The psychotherapist and former England and Middlesex captain says that in religion, as in cricket, there’s more to playing well than obeying the rules

“Spirit” is one of those words used today in a thousand ­contexts beyond its traditional religious one. At first glance then, its appearance in the title of Mike Brearley’s new book – Spirit of Cricket – is unlikely to engage Tablet readers more interested in Lourdes than Lords. But stick at the wicket, for not only is Brearley widely regarded as England’s most successful leader in Ashes Tests, he is also a thoughtful, engaging and eclectic thinker on a whole range of ­subjects – including religion.

As a young man in the 1950s, he recalls, he was drawn to God. “I was confirmed by my own choice at 14 or 15. One of the prayers I remember [from The Book of Common Prayer] is the one about ‘we have erred, and strayed from your ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts …’ It is still moving. It is partly the ­language, but it is also the thought.”

At home in west London, his father Horace – also a first-class cricketer, later a maths teacher – was “agnostic if not atheist”. The young Brearley remembers the embarrassment he therefore felt in his early teens, “at having the idea that there might be something in religion, in what I saw of Billy Graham on the TV. I thought my father would be mocking, in a nice way, but mocking. But I still wanted something more.”