My philosophy on captaincy and leadership

• Create a game plan for the team based on the strengths and weaknesses of each player, the opposition players, and the pitch conditions.
• Ensure each player understands their role and buys in to the game plan.
• Be flexible and adjust the plan to respond to game scenarios and conditions.
• Specifically, in the field each batsmen plays each bowler in different ways so I believe a captain should set particular fields for each batsman- usually these are only minor adjustments, for example, squaring up the offside field for a batsman who plays with an open face and hits behind point.
• I also strongly advocate applying pressure on a batsman particularly early in their innings by placing a silly point or short point in their eyeline to stop lunging on front foot to spinners or create hesitancy in playing fast bowlers leading to an edge or false shot.

I’ll give you an example. We were defending about 250 in a 2-day game and the opposition were about 5 for 130 but then had a good partnership. We were bowling tightly and restricting the runs to create pressure on the run rate required hoping for a false shot.

However, it got to the stage the opposition reached about 5 for 200 which meant that if we did not take 5 wickets the game could end up in a draw or a loss.

I made 2 bowling changes and brought in a short point and short leg to apply pressure to the batsmen and create a false shot despite knowing the risk that there were more gaps to score runs.
We got a wicket straight away and then the other established batsmen fell shortly after. We dismissed the tail and achieved a victory.