Edgbaston in 1985; I can see it now - still has nothing to do with shilly-shallying.
Here, for instance, is the opening sentence of his essay on an old friend. "Karim Din is the owner of the best Indian restaurant in England, an accolade that would probably be enough on its own to warrant a place in this book."
Note the certainty, the absence of any suggestion that there may be room for argument, the failure to observe the niceties of "in my opinion" or "in the view of the experts." No, Botham has spoken and, believe one who knows, when he speaks it is very difficult to answer.
Botham's Century is, for its frankness alone, a terrific book. Aided and abetted by his ghost writer Peter Hayter, the son of Reg Hayter, Botham's first agent, Botham discusses his 100 favourite people, ranging from the fast bowler Curtly Ambrose and the broadcaster John Arlott to his former man-of-all-jobs Andy Withers and the golfer Ian Woosnam.
It demonstrates another remarkable Botham characteristic; his loyalty to those who have helped him, and so it is a book full of praise for his heroes, fond memories of his contemporaries and admiration for men who played with him or under his stern eye now that he earns a fortune from newspapers and television.
Botham is the finest example of the captain scorned. His attempt to be chairman of selectors in the Illingworth era came to nothing; there is you will not be surprised to hear no chapter devoted to Illy. Although privately Botham hands out advice whenever he feels it is right, there is an invisible moat between him and the team.
You may have been suggesting, long before you reached this point, that since the Millennium England have soared to third in the world rankings and have only lost series to South Africa and the Aussies, who would probably beat the Rest of the World with ten men.
Actually it proves my point. The man responsible for most of the rise of England in the last couple of years has been the new captain Nasser Hussain.
I believe that ties up my theory. Leading England - as Gubby Allen, George Mann, May, Cowdrey and Dexter demonstrated - is a great career move for anyone who wants to attain a place on cricket's mountain top for the rest of his life.
Quietly some of these old captains help out. When it was clear that Hussain and Graham Thorpe would not be fit for much of the Ashes series, Mark Butcher's return to the England side followed a consultative process, as the businessmen would say, during which at least one old captain insisted Butcher was the batsman for a crisis. How right was that!
So the sooner Botham is incorporated into the ruling classes, the sooner Gower's tact is utilised, the sooner Greig's enthusiasm and Brearley's brain are re-employed, the sooner England will head back towards the glory days.
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