The Psychology behind Batting Collapses contd
Thu, Apr 15, '21
by KRISSANIA YOUNG
PART TWO
So how can a Cricket Psychologist help coaches and teams handle batting collapses more successfully?
Adrian: I was sort of surprised a couple of months ago when you first said that you wanted to write an article about batting collapses because, from a psychology perspective, it is almost like there is no need to talk about them. The reason for this is that a batting collapse should not change most of a batter’s mental processes. The only mental thing that could, or perhaps more accurately should change, is something along the lines of the batter’s shot selection. For instance, you may choose to become a bit more conservative and eliminate some riskier shots until you have scored sufficient runs. In other words, as the risk-reward ratio of shot selection and winning the match changes, so could your shot selection. That is not something a sport psychologist should decide. That is something the coach and squad should have discussed in the past and everyone should know what is expected of them in terms of shot selection if a batting collapse does happen.
However, none of the emotions that you want to have, nor the degree of intensity of the emotions you want to have, or the kind of thoughts you want to have should change. One of the most important things that I can do for a player—it does not matter who the person is—is to help them understand how much their thinking affects their whole life, including their batting, bowling, and fielding. I constantly hear cricketers and coaches say cricket is a mental game. However, the degree to which their thinking affects everything is something that they don’t give as much attention to as they should. It usually takes quite a few mental skills training sessions, over quite a few months, for cricketers, staff, and coaches to fully comprehend just how powerful their thinking is because they usually have little understanding of psychology. But eventually, after I’ve shown them research study, after research study, after research study, they will all come to this realization, as the evidence is overwhelming.
So initially I am trying to achieve two things. First, I help everyone understand that their thinking affects everything. Second, I make the obvious argument that they should train mentally in a comprehensive and professional manner. As a result, their thinking will get closer to ideal, especially on game day. So, a good way to think about this is let’s imagine that I got a two-year contract with your dearly loved West Indies men’s team (or the women’s team for that matter), I would approach the mental skills training implementation as a three-phase process:
Phase 1 – Building Rapport
The first phase is purely about creating trust and respect. The time that will take will vary from person to person. Some people will be quite open-minded, they may have even worked with a Cricket Psychologist before and be quite open to the possibility of learning from day one. Maybe they’ve even done some homework and they found out who I am ahead of time and thus they want to train with me from Day 1. So, for them, it is not going to take very much time at all before we finish the first phase. Others, however, will initially be completely against me and psychology, usually just because they are scared of the unknown. There will be a very small minority for whom it will take months just to be able to break down their resistance. In that first phase, it does not matter what we focus on. We could focus on batting collapses, concentration, NESTS: which is Nutrition, Exercise, Sleep, Thinking, and Social Support and how they affect your game massively. It does not matter what we do, as we are just trying to establish mutual respect, trust, and rapport. And that’s done on a one-to-one basis.
Phase 2 – One-to-One
Once you have gone through that phase then the second phase I find that tends to work best—and there is no way I would have known this 30 years ago without so much trial and error—is to start training the basics of mental skills, especially increasing mental toughness (e.g., hardiness and confidence) and happiness. And this has to be done on a one-to-one basis. Doing it on a group basis isn’t going to work as effectively in this particular phase because you only just got them to trust and respect you. At the moment, some of them will still ‘hide’ in a group session. What you really need to do is establish a good working relationship with the players, coaches, and staff members, where there’s nowhere for them to hide and they have to focus on my questions. Now, if I ask a question and they don’t want to answer, that’s cool, that’s fine. Everyone always has the right to say “pass” to a question I ask. That’s all part of my mental skills training philosophy, but what I’m getting at is, there is no way they can rely on everybody else to answer the questions and they are forced to take this training extremely seriously. And in this phase, one of the best things I can do for them is to teach them a concept called NOISE. This stands for;
Neuroticism—which you do not want; that is, worry, anxiety, etc (the opposite of emotional stability). (2) Optimism—thinking the future is going to get better for them. (3) Internal Locus of Control—which is all about believing that things happen because of you and not luck or chance. (4) Self-esteem—liking yourself versus low self-esteem, not liking yourself. (5) And finally, Extraversion—being sociable but not impulsive. And those five concepts or personality styles—if you want to call them that—are the five that have the biggest relationship with happiness.
