Memo to Ben Stokes: take the captaincy – but get out while the going is good

The career of an England Test captain, like a life in politics, always seems to end in failure. Maybe it’s at a tearful press conference after back-to-back thrashings by South Africa. Or by a hastily arranged England Cricket Board statement sent out after a row that also cost the head coach his job. Or off the back of an almighty spat with your star batsman that started when he was caught sending texts to the opposition slating your leadership. Or at the fag end of a slump of form in which the team lost five series in a row. In the end the job seems to break everyone who takes it on.

Experience tells you that whoever takes over next – and it looks as if it will be Ben Stokes – will end up in a similar place. Sooner or later, the captaincy becomes a study in watching a good man get ground down. The question is what he and his team can achieve along the way.

It makes you wonder what it is about leading England in particular that seems to take so much out of a cricketer (and why, as Derek Underwood once asked, “so many players want to be captain anyway”). Doug Insole, who led Essex in the 1950s and did a stretch as Peter May’s deputy when England toured South Africa in 1956-57, said a captain needs to be “a public relations officer, agricultural consultant, psychiatrist, accountant, nursemaid, and diplomat”, as well as a player, selector and tactician. It tells you plenty about how stiff the job is that Joe Root ended up in the position he did even though he seemed to do so well in so many of those different roles.

He had the batting. Unlike Mike Brearley, Root always demanded a place in the team, since he was the best batsman in the country; unlike Michael Vaughan, he was able to maintain the best part of his form while he