The Ashes: A tale of two captains

If you happen to be a cricketer, there is no substitute for good cricket; just ask Michael Clarke and Alastair Cook. Clarke, after two lean matches, has pulled Australia back into this Ashes series, while Cook, still run-deficient, must happen across his tomorrow to help England stay in the game. This may be the crux of captaincy, but is not its entirety.

In some aspects, the two men are not dissimilar. Both are playing in their 95th Test match, and Clarke has scored 24 centuries, Cook 25. Clarke's average is a little better, but Cook is younger, and likely to improve. Both have a reputation as their country's most reliable batsman. And both were appointed their country's captain, partially on that basis and partially because there were no other legitimate candidates.

But while Clarke has grown into the specific demands of the role, there's a growing suspicion that Cook's acumen is lacking. Troublingly, he is showing no particular signs of improvement, contributing to performances of infrequent but not startling stagnancy.

With Australia posting a big first innings total at Old Trafford, rather than wring every last run from the situation, Clarke declared early. And this wasn't a decision plucked from his library of hunches, but one that he planned, and with good reason. He knew that bowling England out would be a time-consuming business, and accordingly, despatched his lower-order batsmen to the middle with attacking intent - earlier than seemed necessary, giving Australia 34 overs at England before close of play. He was rewarded with two wickets late in the day.

Cook, on the other hand, leans towards the opposite. Earlier in the summer, when England played New Zealand, they accumulated a first innings lead of 180 runs. Not only did Cook choose not to enforce the follow-on, but, despite the forecasted bouts of English summer, watched his team extend their lead as far as 467 before declaring. They won, but very much more rain, or one decent knock, and they might not have done.

Over the course of the last two days, England have struggled to bowl Australia out. There are various reasons for this, the quality of the batting and the pitch the two most significant. But at no stage could England even exert sustained pressure over the batsmen, reduced to waiting for the jaffa or the error. When the usual methods of swing, seam and stinge failed their pace bowlers, they responded by attempting the usual methods of swing, seam and stinge, adjusting little beyond their expectations.

Consequently, on a pitch that though flat, wasn't slow, Australia were permitted to amass 527 for two or three threats to rib or chin. Once things started to go wrong, very rarely were there men around the bat, prompting the batsmen to consider things differently, or men in strange places, saying strange things. On the second morning, there passed an hour of almost amorous pace bowling before Graeme Swann got a go - he returned a wicket almost immediately - and Joe Root, who snared Clarke at Lord's, was allocated just four overs here.

Even in the final stages of Australia's innings, rather than seek to pilfer the momentum that might have infused theirs, England simply waited it out, six men clustered on the boundary. This allowed Mitchell Starc the fillip of a fifty before opening the bowling, which might have been unavoidable, but no one was really trying to investigate.

Clarke's approach could not have been more different. When his opening pair of Starc and Ryan Harris were wayward, he replaced them with Shane Watson and Nathan Lyon after three overs. Not only did this work in its principal objective - making things harder for England - it also told his bowlers that spells must be earned, and that he had complete faith in his spinner, despite his omission from the first two Tests.

"We assessed conditions really well," explained Clarke at close of play. "We worked out that we're probably going to have five or six overs of the new ball where it's going to be quite hard, and you might get some catches in the slip region. And then the ball's going to get soft and we're going to have to bowl a lot straighter at the stumps, so you're not going to have the regulation field like three slips and a bat-pad, you're going to have to get a bit more lb, bowleds, catches at short cover, short midwicket, those sort of things."

It is likely that England deduced some of this too, but equally likely that they failed to pursue it with requisite gusto.

And with England, the concession of big totals is becoming something of a habit. In the year since Cook took charge, they have given up totals of 521 against India and 460 and 443 to New Zealand, inferior attacks restricting their superior batsmen to totals far smaller than were compiled by inferior batsmen when confronted with their superior bowlers. Yes, there were mitigating factors of form and pitch, as there always are, but those are precisely the circumstances in which creative, proactive captaincy can have an effect, but was absent.

To some extent, the difference between Clarke and Cook is simply a reflection of their personalities: Clarke is outgoing and articulate, Cook studious and considered - attributes also reflected in their batting. Demonstrably, each has worked hard to incorporate the elements more commonly associated with the other, but roughly, they remain the same.

Yet, developing the skills of captaincy are a matter of nurture as well as nature. Clarke was Ricky Ponting's deputy, and though he is generally felt to be the weakest captain in Australia's period of dominance, also in the side was Shane Warne, the progenitor of his "Pup" nickname and one of the finest cricketing brains of all time. Cook, meanwhile played for Michael Vaughan - England's sharpest leader of the recent past - but only as a young professional, focused on batting and not invited into the decision-making process. Then, once established, he was vice to Andrew Strauss, a man of whom similar criticisms are made.

Yet, Cook's position is far from hopeless. One of the beauties of cricket is its comforting repetitiveness; a ball is bowled, the batsman plays, misses or leaves, and then another ball is bowled. Very rarely does a unique situation arise, and accordingly, guile is teachable and learnable, quickly. Inculcating the idea that if things don't work for an exceedingly long time, it might be wise to try something different, seems like a sensible place to start.