Best current international captain

[luckyeddie]

Irrelevant.
You claim that a good captain definately improves the performance of his players.
I claim that ultimately, the performance is in the hands of the players.
If your claim is correct, then logic dictates that every single player improved their performance after the said captain took over.

Are you sure that you cannot find a SINGLE player who's performance deteriorated under a said captain, nomatter how good he is/was ?

Not going to get caught up in this '40 replies in a post' tripe, but I'll address this point.

A good captain improves the COLLECTIVE performance of his TEAM. It might not be enough to notice on an individual basis, but just making more of the right decisions might make a difference of (say) 20 runs in an innings - a totally arbitrary figure because of course captaincy is not an exact science. Now those 20 runs might take the form of a batsman being more comfortable playing in a certain position, but it's far, far more likely to be because of astute bowling changes, field placements, general day-to-day decisions.

So, there you go. Maybe looking at things on an individual basis, the differences are too marginal to perceive - but just remember what I've said the next time you see a captain fail to position a wide slip to someone like Gilchrist or Flintoff and the ball whistles through third slip at catchable height 3 or 4 times before they take action, and then wonder how they've got 50 already.

 

[Pedro Delgado]

its not a serious problem but it is a chink in his armour, gough in 2001 caused him severe problems for the first few games, as did vaas recently. even agarkar had him plumb lbw very early on in his inning at adelaide. its something that he needs to work on to make himself better, and its something that causes him sever problems when hes going through a slump.

"Severe" seems too strong a word when the chap averages 56 in Tests and 42 in ODI's. Doubtless England will get him out cheaply now and again, however it wouldn't surprise me if he scores a century or two as well. All batsmen have chinks in their armour don't they, otherwise they'd all be averaging 100+. Ponting is world class, end of.