And we know from a great research study by Peter Totterdell that the happier a player is and the happier a team is in cricket, the more runs are scored. For instance, in my book, I discussed his study this way: “Peter Totterdell requested 33 male professional cricketers, aged 19 to 37 years, from four English county championship teams, answer questions several times on a championship match day, via a pocket computer. The cricketers provided feedback about their happiness, the amount of hassle they were experiencing, and whether they perceived the match situation was favourable. He then compared these ratings with official batting averages. He noted two important results. First, the happier a cricketer was the more runs he scored. Second, the happier a cricket team was the more runs the individual cricketers and the team scored.” And so, if you have the most appropriate thinking styles, like low neuroticism and high optimism, internal locus of control, self-esteem, and extraversion then you will be happier, the team will be happier and then you will score more runs. So that is one of the many things I can do with people in that second phase.
One of the things I would do is teach them how to create what is known as an affirmation. It would be a NOISE affirmation. They will spend one hour learning about neuroticism and how to get rid of it. Then spend another hour on optimism, another on internal locus of control, another on self-esteem, and one on extraversion. And then they will end up with five sentences, one sentence for each of those concepts. The sentences might be something as simple as, “I should not worry” or “be like Bob Marley, don’t worry be happy.” Then in the sixth hour, we do a session where we combine all five personality styles together to ultimately create a sentence based on all five concepts. And in the seventh hour, we change that one sentence which summed up those five concepts to create a two-to-eight-word affirmation, which is a little saying that helps you remember that NOISE sentence, and then you can use it in so many places. You can use it when you’re going out to bat, you can use it while batting, you can use it while bowling. For instance; if you have been working with me a long time, not only would you have that NOISE affirmation, but what you would also have is a routine. You would have created a routine for when you go out to bat, a routine when you go out on the field, and this could take ten seconds, involving a whole lot of different techniques, usually.
You see a lot of guys when they cross the rope—some of them are religious—they do something that is obviously indicating some sort of religious feeling for them. Others do something physical and it’s usually the same thing each time. Some of them touch the ground, etc. So, I need to work with the routines they already have and try to make them slightly more effective in terms of the way they think. The second phase is all about teaching them how to think more effectively. Not only do we do the NOISE affirmation but I also teach them things like basic Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, where they become, in effect, their own ‘psychologist’. And they learn to argue against silly, inappropriate, and/or dysfunctional thinking. If you put paper clips in your pockets and for four hours take one paper clip out of your pocket and put it into another pocket every time you have a negative thought, you’d be surprised how many negative thoughts you have by the end of the four hours. I’ve done this with many International teams and what I found is that there is virtually no one, (in the four-hour period when they first start training with me), who does not have negative thoughts. But it can be quite easy to get them to reduce the number of negative thoughts they have with something as simple as diaphragmatic breathing.
I believe diaphragmatic breathing is the most effective thing in all of psychology. In my book, there is a chapter on that, along with one on meditation and progressive muscle relaxation. These are things an eighteen, nineteen, or twenty-year-old cocky and very confident cricketer, won’t initially be particularly interested in. These cricketers focus so much on technique, technique, technique, and to a lesser extent, physical fitness. Eventually, when you get through to them the power of functional thinking, they realize there is far more to cricket than just knowing how to play their shots properly and then they start to become more open to the idea of meditation, diaphragmatic breathing, etc. And here’s the really cool thing, we only do it for sixty seconds! As the second phase finishes, this is where I build up the cricketer’s ability to think more effectively and less negatively, more often. And we can test that by re-doing that paper clip test. I like to do that test near the start of meeting a team, usually in the first or second session and then we will come back to it two or three months later.
