Cricket Coaching: Follow in the bare footsteps of the Kalenjin

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

What can the story of running shoes among Kenyan athletes teach us about cricket? More than I thought possible.

Nearly all top marathon runners are Kenyan. In fact, they are drawn from a particular Kenyan tribe, the Kalenjin, an ethnic group of around 5 million people living mostly at altitude in the Rift Valley.

Here is the really interesting thing. The majority of top marathon runners grow up running without shoes. The debate about whether other athletes should try to mimic barefoot-running technique remains contested and unresolved. However, it is overwhelmingly likely that the unshod childhoods of the Kalenjin does contribute to their pre-eminence as distance runners.*

And yet it is also true that as soon as Kalenjin athletes can afford running shoes, they do buy them. They know that the protection offered by modern shoes helps them to rack up the epic number of hours of training required to become a serious distance runner.

So there is a paradox about long-term potential and running shoes. If an athlete wears shoes too often and too early, when his natural technique and running style are still evolving, he significantly reduces his chances of becoming a champion distance runner. But if he doesn't wear them at all in the later stages of his athletic education he jeopardises his ability to train and perform optimally when it matters.

Put simply, the advantages of modernity and technology need to be first withheld and then embraced. Most Kenyan runners begin wearing trainers in their mid-teens. Some sports scientists argue that if they could hold off for another two or three years, they'd be even better as adult athletes. But no one knows for sure exactly when is the "right" time to start running in shoes. We glimpse the ideal athletic childhood, but its contours remain extremely hazy. 

Logically, there is a further complexity. Imagine two equally talented developing athletes, one with shoes, the other barefoot, neither yet at their athletic peak. Wearing shoes, by assisting training and recovery, would yield an advantage at the time. But that short-term advantage would leave behind a long-term disadvantage, by depriving the athlete of the legacy that barefoot runners enjoy when they begin wearing shoes at a later stage. In other words, building the right foundations during adolescence is more important than doing whatever it takes to win at the time.

Where is the cricket here? When I read about the strange influence of first learning barefoot then using the latest technology - in the admirable and thought-provoking book Two Hours by Ed Caesar, published this July - I wrote in the margin: just like cricket coaching.

A modern player seeking an edge over his opponents would be mad not to have access to the latest kit, technology, data, fitness coaching and rehab techniques. But if he comes to rely on the interventions and apparatus of coaches and trainers too early, when his game and character are still in flux, then he misses out of the biggest advantage of the lot: self-reliance and learning from trial and error. In other words, there is no conflict between homespun training methods and sports science. It is a question of the right amount at the right time. Indeed, the art of training always relies on subtly mixing technique and science alongside folk wisdom and feeling.

Consider the greatest of all cricketing educations. As a child, Don Bradman learnt to bat on his own - repeatedly hitting a golf ball against the curved brick base of his family water tank. The empirical method led him to a technique that no one had dared to try. His bat swing started way out to the side, rather than a straight pendulum line from behind him. He had escaped the greatest risk that can befall any genius: an early overdose of prescriptive formal education.

Kevin Pietersen, in his pomp the most exciting England batsman of his era, was also self-taught to an unusual degree. It was ironic, in his recent autobiography, that Pietersen was so keen to describe in words that he knew better than "the system". In his earlier days, he made the point more eloquently with his bat. Having arrived from South Africa as an offspinning allrounder, he became one of the most thrilling batsmen in the world. Think of all the money and effort - the "pyramids of excellence" and "talent conveyor belts" - expended on manufacturing great English players. And one of the best of them was untouched - some would say undamaged - by the whole apparatus. He figured things out for himself.

Connected to the question of impairing natural development is the problem of over-training and specialising too early. The now debunked "10,000 hours theory" - which holds that genius is created by selecting a discipline as early as possible and then loading on mountains of practice - is being replaced by a far more subtle understanding of nurturing talent.

A study of professional baseball players showed that keeping up football and basketball in teenage years increased the likelihood of making it as a top baseball pro. In his fine book The Sports Gene, David Epstein assembles persuasive evidence that Roger Federer's sporting education (a mixture of badminton, basketball, football as well as tennis) is far more typical of great athletes than the Tiger Woods-style mono-focus that is so often held up as the model.

When the psychologists John Sloboda and Michael Howe studied gifted children at a musical academy, they found that extra lessons for younger musicians proved counterproductive: the kids just burned out. The best players, it turned out, had practised the least as children. Diversity was just as important. The exceptional players practised much less at their first instrument, but much more than the average players on their third instrument.

So if you want an Under-13s champion, yes, buy the latest kit, bully him to practise all hours, pick one sport and make him eliminate all the others. But you are merely reducing the likelihood of producing an adult champion.

