In student days, in the early 1960s, Mike Brearley was keeping wicket for Cambridge with Edward Craig at first slip. In his book, On Form, Brearley recalls Craig asking him philosophical questions, ‘sometimes between deliveries, ‘Can we ever not know the contents of our own minds?’ ‘Are aesthetic judgments all subjective?’ ‘Is there such a thing as freedom?’ And so on.’ Craig went on to become Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and has continued to debate such matters, as in his book, A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy.

Playing for Middleton Stoney CC, the conversations between slips and keepers tend to be more mundane. What they are talking about is not the only challenge for a captain. There is who should field in the slips or indeed, who should keep wicket. The latter is an issue for England, now regularly playing three wicket-keepers who all merit a place in the team as batsmen, and for Middleton Stoney, as we can have up to six keepers in the same side.

So, at this grassroots level of captaincy, I might ask, ‘Would you like to keep wicket today?’ or ‘Would you like to field in the slips?’ and can pretty much predict that the answer in either case will be along the lines of, ‘Up to you, skip’. In fact, saving energy, I probably only need to say, ‘Keeper?’ or ‘Slip?’ and they might just nod or say, ‘Skip’.

The issue of who should field where has its parallels in wider life, for instance in running a university the issue might be whether to play your star lecturer as leader of this or that module, your star professor as dean of this or director of that or leave them free to concentrate on their own research game, and so on. The process is much more protracted in university appointments but the challenge is much the same. In politics, I imagine, Prime Ministers might be unsure whether to ask someone to be secretary of state for health or foreign secretary or return to the back benches.

Back in cricket, there is the issue of whether to field there in the slips yourself, as Brearley tended to do. Some captains think it gives them the best view from which to decide bowling and fielding changes. Some prefer to field at mid-off so that they can talk to the bowler during the over. Others like to lead by example, for instance Brian Close bravely fielding close at short-leg or Clive Lloyd who was equally adept at running out people from the covers or taking catches in the slip cordon. Older captains in village cricket tend to look for the best place to hide their own failing (in)abilities.

Brearley doesn’t say much more about Edward Craig but to give an idea of their cricketing standard in that year of 1961, the great England batsman Tom Graveney was out for a duck, playing in a first-class match for L C Stevens XI v Cambridge, whereas when Cambridge went in to bat, Edward Craig scored an unbeaten double century. But how good Brearley and Craig were as a catching combination is difficult to tell because the statistics partly depend on how good their bowlers were. I am guessing that they were quite polite by the standards of club cricket where some wicket-keepers and slips (not ours, of course) seem to think their role is to talk out the batsmen.

Middleton Stoney has a variety of fielding awards now, mostly introduced by me in a vain attempt to catch one, if only by virtue of playing the most games and thereby having the most chances. How competitive this category is in friendly village cricket can be judged by the fact that no catches were taken by either side in the first game of this season. The person who took the most catches last season was Mark Ford-Langstaff who normally starts at first slip but who is equally good at taking catches on the long-off or long-on boundaries. As he wasn’t playing yesterday, another good fielder, Nick Moorman, took a very difficult chance at first slip as well as a caught and bowled. Jay Mumtaz held a steepler at mid-off but others dropped one or two in the deep which Nick or Mark would have caught, and even the opposition’s captain (a talented all-round sportsman) failed to take a couple of catches which, from the vantage point of acting square leg umpire, I expected him to snaffle, especially as one was off his own bowling.

Against another side he led last year, I took what I regarded as the catch of a lifetime at short mid-wicket. Making a schoolboy error, I offered the opposition the opportunity to write the match report. There was no mention of the catch in the draft. Indirect enquiries revealed that the reporter had missed this moment as he had been the batsman previously dismissed and was in the shower. Oh yes, he recalled, the next person to return to the changing-room had said he couldn’t believe that short-leg (I don’t know about you but my fielding positions get closer as the catch becomes even better in my memory) had held on to a rocket that would have gone for six. When our senior professionals are not playing, there is no prospect of your catch being recognised for its true worth if the match reporter has glossed over it. This is part of a general truth about village cricket in the website era, to which I shall return later in the season.

For now, though, the slip question is this: as the best fielders cannot be everywhere, how should the skipper choose where to deploy the most talented players?

It was my mistake on Sunday to expose a relative novice in cricket to a tricky chance or two at mid-on but then I didn’t expect the opposition batsman to hit the ball quite so hard and high off one of our better, faster bowlers. More importantly, as one of the country’s leading surgeons, his hands might have been damaged

The parallels here to wider life are innumerable. As a leg-break bowler, I have relied on catchers over the decades and can’t recall making a fuss when a catch was dropped. For example, in my second game for Middleton Stoney, in 2011, I took 6 wickets (just saying, in case our honours boards are ever retro-fitted) but counted 8 dropped catches, so I’m calling that as a 14-for, even if almost all the dropped catches were off the same batsman. Now that I am club captain, of course, there is no need for a fuss since retribution can be wrought in many more subtle ways.

