Life and Cricket - success and failure

I am a big admirer of Harsha Bhogle. He's one of those rare breed - an excellent commentator (with amazing cricket analyzing skills) who's not a cricketer. The following is his post. It can be found here. However, i don't want to find the link missing someday and not be able to read this post again. The post has some interesting thoughts.

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Share your experience
By Harsha Bhogle

More than most people, sportsmen can talk to us about success and defeat. They live with that reality, go to bed with it, derive their sustenance from it or get ruined by it. In truth, a stockbroker, a surgeon or a brigadier could as well but sportsmen are seen and recognised and by that strange correlation, acquire credibility.

Sadly, few sportsmen actually talk interestingly about their experiences. Most of those that write in newspapers would not want to read what they have written; if they have actually written it in the first place. Many, out of arrogance or limited exposure or similar misfortune, cannot relate to anything other than facing up to a cricket ball or bending a free kick around the defence.

And so, those sportsmen that can, become valuable sources of knowledge and are a pleasure to read or talk to. Greg Chappell is one of them and working with him in Australia last year was a wonderful experience. He thinks deeply about the game and in the December issue of Wisden Asia Cricket, he talks about the relationship between the mind and the body of a sportsmen and its impact on performance. Happily, if you read it, you will be able to relate his thoughts to professions beyond sport as well.

"I learned from my experiences in cricket that your brain will give you what you think about," he says and that is true for the mind is the strongest entity there can be. It can make a hero out of a mortified soul, give tired legs the power to run, make a man with no sleep feel fresh. Conversely it can make a champion worry about his next run, an athlete hesitant to get on the track again. I have seen it in television where the fortieth episode of a sixty part series can either be a chore or a challenge depending on what the mind allows it to be. And indeed, I have seen outstanding performers look mediocre when they let a challenge disintegrate into a chore.

"As I reviewed each game of cricket I ever played," Chappell writes, "I realised there was a common thread through the successes and failures I had experienced. On the good days my thinking had been simple and concise. On the bad days, it had been confused and uncontrolled." Good days and bad, whether in television or in sport, are a function of the ability of the mind to switch off from the influences around and focus on the necessary. As the influences get stronger, the ability weakens, the lure of the irrelevant grows.

"Once the mind has competing bosses, the individual starts to have arguments with himself about what to concentrate on. In that state it is hard to muster the single minded focus needed to make runs consistently at the highest level." Often the reward is the greatest competition to performance and when that starts to come first, performance declines. With Shane Warne and Sachin Tendulkar, two of the greatest sportsmen of the last fifteen years, the body has started coming in the way as well.

Chappell believes that Tendulkar is struggling with his mind and his body and with conflicting thoughts that can therefore arise. "If he (Tendulkar) is to return to his best then he is going to have to recapture the thinking process that allowed him to dominate bowlers. Because his focus is not clear he often finds himself looking for cheap runs on the leg side early in his innings. Early in his career, when his mind was clearer he would walk in and meet the ball with the full face of the bat."

I find the idea of cheap runs fascinating. Every performer, whether a broadcaster, a dancer or a cricketer, has days when he believes he cannot be at his best. He looks for the equivalent of a single to get by rather than the boundary he otherwise would have scored. In course of time, the challenge fades, the single becomes more frequent and more acceptable and the performer stagnates. At such times, he needs to ask searching questions of himself, to reset his horizon. It has happened to me and I am sure it has happened to most of you reading this.

So, Chappell says, "if Sachin can recapture the thinking of his youth, he will return to his best, or near to it...if he continues to lose the mental arguments with himself in the middle, he will spend a lot more time looking on while others make the runs."

It is an interesting thought. In his last couple of years, the great Viv Richards declined to play the 'easy single' game and averaged in the mid-thirties. Is Tendulkar's 'easy single' game indicative of the fading of the challenge, the acceptance of a lesser goal or is it a smart realisation of what his body is allowing him to do and therefore a maximisation of his perceived potential?

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