"BY you he's a captain, by me he's a captain, but by captains is he a captain?" runs the punch line of a very old Jewish joke. I keep thinking about it when I see the subject of soccer team captains appear in the Press. The latest example involves Leicester City. It was expected that when that fiery veteran Dennis Wise recently joined them after long service at Chelsea, the captaincy would be his. But in the event it has remained with its previous incumbent, the big centre back, Robbie Elliott. And I thought, so what?
The point being, as I need hardly stress, that soccer isn't cricket. In cricket, as we know, the captain is a crucial, influential, paramount figure. In a game that can last for several days, it is he, above all when his team is fielding, who deploys the field, who decides which bowler can come on. There may well be, as indeed there is at Test match level, a team manager, but while the game is going on, especially when that team is in the field, it is the captain who counts. Not least if he is an intellectual such as England's Mike Brearley.
But soccer by contrast is fast and furious. There is little time or chance for a captain, however famous and potentially influential, to make his mark. Above all by and large he is not encouraged to do so. In distant pre-War days, the manager, with certain great exceptions such as Arsenal's Herbert Chapman, was an oddly marginal figure who seldom gave a team talk or any detailed tactical instructions. There were those who simply would look into their side's dressing room, shout some half humorous, half ironic instruction, then disappear.
Not now. The coach and the manager tend to reign supreme, denying freedom of mind and movement to the players, forever shouting at them from the so called dug out on the touchline. Which means so often that captaincy is no more than an honorary job; the captain being limited virtually to tossing up before the game and deciding which end he wants if he should win.
Just look at England! The current captain is David Beckham who plays wide out on the right, and whose tactical flair is invisible to the naked eye. He is beyond doubt, within his plain limitations, a gifted player, but all too often subject to cruel parody in Press and television for his limited intelligence. The new England manager, Sweden's Sven-Goran Eriksson, is, he says, happy for Beckham to continue as captain: but has he thought carefully about Beckham's notoriously explosive temperament, which had him sent off so expensively in Saint Etienne against Argentina in the World Cup 98 and which recently caused manager Alex Ferguson to pull him off the field during a far from friendly "friendly" at Old Trafford against Manchester United?
None of which means that influential captains cannot exist, although there are few in sight to be compared with Danny Blanchflower, Franz Beckenbauer and, in his own quiet way, Bobby Moore. Blanchflower was a remarkable captain of Tottenham Hotspur and Northern Ireland. Spurs he inspired to win the English Cup and League double in 1961 for the first time this century. Even more remarkably, he galvanised the unfancied Northern Ireland team which knocked mighty Italy out of the 1998 World Cup eliminators, and went on to give a fine account of itself in Sweden. Before which tournament Danny, with characteristic humour, announced that they had a plan: "We're going to equalise before the other team score!"
He himself would be the first to give praise and credit to the Irish team's manager, its former star inside left, Peter Doherty. Indeed you might call Danny what the Italians term "the manager on the field." The man who interprets what he knows to be his manager's desires, though in Danny's case his influence from stylish right half went a very great deal beyond that. As one who talked and listened to him for hours, I know what an original and sophisticated grasp he had of the game. Inevitably his sturdy independence brought him into conflict with Tottenham managers who resented his prestige with his team.
Beckenbauer was another "manager on the field" for West Germany, the actual manager being Helmut Schoen. Though Beckenbauer was such a commanding figure, it should be remembered that although he himself invented the role of attacking libero as a youngster with his club, Bayern Munich, it would be many years before the cautious Schoen would allow him to bring it and "Total Football" to the West German international team.
Franz of course went on to become manager of the German international team, with which he reached two World Cup finals, winning the second of them. There is little comparison in terms of character between him and Bobby Moore, who captained England to victory against Franz's West Germany in the 1996 World Cup Final. Bobby, always such a closed and reserved figure, would never cut it, alas, as a manager, but as a captain in his own special way he was unquestionably a force.
No one has written better on the subject than Paul Gardner, the England writer long based in America. "No wonder they made him England's captain at 22," he wrote. "Everyone he played with had a story about his coolness." Never, surely, more notable than when in Colombia, on the eve of the 1970 Mexican World Cup, he was put under house arrest on a trumped up charge about a stolen bracelet. Moore arrived in Guadalajara to join the England team as seemingly unruffled as if nothing had ever happened. It was his sheer calmness "under fire," his knack of making things look so easy, that inspired the players around him.
In Italy, the ideal "captain on the field" was surely Franco Baresi, the Milan central defender and sweeper. Baresi went on well into his middle 30s, hugely admired by younger Italian stars, who happily deferred to him on the field. He may have missed that penalty kick at the World Cup Final of 1994, but lesser men would not have been playing at all after a knee operation barely days before.
In Italy, for a long time, the role of captain of the azzurri was so diminished that it was awarded purely on the basis of who had won the most caps! There was once a farcical situation when the two Fiorentina full backs Sergio Cervato and Aldo Magini had won exactly the same number, and the choice was then made on the basis of who had won more caps at B level! Real captains today are few but they can count.
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