Stop Using the Captain as a Dartboard

Every time a cricket team loses, the captain gets roasted while selectors, coaches, the director of cricket, and administrators walk away untouched. Captains don't pick squads, don't control contracts, and don't design long-term strategy. They work with the players they've been given, inside a system they didn't build. Blaming them alone is scapegoating dressed up as accountability. Modern cricket is a complex system, and when a team underperforms the right question is how the system failed, not what the captain did wrong. Did the selectors pick the right squad? Did the coaches prepare the players properly? Did the director of cricket set clear strategy and culture? If the answer to any of those is no, the captain was already being set up to fail before he walked out for the toss. Cricket victories are collective: selectors get praised, coaches get credit, the board takes a bow. That logic has to work in both directions. Treating the captain as the sole repository of blame papers over the structural problems and leaves the same culture that produced the losing team fully intact. Honest post-mortems require looking at selection politics, long-term planning failures, and misaligned coaching appointments, not just pointing at the most visible person on the field. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@cri9259/post/stop-using-the-captain-as-a-dartboard