The boys we trusted with the last over

Long before leadership became a corporate formula, we instinctively knew who carried calmness inside chaos.

The floodlights were never really floodlights. Just a flickering neon streetlight at the corner of a narrow small-town road, struggling against insects, dust, and occasional voltage drops.

The tennis ball had already softened from hours of play. Sandals lay scattered beside bamboo fences.

Somewhere nearby, the last echoes of Maghrib azaan slowly dissolved into the evening air while a mother shouted from inside a tin-roofed house demanding her son come home immediately.

Nobody listened. The match had become too serious by then.

We needed twelve runs from the last over.

I still remember the silence before the first ball. Not complete silence. Small-town evenings are never fully silent. A distant rickshaw bell. A television commentary leaking from a nearby tea stall. Dogs barking somewhere behind the houses. The electric hum of the neon light above us. But inside our little world, something had shifted. Nobody was joking anymore.

And strangely, long before adulthood taught us words like leadership, management, charisma, organisational behaviour, emotional intelligence, or institutional structure, we already knew who would take strike, who would bowl the final over, and most importantly, who everybody would look toward once panic entered the game.

Nobody appointed him captain. There was no election. No certificate. No executive coaching session. No personality assessment. No leadership summit inside a city hotel ballroom with fluorescent lights and carefully arranged mineral water bottles.

Yet somehow, in every small-town cricket match, one boy naturally carried a strange gravity around him. During arguments over LBW decisions, his voice settled chaos. During batting collapses, his calmness quietly spread through the team. Even defeat felt less frightening when he was still standing at the crease chewing gum beneath that trembling neon light.

Years later, after spending enough time inside institutions, offices, NGOs, media houses, political structures, and carefully designed professional systems, I often think about those captains from our childhood cricket matches. Because modern establishments are obsessed with formulas.

They want leadership to become measurable, teachable, repeatable, scalable, and ultimately replaceable. Entire industries now exist around this ambition. Executive coaching. Personality mapping. Strategic communication modules. Emotional intelligence workshops. Succession pipelines. Performance matrices.

And perhaps systems need some of that. No institution can survive depending entirely on extraordinary personalities forever. Organisations need continuity. States need structure. Teams need process. Cricket boards cannot simply wait for another naturally gifted captain to appear once in a generation. But somewhere inside this industrial production of leadership, something deeply human gets lost.

Because systems can produce managers. They can produce administrators. They can produce compliant professionals capable of preserving machinery. They can produce people who know how to survive meetings, protect procedure, avoid disruption, and speak correctly inside institutional spaces. What they cannot reliably manufacture is emotional gravity.

Modern leadership psychology itself increasingly suggests that leadership is not entirely learned. Studies on twins and behavioural genetics have shown that the tendency to occupy leadership roles is partly heritable — shaped both by environment and natural disposition. That does not mean leaders emerge magically complete. But it does suggest something uncomfortable for modern establishments: certain individuals appear naturally predisposed toward emotional influence long before institutions formally validate them.

Perhaps human beings learned this instinct thousands of years ago. Long before corporations existed, tribes still had leaders. Long before MBAs, performance reviews, and executive seminars, human groups still instinctively followed certain individuals during uncertainty. Evolutionary leadership theories suggest humans developed psychological mechanisms to identify figures capable of guiding groups through danger, instability, conflict, or survival pressure.

And interestingly, ancient humans did not choose leaders through paperwork. They followed people whose presence reduced fear. That instinct still survives inside us.

Modern neuroscience and organisational psychology repeatedly return to one fascinating idea: emotions spread socially. Researchers describe this as emotional contagion — the phenomenon where the emotional state of one individual silently influences the emotional condition of an entire group. In simpler language: human beings unconsciously read nervous systems. We notice who panics. We notice who performs confidence theatrically. And we notice who genuinely carries calmness under pressure.

This is why leadership becomes visible during crisis long before it becomes visible on paper. A room changes temperature when certain people enter it.

And perhaps this is why leadership has always been difficult to fully standardise. Modern establishments desperately try to convert leadership into mathematics because mathematics is comforting. Mathematics can be replicated, audited, documented, transferred across generations. But leadership behaves more like music than mathematics. You can teach rhythm. You can teach structure. You can teach technicality. But presence? That strange ability to emotionally stabilise other human beings while uncertainty unfolds around them? That has always remained far more primal.

Cricket reveals this truth mercilessly because cricket is psychologically brutal. Long silences. Momentum swings. Public humiliation. National pressure. One bad decision replayed endlessly across millions of minds. And in those moments, people do not really search for leadership theories. They search for calm eyes.

