Your country's best - and worst - Test captains?

PeterCS wrote:Merlo - Gatt and Strausser @ 3 & 4?

Oh aye for sure . . . three Middlesex men in my top four . . !
Happy days!

Basil wrote:Hussain comes close to the top of the pile, or should do.

Definitely

taipan wrote:

PeterCS wrote:Taipan - how do you and those you know rate Peter Thundermurder (van der Merwe)?.

Interesting question. My initial thought was a bit lucky to be in the team and a touch short of test quality, and then the Afrikaans background, so then looked him up. His high school is/was as bastion of English speakers, ditto his university. Obviously had leadership qualities but still not sure of his test class.

Bacher was similar. Probably not test class but an extremely astute captain. Hence his preference to Eddie Barlow.

By all accounts Cheetham was excellent.

most of those have been expunged from test records because of the apartheid era...

telling comments from taipan about his intrinsic valuesystem...leadership only comes from going to the right school...what a nob

Smith is far and above the best saffie cappy of the modern era followed by daylight then Wessels, Spillock and Corruptje

I thought he was saying that he had previously considered van der Merwe a lucky (and perhaps overrated) player, on the basis that he had been favoured and fast-tracked to the top by clannish Afrikaanerdom.

Since however (it transpires) said player had gone essentially through an English-speaking system, he had not been a fortunate recipient of such close community nepotism - hence perhaps deserved closer scrutiny and more credit: maybe he had earned the plaudits he received as captain.


Going beyond that, you can of course argue that the famous "broader ethnic issue" favoured PvdM unduly. But that's a slightly wider argument.

In any case, I don't see an "old-school tie" argument here: rather the hint of a Boerish conspiracy of advancement of their own man from school to Test leadership - which it turned out didn't actually exist.

(It could be I understood the drift wrong, of course!)

horrie sees what he wants to see

that Wessels was under rated as a captain?

embee wrote:horrie sees what he wants to see

Not quite correct. Horrie cannot comprehend what he does see.

During my time?

Chappelli, AB and TFF.

Ponting & Waugh.

Best: Border

Worst: Yallop