Phase 3 – Group & Individual Sessions
Then we can get to the third phase which is a combination of individual and group sessions and that is where something like batting collapses could fit in. It doesn’t really matter what topics we discuss to a certain extent, anything that can be done in a group to improve teamwork and improve the understanding of what they should be doing in different scenarios. For instance, one thing that I have done many times in the past is present a lot of examples from real life. I show the squad the start of a specific scenario and then ask, “what would you do?” Then we discuss what actually happened. For instance, Terry Alderman was playing for Australia when a spectator ran onto the field. What I have done in the past is show a video of that and then I ask, “what would you do in that scenario?” And we get to talk about it and then I ask, “what would you want your teammates to do?” And then I show them what actually happened, how Terry tackled the guy and screwed up his shoulder and he couldn’t play for the rest of the season. I get people to think about the consequences of their actions. It’s a great way the coach can interject and stamp their philosophy on the team. In that regard, I take a back seat. I don’t say my opinion, largely because my opinion doesn’t matter. It’s their team. They have been kind enough to embrace me and utilize my techniques and information, but they must decide what they think is right for them. I’m there to facilitate the conversation and give the coach a better opportunity to impact the player’s behaviour. I present a whole lot of these cool examples. And that is where I started to think about your idea of batting collapses. Once I’ve got the players, coaches, and staff’s trust and respect and I have trained all of them to think more effectively, then talking about something like batting collapses will be a lot more effective. What you can do for a batting collapse so easily in that sort of environment is, talk about how you should really not be changing your thinking much at all. Batters should be maintaining their routine. The same, I might add, goes for bowlers, when they aren’t taking wickets. They need to maintain their routines and positive thinking, but they may need to change their bowling tactics.
They all have their own individual batting routines that they do and it should be just something that they continue to do regardless of a batting collapse. That is why some of your other questions were interesting, like the question of, do you see a difference between elite players and lower-level players? Yes, I do. And the reason why is that elite players tend to have created—even if it is not the most effective—they have created routines that they may not even realize they use. Sometimes they may not even call them routines. They tend to use them every time they go out to bat and if something like a batting collapse comes along, the team collapse is not going to affect them as much. Whereas at the lower level, especially with the younger ones who have not developed an effective routine, when a batting collapse happens, they are far more likely to fail to perform because they have nothing to fall back on. That is why the third phase should not just be group mental skills training, it ought to be doing more and more and more individual work with the players so that they have something that they can fall back on in good times and bad times.
Just in conclusion here, Adrian—earlier in our chat you stated, what makes cricket really hard, however, is you are given lots of time to think and therefore potentially sabotage your performance with negative thinking. Now, I need you to explain how you would put a positive spin on all the time to think—as you put it—which cricket affords during a game:
Routines are great for that. For instance, I teach a technique called a post-performance routine. To design one, a cricketer and I need to spend many hours together. First, I have to teach them many mental skills techniques. Then they choose which techniques they like and which they don’t want to use. Then we determine the ideal order to do them in. The routine is usually something like 20 to 120 seconds in length. Such a post-performance routine may be as simple as doing 60 seconds of diaphragmatic breathing, then thinking about the three things they did best in the match, then reminding themself of their mission statement, vision statement, values, and long-term goals. In effect, they are designing a sequence of behaviours that helps them, play in their mind what has happened during the day, and then forget about it and move on. They are just focusing on what matters. The reality is, everybody fails at one time or another; be it a Cricket Psychologist, or a journalist, or a cricketer. I can assure you I have made many mistakes in my life and that actually helped me. Failure doesn’t really matter because, if anything, failure is a fantastic opportunity to learn, so that you can do better next time. You should never see a short-term failure as really a bad thing. What matters is that in the long term you achieve your goals. So, you can do your post-performance routine at home, in the car, or going for a short walk. Wherever works for you and then get on with life.
Another thing I would say is that you’ve got to have a life away from cricket. I was working with one of the national teams when the team physiotherapist came up to me. The physical therapist was from a different country and said, “have you noticed that the players never read, apart from short texts on their phones or Facebook, etc?” I had not because I was relatively new to the team. So, I spent the next few weeks observing the amount of time they spent reading. The physiotherapist was right. The cricketers spent very little time reading. This is a problem because many cricketers in their late twenties or early thirties have an “emotional heart attack” for a few days. They look at themselves and think, “I was not as successful as I thought I was going to be or I didn’t make as much money as I thought I would. And I have nothing to fall back on, I have no education, I have no skills. What the hell am I going to do?” One of the things I would suggest is that you need to have a life away from cricket. You should develop other skills and have other things you can do. Sure, doing everything possible to be the very best in cricket is great and I commend you for that, but that can include being a bit more aware of the world and all the other possibilities it holds. So, at night time, watch television less, and instead read a book for 30 minutes. I’d encourage cricketers and staff, and in particular, coaches to get outside of their comfort zones. Learn some extra skills and become better people. So, it could be something like learning a different language or a musical instrument—even if it frustrates the hell out of your team members when you are learning!
I would like to thank Adrian for taking this time, immediately after publishing his book, to speak with me at length on this topic.
