If in doubt when selecting a team, go for character over talent

We all know the “where did it all go wrong, George?” story about the hotel waiter delivering a bottle, perhaps a magnum, of champagne to George Best’s room where he lay in bed with a gorgeous blonde. It has been told so often that you feel it must be apocryphal. Even if it isn’t you may think the question was absurd. A lot more went right than wrong for George Best. He was one of the two or three most famous footballers in the world, and, if he appeared often on the front page of the tabloids, it was his exploits, his footballing genius recorded and celebrated in the sports pages at the back of the paper that made him also front-page news, even in the day of grainy black-and white TV, long before anyone would have known what you meant by the words “social media”.

Nevertheless his career at the top level of the game was shorter, much shorter, than it should have been, especially when you compare him with his great Manchester United team-mates Denis Law and Bobby Charlton.

Thoughts about George were provoked on Wednesday when I read a piece in The Guardian about Jack Wilshere. It doesn’t seem so long since he was the next great thing in English football. But he was missing from Gareth Southgate’s World Cup squad last year, and now I read: “It did not take long for some people at West Ham to develop doubts about the wisdom of signing Jack Wilshere. The misplaced early optimism soon ebbed away and the grumbling began midway through last season.”  Of course, a wretched succession of injuries has crippled his career, but he is now twenty-seven. Is the “next great thing” to be remembered as a “might have been”? Is Jack Wilshere going the way of Theo Walcott, brought into Sven-Goran Eriksson’s World Cup squad as a teenager in 2006, now at the age of thirty plying his trade for Everton without much distinction.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Sport is often a cruel master. Two or three years ago we were all excited about Hampshire’s young leg-spinner Mason Crane. Sent to develop his craft playing club cricket in Australia, he so impressed Stuart McGill, a wrist-spinner who himself took more than 200 Test wickets despite being kept out of the Australian side for long periods by Shane Warne, that on his recommendation he played for New South Wales in the Sheffield Shield. So he was picked for what proved to be England’s disastrous Ashes tour. He played in one Test, bowled 48 overs and took 1 for 183: Khawaja, stumped by Bairstow for 171.

Since then, young Crane has suffered a stress fracture in his back – this ever more frequent injury for English bowlers. For Hampshire this season he has taken only 5 wickets in the County Championship, as a cost of more than a hundred each. He is still very young, especially for a slow bowler. So perhaps he will come again. Sadly, perhaps not.

Players making a brilliant start only to find their careers petering out, sometimes quickly, are not uncommon. Lancashire’s Frank Hayes made 106 not out against the West Indies in his first Test in 1973. The start of a fine career? Alas, no. He would play only eight more Tests, finishing with a Test aggregate of 244 runs at an average of 15. Few, I suppose, remember Gerald Smithson. He impressed sufficiently in a few matches for Yorkshire in 1947 to be taken on a tour of the West Indies that winter. (Most of the leading players were left behind, rested in preparation for the Australian visit in the summer.) Smithson was then doing his National Service as a “Bevin Boy” working in the coal-mines; his release for the tour was the subject of a debate in the House of Commons. He made a duck in his first Test, scores of 35 in each innings of the second. No idea then of giving a young player six or seven Tests to prove himself. He was immediately dropped by an unsympathetic captain, Gubby Allen.

He didn’t last much longer for Yorkshire, perhaps because he was summoned before the committee and ticked off for hitting two boundaries in the last over before lunch in a Roses match at Old Trafford. Disappointing, yet there was clearly something there. Two or three years later, Bill Edrich wrote that he “keeps showing signs of the magnificent form he displayed in 1947” and expressed the hope that he would “soon settle down and regularly display the magnificent batting that all of us who have bowled against him know he can command.” It never happened, or only too rarely. After a few seasons for Leicestershire, he dropped out of first-class cricket: another enigmatic might-have-been.

Jesus Christ may not, I suppose, have been thinking about sport and sportsmen when he delivered the parable of the sower, but the verse about the seed which falls upon stony ground and springs up quickly, then withers as quickly because its roots are shallow, applies to so many careers in sport. Natural ability and the optimism proper to youth take you only so far. How many young golfers have starred as amateurs in the Walker Cup, turned pro immediately and disappeared from view? Many are called but few are chosen. We have all, whatever our favourite sport, seen young starlets who excited us and promised to do great things, only to surface years later in a sad “where are they now?” column. Back playing club cricket or non-league football is too often the answer.

The U.S. Open tennis championship, the last of this year’s majors is about to begin. What odds will the bookies offer you against anybody other than one of the Great Triumvirate lifting the trophy? What odds indeed against the beaten finalist being another of the Three? There must be moments when younger competitors look at the honours boards at the Slam tournaments and, like Macbeth gazing on the procession of Banquo’s heirs, mutter: “What? Will the line stretch on to the crack of doom?” It’s not so long since Grigor Dimitrov was the favourite to break through and win the crown. He has an abundance of talent, but that’s not enough. Then it was Milos Raonic and more recently Sasha Zverev, but neither is beating at the door. Dominic Thiem has twice reached the final at Roland Garros. Both times Rafa brushed him aside without undue trouble. A couple of years ago John McEnroe was telling us to look out for Taylor Fritz, an American champion-in-waiting. I’m still looking, but there’s no sign of him.

Talent is easy to spot. The character to succeed at the top much harder to identify in a young player. One could draw up a long list of English batsmen born between, say, 1930 and 1950 with more natural talent than Geoffrey Boycott (born 1940). Neville Cardus, early in Boycott’s career, described him as “an artisan building his brick wall of an innings”.  Fair comment perhaps, but it was character that enabled Boycott to make that wall such a durable obstruction. Fifteen or so years after Cardus wrote these words, the artisan at the age of forty made an unbeaten Test hundred in the West Indies against one of the most formidable pace attacks there has ever been: character.

Nobody can succeed in top level sport without talent and technique, but in themselves they aren’t enough. If in doubt when selecting a team, go for character. That’s why I think Rory Burns may establish himself in the Test team. There are technical faults in his game, but his character looks rock-solid. Which is more than you could have said for George Best, footballing genius though he was.