Some captains lead through tactics. Some through statistics. Some through aggression. Some through theatre. But the rare ones lead through emotional containment.

This is why certain cricketers become larger than their records. MS Dhoni was never remembered only for field placements or finishing ability. What people truly remember is stillness. The image of him adjusting fielders quietly while entire stadiums dissolved into panic. The feeling that pressure somehow slowed down around him. Kane Williamson carries a completely different style of authority. No visible performance of masculinity. No excessive theatre. Yet teammates repeatedly describe the same phenomenon around him — emotional steadiness without noise.

But for Bangladesh, perhaps no sporting figure embodied this psychological dimension of leadership more painfully than Mashrafe Mortaza.

Bangladesh did not emotionally follow Mashrafe because he looked invincible. Bangladesh followed him because he looked wounded and still walked first. That distinction matters deeply. By the later years of his career, Mashrafe often appeared physically damaged beyond logic. Destroyed knees. Endless surgeries. Heavy strapping around the legs. Slight limp before beginning the run-up. Exhausted face. Sometimes it genuinely felt impossible for him to continue bowling at the professional level. Yet he kept taking the ball.

That image stayed with people. Not because Bangladeshis are obsessed with suffering, but because human beings instinctively trust visible sacrifice. A captain limping back to bowl another over affects people psychologically in ways no leadership seminar can reproduce. Pain voluntarily carried for the group has always held primal power over collective imagination.

History repeatedly shows this pattern. Perhaps that is why nations, like cricket teams, also instinctively search for figures capable of making uncertainty emotionally survivable. Whether one agrees with their politics or not, figures like Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Nelson Mandela, or Fidel Castro were not followed merely because of administrative competence. Their voices carried psychological force.

Bangabandhu’s leadership did not live only inside political strategy. It also lived inside cadence, pause, emotional timing, certainty. On 7 March 1971, millions were not merely listening to instructions; they were listening to a man absorbing the fear, humiliation, anger, and longing of an entire population and returning it as resolve. The voice became larger because the desperation of the nation became larger.

Mandela carried a different kind of gravity. After twenty-seven years in prison, people expected bitterness. Instead, they encountered restraint. Calmness. A refusal to let suffering deform dignity. In deeply fractured societies, emotional discipline itself can become leadership.

Castro represented yet another dimension entirely. His marathon speeches sometimes stretched for hours. Military fatigues. Cigars. Relentless public presence. A voice that seemed unwilling to tire before the nation itself did. Agree or disagree with his politics, Castro understood something ancient about leadership: human beings often interpret endurance as authority. People do not only listen to what leaders say. They observe how long conviction survives exhaustion. In uncertain societies, stamina itself can become psychological reassurance.

Again, this is not about political endorsement. It is about recognising a recurring pattern throughout human history: people instinctively move toward figures who appear emotionally larger than fear itself, and perhaps this is exactly where modern establishments become uncomfortable.

Real charisma disrupts replaceability. Institutions prefer continuity because continuity protects structure. A compliant professional can preserve machinery smoothly. Another trained manager can eventually replace him. Files continue moving. Meetings continue happening. Chairs continue being occupied. But genuinely magnetic leaders create emotional dependency that systems cannot easily reproduce. That is dangerous for establishments. Because real leadership often begins precisely where compliance becomes insufficient.

Compliance asks: “What is the approved process?” Leadership asks: “What does this moment demand?” Compliance protects the position. Leadership absorbs uncertainty. Compliance waits for certainty. Leadership acts while certainty is still absent.

This does not mean systems are evil. Nations cannot survive permanently on charisma alone. Organisations built entirely around singular personalities often collapse after those personalities disappear. But perhaps modern civilisation has overcorrected. In trying to industrially manufacture replaceable leadership, we sometimes drain leadership of the very thing human beings instinctively recognise first: presence and maybe this is why, even today, in rooms full of highly qualified professionals, polished presentations, strategic frameworks, and carefully rehearsed confidence, I sometimes find myself remembering those small-town cricket matches beneath flickering neon lights.

The silence before the last over. The nervous shifting of feet. The dust hanging in the evening air. And the strange comfort of knowing that one boy, somehow, was still calm.

Because nobody asked for certificates before giving someone the final over. Nobody conducted personality assessments beneath that evening sky. We simply knew. Some boys could bat beautifully. Some boys could bowl fast. Some boys could shout the loudest. But only one or two could make defeat feel survivable.

Evan Iqram is a former veteran sports journalist and media personality. He works for Transparency International Bangladesh.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.