Welcome, everybody to soccer 101. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and on this week's episode, we're talking leadership, armbands, and Roy Keen screaming at you. It's captains. What is a captain? How long has the role been around? Who are some of the most famous in history and much, much more? Joining me to talk all that out is the captain of our collective hearts. It's Graham Ruthven Graham. The obvious question to get us going, first of all, hello.

Hello.

Second of all, favourite Scotland captain?

Oh, that's a good one. I would go for Dan Fletcher. He was more the kind of lead-by-example captain than the scream in your face, Roykeen, break your legs if he don't do the right

thing, captain. But yeah, Darren Fletch, he was the Scotland captain when I was growing up. And he scored a really important goal in the first Scotland game I ever went to. So yeah, Darren Fletcher will always have a place of my heart. I'm excited for the message I'll get later from Graham when he remembers the thing he should have said about Darren Fletcher and then it's like, I should have mentioned that too, because I do feel like when it comes to Scotland and captains, Graham has many, many, many thoughts, almost as many as he has about the kit. But Graham, we are here to talk about captaincies and captains in soccer. Let's start with the basics. What is a captain for people who don't know? So the captain are sometimes called the skipper.

Listeners might have heard that, some nautical terminology there.

It is basically a player chosen to be the on-pitch leader of the team.

So most commonly the captain is chosen by the manager of the team.

Although sometimes it can be a bit more democratic than that.

It might be a vote within the dressing room, but traditionally it is the manager. Sometimes it's very simple, and a captain

will be chosen simply because they are the most senior player, or they've been at the club for the

longest, or they're a homegrown academy product, but a lot of the time it will just be putting

the armband on the most vocal person

within the dressing room. In my opinion, the primary duty of a captain is to provide leadership

on the pitch, right? And there are some duties that they do. So on the training pitch in the dressing

thing. Yeah. There's like actually really only like two things they technically do, even though we think there's all these many, many things they do. Yeah, exactly. So in terms of their official role, in terms of the laws of the game, a captain's only official responsibility is to help conduct the coin toss before the match and before a penalty shootout. There's not much more than that. But on the training pitch and the

dressing room, everywhere else, of course, it's usually the manager who is the leader, but out there

on the big green thing where it actually happens, the manager can't really be that figure. So

the captain is there to offer encouragement, really instructions from the manager, just generally

sort of maintain the spirit of the team. I guess they're the ones

that generally are meant to lead discussions with the referee, although that doesn't always happen

in practice. It's usually the captain leading drills in the warm-up, although I've seen assistant

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