Martin Johnson has got the job as team manager of the England rugby union side because he was a great leader on the field. Whether his skills will work from the other side of the white line, who knows, but we will have fun finding out. Even if it all goes badly wrong, we will remember Johnno the captain - the monobrowed rallying point, the man who, as legend has it, never took a backward step.

In 1966, the England football team won the World Cup under the captaincy of Bobby Moore, like Johnson an astonishing on-pitch leader. They beat West Germany in the final, a team who included Franz Beckenbauer. Beckenbauer became an astonishing on-pitch leader and led West Germany to victory in the World Cup of 1974.

In 1990, Beckenbauer was no longer playing. But he won the World Cup again, this time as coach of West Germany. Moore also became a manager. He was with Eastern AA in Hong Kong, Oxford City and Southend United and had no success with any. It follows, then, that on-pitch leadership is not the same as coaching and management.

We don’t know about Johnson’s skills as a non-playing leader yet. But we know all about his leadership on the field. It was a vivid thing to watch, particularly on television; television doesn’t give you tactics and patterns, but it gives you character all right.

And from the television it was clear that Johnson was the focal point of the team. Once he had mastered his habit of clobbering people who got in his way, he came of age as player and leader. There was a match at Twickenham in 2002 when South Africa tried to provoke England, and Johnson in particular, by roughing them up. England responded by racking up a half-century of points. Every time South Africa taunted them, they pointed at the scoreboard.

Thus Johnson added discipline to his other qualities and England won the World Cup of 2003. Jonny Wilkinson kicked the dropped goal that settled it, but it was Johnson who set the tone for everything England did in that tournament. He always said that he never set himself up as leader, but he took on the role when he was asked to and found that he was the type of man people follow.

The Australians always think that we make too much of a thing about captaincy. Australians are all mates together, while the English always insist on creating an officer class. But Australia produced one of the most effective cricket captains of all time and perhaps the most self-conscious.

Steve Waugh created a team designed to terrify. He outlawed the cricket conventions that indicated weakness: no nightwatchman, no farming the strike, no batting with a runner. He had a messianic view of the nature of leadership and it worked.

Mind you, it annoyed the hell out of Nasser Hussain, the England captain at the time. He said that he would love England to play the Australian way, but it was a touch tricky without Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. Hussain said that New Zealand were a role model for England: maximise less extravagant resources.

When we talk about cricket leaders, when we talk about on-pitch leadership in any sport, we think of Mike Brearley. He was an inadequate Test batsman, but he made the team on pure leadership. Brearley was and is a charming man. As a cricket captain he was also cold, hard and ruthless. He was never aimless, never let a game drift, always looked for an initiative, was clever psychologically - and he had Ian Botham.

Hussain was a more significant leader. He took on the captaincy when England were at their lowest ebb and, with Duncan Fletcher, he created a team who beat everyone except Australia (and even that was to come after he had stepped down). These days, Hussain is agreeable and thought-provoking company around the media centres. I asked him how he had got the best out of the elusive James Anderson. “Were you horrid to him?” “He was horrid to everyone,” another former player interrupted. Hussain gave a slightly embarrassed laugh that indicated agreement.

Hussain’s bad-cop technique was necessary and it worked. He stopped English cricket being a joke - a truly colossal achievement. Under his leadership, no one played for his place alone. No one dared.

But perhaps the greatest cricket captain of recent history was Clive Lloyd. Brearley has suggested that Lloyd didn’t “have a cricket brain”, but that wasn’t the point. Lloyd united the West Indies team, got the players to sink inter-island rivalries and play as one. Lloyd rallied them behind the terrifying four-pronged pace attack - Lloyd’s invention - and for years his team were more or less unbeatable. Tactical acumen is a bonus, leadership is what counts. What matters is whether or not you can inspire in others the virtues of fellowship.

We hold up David Beckham’s golden afternoon against Greece in 2001 as a classic example of leadership on the football pitch, but it was nothing of the kind. It was a wonderful performance all right, a wonderful goal, but it was a solo. The team didn’t follow Beckham, so he had to do it all himself.

That was always Beckham’s weakness: the team never really followed him. They could see that Beckham loved the title of captain more than captaincy itself. His showy, “I lead from the front” policy was to cost England dear in missed penalties. When he played - very well - in the quarterback position, the tactic failed because the rest of the team wouldn’t play. They refused to follow; Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard in particular. You can’t be a great leader if the rest resent you as a glory-hunter.

It was Moore who was England’s great on-pitch leader in football. “There should be a law against him,” Jock Stein, the former Scotland and Celtic manager, said. “He knows what’s happening 20 minutes before anyone else does.”

Real leadership in sport is always an enthralling thing to see in action. My mind goes back to the Olympic Games of 1988, when Great Britain won the hockey gold medal under the quiet leadership of Richard Dodds.

“He was brilliant at the difficult bit, being the one between the management and the players,” Sean Kerly, the spearhead of the team, said. “He was very good at understanding personalities. With some he was quiet and subtle. But he knew he could tear me off a strip in public and it would only motivate me.”

Perhaps the most stunning example of leadership I have seen was on the rowing lake at the Olympic Games in Athens four years ago. The Great Britain four were losing with ten strokes to go; in those ten strokes they won. “If I’d been in a single scull, if it was just me, I’d have stopped,” Matthew Pinsent, the de facto crew leader, said. “If I had any conscious thoughts in those seconds, it was, ‘Don’t make a mistake. Don’t do anything that would cost the other guys a medal. Don’t let them down.” Moral: a great leader doesn’t seek glory, still less dominance. Rather, he accepts responsibility.