The great thing about declaration cricket is it gives you the opportunity to risk losing in order to win. Yet captains all over the world from the village green to Test match regularly ignore the bit of advice I picked up on Twitter last week.

You can understand the reluctance of Test captains to make a 'sporting' declaration. They play series and their careers are on the line. Discretion becomes the better part of valour. Club and school captains have no such excuse. Everyone is there hoping to play in a cracking match.

Yet how many games per season finish in crushingly dull stalemate?

In my league last year, for example, of 140 completed matches there were 53 draws. That's nearly 40% of all games or to put it another way: Blooming boring cricket.

This is not unusual. If your games can have draws check the numbers in your league to compare. They will be similar.

I put the blame squarely at the feet of the captains, specifically those who bat first. They, following the example of the professionals, have forgotten the simple truth: You need to risk losing in order to win.

The 'no risk' strategy is to rack up as many runs as you can in the time available. Then you hope your bowling is strong enough to get the opposition out if they are blocking. If they are not, you have a boring draw on your hands and only your declaration to blame.

Club captains have a responsibility to make a game of it for 2 reasons:

1. Close games are more fun to play in and help your team attract good players.
2. If you get good at knowing when to declare you will win more games because the opposition will keep going for the runs making it easier to bowl them out.

Yes this takes guts. You will get it wrong sometimes. Someone will play a winning innings and all you can do is watch in amazement as you lose. For me there is no doubt that it's worth those odd losses in order to have great wins and close draws going down to the last over.

Wouldn't you prefer to play cricket like that every weekend?

Want to be a better captain? Learn from the best with the interactive online course Cricket Captaincy by Mike Brearley.