Have sports captains had their heyday?

The news that England’s captain Owen Farrell will miss the Six Nations hasn’t been met with wails of disappointment from English fans, many of whom believe it was time for a change. Eddie Jones, however, had named Farrell captain for the tournament before the latest injury ruled him out. Of course, some fans who reckon Farrell’s best days may be behind him probably think the same applies to Jones.

It has always been difficult for those of us who are mere spectators to know just what a captain brings to a team, especially off the field. He is expected to lead by example on the pitch, but his ability to alter the course of a match is rarely clear.

Certainly, now that coaches are dominant, it’s reasonable to think that the captain is less important and less influential than he used to be. Coaches seem to be of this opinion too. It’s quite usual to see the captain being substituted even when the outcome of a match remains in the balance. The same is true in football.

I would guess that while everyone can name the captain of England’s 1966 World Cup winning team, fewer could tell you who captained England in the last World Cup. In football and rugby, the coach is the boss; he is the man who picks the team.

Back in rugby’s now sadly distant amateur years, there was for a long time no coach, and one might think that the choice of captain was more important. But amateur selection committees were often capricious. A lost match or a couple of defeats might see the captain jettisoned.

The same was often the case in cricket, even though the nature and pace of the game mean that the captain has to make important on-field decisions.

Even so, it was quite common for the captain to be changed in the course of a season. There was one series in the 1980s when England had four different captains. Now, after the humiliating defeat in Australia, fans and journalists have been calling for a change of captain: Joe Root must go.

He has had a long innings and it hasn’t, in the end, been a successful one. He remains, of course, England’s best batsman, arguably indeed their only batsman of genuine Test match quality. One question might be how he would react to the loss of the captaincy. Would he benefit from being relieved of the burden?

It’s possible. On the other hand, I recall that in the second half of his Test career when he was sometimes captain and sometimes not, Colin Cowdrey batted much more successfully when captain than when he was reduced to the ranks.

The responsibility of leadership brought out the best in him. My memory is that his last half-dozen Test match centuries were made when he was captain, and he scarcely made even a fifty when he wasn’t.

Character and sympathetic intelligence are qualities you look for in a captain in any sport. Andrew Strauss one might say was the last really successful England cricket captain.

Fair enough, but then you look at the strength of the batting in his teams. Mightn’t Root have won three Ashes series instead of losing two and drawing one if, like Strauss, he had been supported by batsmen as good as Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott, Kevin Pietersen and Ian Bell?

No captain can be held responsible for the failure of his batsmen to make runs or his bowlers to take wickets. As against that, one should remark that Root unlike captains in the past had some say in selection.

In rugby, and probably to some extent in football too, there has always been an argument about the best position for the captain. Back in 1997, Ian McGeechan chose Martin Johnson as the Lions captain for South Africa even though he had little, if any, experience of captaining a side, principally, McGeechan said, because he wanted someone imposing who wouldn’t ever take a backward step.

It proved a good decision and Johnson went on to be one of England’s most successful captains, the only one indeed to lift the World Cup. But there is no one rule in these matters. Nobody would have called John Dawes physically imposing, but he was the only Lions captain to win a series in New Zealand.

At the time of writing, Eddie Jones hasn’t yet named Farrell’s replacement, but it is likely to be Courtney Lawes if he is fit (which is doubtful at the moment). What we can be sure of is that whatever may be his influence on the field, he will be very much a junior officer to the commander-in-chief Jones.

I’ve always thought there is a good case for having a forward ads captain, if only because he is saying “come on” rather than “go on”. On the other hand, the French have often liked to have a scrum-half as captain, he being in the best position to serve as a general.

In the end, of course, captains, like coaches, are judged by results. Whoever captains this season’s Six Nations champions will be acclaimed as outstanding. Conversely, it is because England finished only fifth in last year’s tournament that so many are ready to judge Owen Farrell a failure – just like Joe Root.

The fact that a captain’s influence is undeniably limited will cut no ice.