Even professionals can aspire to retain the receptivity of children who are learning by playful sampling rather than through directed orthodoxy. I once organised the first phase of pre-season training for a cricket team. I tried to change the culture from one of compliance - if I don't do what I'm told, I'll get in trouble - towards self-regulation, the ability to feel and respond to your game as you push yourself and find out what works and what doesn't. The Kalenjin have mastered that, too. Even at the very top, the athletes continue to lead the training sessions. They take what they need to from science but they trust their intuition.

*A barefoot childhood is by no means the only factor. A recent study showed that the Kalenjin elite runners had 5% longer legs and 12% lighter legs than a sample of top Swedish runners. The Kalenjin also have an unusual mixture of sea-level ancestry (they moved from the low-lying Nile Valley to the elevated Rift Valley only a few centuries ago) and altitude living. Physiologically, they are valley people who live up the mountain. There are also, inevitably, a host of environmental factors.

Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert?

By Ben Carter BBC News

A much-touted theory suggests that practising any skill for 10,000 hours is sufficient to make you an expert. No innate talent? Not a problem. You just practice. But is it true?

One man who decided to test it is Dan McLaughlin, 34, a former commercial photographer from Portland, Oregon.

"The idea came in 2009. I was visiting my brother and we decided to play a par three, nine-hole course," he says. "I had never really been on a golf course and went out and shot a 57, which is horrible. It's 30 over par on an easy nine-hole course."

Far from being discouraged by his apparent lack of any natural talent for golf, Dan and his brother started talking about what it would take to become a professional golfer. Dan soon decided he wanted to try.

"When I announced I was going to quit my job, my co-workers started bringing books in and I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated and The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle," he says. "These books all had this idea of 10,000 hours in them."

The 10,000-hours concept can be traced back to a 1993 paper written by Anders Ericsson, a Professor at the University of Colorado, called The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.

It highlighted the work of a group of psychologists in Berlin, who had studied the practice habits of violin students in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

All had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age eight, practice times began to diverge. By age 20, the elite performers had averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only done 4,000 hours of practice.

The psychologists didn't see any naturally gifted performers emerge and this surprised them. If natural talent had played a role it wouldn't have been unreasonable to expect gifted performers to emerge after, say, 5,000 hours.

Anders Ericsson concluded that "many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years".

It is Malcolm Gladwell's hugely popular book, Outliers, that is largely responsible for introducing "the 10,000-hour rule" to a mass audience - it's the name of one of the chapters.

But Ericsson was not pleased. He wrote a rebuttal paper in 2012, called The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists.

"The 10,000-hour rule was invented by Malcolm Gladwell who stated that, 'Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.' Gladwell cited our research on expert musicians as a stimulus for his provocative generalisation to a magical number," Ericsson writes.

Ericsson then pointed out that 10,000 was an average, and that many of the best musicians in his study had accumulated "substantially fewer" hours of practice. He underlined, also, that the quality of the practice was important.

"In contrast, Gladwell does not even mention the concept of deliberate practice," Ericsson writes.

Gladwell counters that Ericsson doesn't really think that talent exists.

"When he disagrees with the way I interpreted his work, it's because I disagree with him," he says.

"I think that being very, very good at something requires a big healthy dose of natural talent. And when I talk about the Beatles - they had masses of natural talent. They were born geniuses. Ericsson wouldn't say that.

"Ericsson, if you read some of his writings, is... saying the right kind of practice is sufficient."

Gladwell places himself roughly in the middle of a sliding scale with Ericsson at one end, placing little emphasis on the role of natural talent, and at the other end a writer such as David Epstein, author of the The Sports Gene. Epstein is "a bit more of a talent person than me" Gladwell suggests.

One of the difficulties with assessing whether expert-level performance can be obtained just through practice is that most studies are done after the subjects have reached that level.

It would be better to follow the progress of someone with no innate talent in a particular discipline who chooses to complete 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in it.

And we can, thanks to our wannabe professional golfer, Dan McLaughlin.

"I began the plan in April 2010 and I basically putted from one foot and slowly worked away from the hole," he says.

"Eighteen months into it I hit my first driver and now it's approaching four years and I'm about half way. So I'm 5,000 hours into the project. My current handicap is right at a 4.1 and the goal is to get down to a plus handicap [below zero] where I have the skill set to compete in a legitimate PGA tour event."

David Epstein hopes that McLaughlin can reach his goal, but he has some doubts. In the sporting world innate ability is mandatory, he believes.