What doesn’t help the person who has dropped a catch is for the bowler or others to go on about it. We have almost eradicated this pernicious habit. One of my first acts as club captain was to stop the practice of post-match public fines/humiliation and to replace it with a champagne moment. That’s not to say I don’t personally go on about dropped catches off my bowling (or missed stumpings, just saying) but it’s a question of how to make progress. I don’t mean by that, incidentally, that I have kept a note of the eight miscreants from that match v Old Salopians, nor a diagram with x marking the spot for each drop, not that a graph of their batting order positions since I became skipper in 2016 would show any correlation to their performance on that day five years earlier.

What I would like to have done is to apply a lesson from another sport. The coach who turned round the fortunes of rugby league’s Leeds Rhinos in the middle of the last decade was Tony Smith. He gave a talk on leadership which influenced my approach to my day jobs and which would apply to cricket or any other activity. When he played rugby league back in Australia, the game was semi-professional so he had another job as well, in his case working in a bank. He said he made a silly error and got bawled out by the manager but nobody told him or showed him how to avoid the mistake. So he resolved to show anyone for whom he had a responsibility how to get better. If a player dropped a high ball, for instance, he would work all week with him on getting into position and taking the catch, over and over again, with other players and coaches kicking and chasing the ball hundreds of times and Tony Smith alongside the player, first at walking speed, then working up to full speed, ready for the next match when they all knew that the opposition would be targeting their last tackle kicks on the player who had made that mistake.

Which brings me to a memory of school cricket from 1969 to 1975. We did practise taking close catches and catches in the deep. The 1^st XI did so day after day. Our coach, Mike Dawson, Head of French, a former Minor Counties player and still then a great club cricketer for The Mote, would hit the ball hard and, for the deep catches, high. Everyone got better. I don’t remember two brothers in that team, John and Mick Niven, ever dropping a catch in in all my years at school. My catching practice goes back even further, to the beach on summer holidays at Littlestone, under the tutelage of my Uncle Martin. A purist might say my hands and stance were more for the camera then than for catching, a point which continues to be made decades later.

On placing the right people in the right places, we all make mistakes. For instance, in a game last year I was fielding at gully but thought we should give the batsman something to think about by having a short-leg. So I went there, put a newcomer to the club, Rob Barton, at gully and the next over an easy catch went there, which he took. Where was the error in that? Well, I was one further off the pace for the most catches, of course. Luckily, when Matt Barton, one of Rob’s sons who was watching the game and who, I had noticed, was in the direct eye line of gully, was asked what he thought of his father taking that catch, he claimed that he had been looking the other way.

Looking the other way is an art form developed by some players in club cricket whereas fielders should be looking to see if the captain wants you to move. Field-placing at its best is a more creative and collaborative art, with the bowler, captain and fielder combining to determine where, say, deep backward square leg should be. I give that example because our catch of the season in 2017 was taken in that spot. Even though I wasn’t playing in that match, I know the location of the catch because that’s where we put out, in every game, the boundary flag which marked that catch of the season award, by Paul Wordsworth. Paul, by the way, was fielding at second slip on Sunday, likes to keep, is another medic, another professor, and a talker in the slips. As far as I can gather, he wasn’t paying too much attention in the deep when the helpful cries of ‘Catch it’ for once had a part to play in a drama. He looked round and intercepted the 6.

The captain of the day, the bowler and the fielder will all claim the credit for having the right catcher in the right spot. If the catch is missed or dropped, the looks around the ground remind the captain that it was ‘Up to you, skip’. Sometimes, however, the art is placing a short-leg or short mid-wicket or short extra cover to be in the batsman’s eyeline and/or thoughts, to play a part in a different kind of dismissal (and to risk being hit). Or sometimes the skill is in leaving a gap for a particular batsman’s favourite but risky shot.

The principle captains should, in my opinion, be following is a version of Pareto optimality, a concept I studied in economics and law. It is defined, in a book The Concise Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig (although this entry, applying the principle under discussion, was written by others), as an arrangement in which ‘no individual can achieve higher preference satisfaction without someone else undergoing a reduction in their satisfaction level’. This is an idea which has its shortcomings but which explains friendly village club cricket leadership.

All of which brings me back to those three questions posed by Craig to Brearley in the slips in 1961 but now, as it is exam season, with my answers.

‘Can we ever not know the contents of our own minds?’

Don’t know.

‘Are aesthetic judgments all subjective?’

Mine aren’t.

‘Is there such a thing as freedom?’

There is more in the slips, as to how far back you stand or how close you are to the keeper or to the next slip, so long as you keep taking your chances.

Mind you, as with much of my approach to being skipper, or to life, there might be a philosophical slip in there somewhere.