NOT before time Alec Stewart has been appointed to the captaincy of England. His has been a curious case of negative nepotism. For years the buzz on the county scene was that he had got where he had because his father was Micky Stewart, captain and later coach of Surrey.

My belief is the exact opposite. Had he not been the son of Micky he would have been in the England side long before he was and would not have had to wait until the advanced age of 35 before being given the captaincy.

He is a fine cricketer. Few modern English batsmen have been able to command as he does in the early stages of an innings. He has weight of stroke and he has placement, two essentials for a top-class batsman.

In the very best sense he is a grizzled old pro. He reminds one of the very best type of RSM or Warrant Officer. In his turn out there could be no greater contrast with his predecessor, Mike Atherton aka El Scruffo. Mike always looked as if he was heading off to front a liberation movement in Nicaragua or some other non-Test playing country.

In the matter of wicketkeeping Stewart has also received less than justice. There was a great deal of burbling, not least by Brian Johnson, that it was essential to have a good keeper to spin bowling. Stewart has never been less than a very adequate keeper to spin bowling and a look at the figures is revealing. Take the case of Alan Knott, as good a keeper as England has had since the war. Out of his 269 victims fewer than 20 were stumped and even Jack Russell has stumped only 11 out of 152.

My point is that stumping only matters if England have in their attack spinners of the calibre of Shane Warne or the great Indians Bedi and Chandrasekar or someone like Lance Gibbs of the West Indies.

Nor does it matter that Stewart has to bat and keep wicket, for this gives him a double chance to make an impact on any match. If Atherton was in a trough with the bat then he was hardly contributing.

One of the glories of cricket is that it is the only game in which captaincy matters a damn and it matters a lot of damns. In association football it pretty well begins and ends with an ability to tell one side of HM's coinage from another and even that is increasingly done by club mascots. Coaches don't allow football captains to think. Similarly, rugby captaincy does not go much beyond slamming one fist into the other palm while uttering an exhortation which is lost in the noise of battle.

But a cricket captain can dramatically affect the outcome of a match. He can deliver a well-timed declaration. He can make an inspired change to the batting order. He can intuitively deduce that one of his bowlers is bowling very well but will not get a wicket that day and whistle up a change bowler who will.

Greatness is by definition rare. And great captains are scarce. In a lifetime of watching the game I would name three greats as opposed to the very, very good. They would be Richie Benaud, Brian Close and Michael Brearley. All had one thing in common; they made things happen.

Thus Benaud at Old Trafford in 1961 when England were running away with it went round the wicket to Subba Row and Peter May and sowed the seeds of doubt which led to an Australian win. Close's stock-in-trade was an almost suicidal bravery. No-one ever led by example more than he and it helped that his physical courage was backed by a razor-sharp cricket brain. Brearley had a First from university and another in the understanding of the individual players under his command. He got more from such as Ian Botham and Bob Willis than perhaps even they had thought possible.

Great player does not necessarily equate with great or even good captain. For shear natural genius no English player post-war has equalled Ian Botham. Yet he led England 12 times without ever recording a Test win and he captained Somerset for two seasons in which they won in only two first-class matches, for one of which he was absent.

We have a thoroughly-versed old pro in charge of the shop now. Alec Stewart scarcely has time to become a great captain but he could, like another of his breed, Raymond Illingworth, become a very good one. That would do for most of us.