A recent study of baseball players, Epstein points out, found that the average player had 20/13 vision as opposed to normal 20/20 vision. What this means is that they can see at 20 feet what a normal person would need to be at 13 feet to see clearly. That gives a hitter an enormous advantage when it comes to striking a ball being thrown towards them at 95mph from 60 feet (or 153km/h from 18m).

Using an analogy from computing, Epstein says the hardware is someone's visual acuity - or the physiology of their eye that they cannot change - while the software is the set of skills they learn by many, many hours of practice.

"No matter how good their vision is, it's like a laptop with only the hardware - with no programmes on it, it's useless. But once they've downloaded that software, once they have learned those sports-specific skills, the better the hardware is the better the total machine is going to be."

But is there a simpler way to think about all this? Maybe talented people just practise more and try harder at the thing they're already good at - because they enjoy it?

"Imagine being in calculus class on your first day and the teacher being at the board writing an equation, and you look at it and think 'Wow, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen,' which some people do," says Gladwell.

"For those people to go home and do two hours of calculus homework is thrilling, whereas for the rest of us it's beyond a chore and more like a nightmare.

"Those that have done the two hours' practice come in the following day and everything is easier than it is for those who didn't enjoy it in the first place and didn't do the two hours' homework."

What Dan McLaughlin is hoping is that what he lacks in innate talent he more than makes up for with his 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

If Dan's plan goes well he could be mixing it with the likes of Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy in 2018. If not, he will just be a very good golfer.

What is talent in sport?

Is it just natural ability or the consistency that comes from perseverance?

Harsha Bhogle

June 17, 2011




My father believed - as was the norm with respectable middle-class families in the years gone by - it was important that his children were good at mathematics. If your child was good at mathematics, you had imparted the right education and fulfilled one of your primary duties as a parent.

He often quoted to us what his friend, a respected professor of the subject, used to say: "There should be no problem that you encounter in an examination for the first time." It meant you had to work so hard that you had, conceivably, attempted and vanquished every situation that could find its way into an exam paper. It begs the question: if you did achieve 150 out of 150 in an exam (which my wife very nearly did once, much to my awe), was it because you were extraordinarily intuitive or because you had worked harder than the others, so that you didn't "encounter any problem in an exam" for the first time?

In other words, is getting a "centum" (a peculiarly Tam Bram expression) a matter of genius or a matter of perseverance? It is an issue that many intelligent authors around the world have been debating for a while, and one that is at the heart of sport. Would anybody who solved a certain number of sums get full marks? Would two people, each of whom put in 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell's threshold for achievement) produce identical results? Or are some people innately gifted, allowing them to cross that threshold sooner?

We pose that question a great deal in cricket when we argue about talent. Players who play certain shots - the perfectly balanced on-drive for example - are labelled "talented" and put into a separate category. They acquire a halo, and in a near-equal situation they tend to get picked first. "Talent" becomes this key they flash to gain entry. And yet it is worth asking what talent really is.

Is it the ability to play the on-drive or, more critically, the ability to play that on-drive consistently? It is a critical difference. Consistency brings in an element of perseverance that you do not normally bracket with talent.

Let me explain. I have often, while watching Rohit Sharma bat, said "wow" out loud. I probably said it because I saw him play a shot I did not expect him to. Or maybe it was a shot very few players were able to play. Just as often, I find myself going "ugh" with frustration at him. It is probably because, having had the opportunity to go "wow", I now expected him to play the same shot again. And so, without explicitly stating it, I am invoking the assumption of consistency to assess talent. The old professor of mathematics would have said, "Play the shot so often that it is no longer a new shot when you play it."

It is while I was debating this in my mind that I became aware of why Sachin Tendulkar paid such high compliments to Gary Kirsten for throwing him balls. Tendulkar wanted to perfect a shot and needed someone to throw him enough balls to attain that perfection, so that when he attempted it in a match he wasn't doing it for the first time. And in a recent conversation he said he was at his best when he was in the "subconscious", not distracted by the "conscious", and able to play by instinct - which he had perfected through practice.

Now we often call Tendulkar a genius, and yet, as we see, the talent that we believe comes dazzling through is, in essence, the product of many hours of perseverance. Is Tendulkar, then, the supreme example of my father's friend's theory of doing well at maths? And assuming for a moment that is true, shouldn't we be honouring perseverance because that is what it seems "talent" really is?

And so it follows that when we complain that all talented players don't get to where they should, we are in effect saying that they didn't practise hard enough to be consistent. Maybe it means we should all use the word "talent" more sparingly; not bestow it on a player until ability has been married to hard work long enough to achieve consistency.

This is also the starting premise of a new book I hope to continue reading - Bounce by the former table tennis champion Mathew Syed. I am delighted by its opening pages, one of which said "talent is overrated". It is something I have long believed.