PART ONE
“As the pressures in sport keep increasing, the best way to see enhanced performances by athletes is not so much by improving technique-wise and physically, but by making mental improvements. Even though I am an international coach, I don’t believe I and other cricket coaches are qualified to teach in that area. There most certainly must be a sport psychologist with every team, especially at the highest level, because athletes don’t know how to cope with all the pressures. We have seen players like Sarah Taylor and Jonathan Trott stop playing cricket because they couldn’t handle all the pressures of the game. They didn’t know how to cope with it. In fact, some athletes upon retiring, struggle to make a comeback in life and need mental training to prepare for that. Having a cricket psychologist will make the life of every coach much easier.”
These were the words an international Head Coach said to Adrian McInman, Cricket Psychologist and author of the new book, Phenomenal performances: Increase happiness and mental toughness with NESTS, Habits, NOISE, and the Thriving Habit (available on Amazon as a paperback and E-book). In this article, we are going to examine an aspect of cricket that receives little attention: batting collapses. We will discuss the mindsets of batters in team collapses, especially with regards to the level of competition, and the interaction of mental toughness and mindsets, before then examining how a Cricket Psychologist can help coaches and teams handle such situations more successfully.
Before I interviewed Adrian, I gave him eight questions ahead of time. He answered them based on his experiences training cricketers and coaches, along with six anonymous interviews he did for this article with two international cricketers, two association-level cricketers, an international coach, and a franchise coach:
Full Story