The zone and the importance of imagination

A sportsman in the zone, like an artist, has both a wider and a narrower focus. He has the ability to be in the game and yet stand above it, seeing it clearly

Ed Smith

December 16, 2012

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	Mike Brearley: went beyond merely visualising a desirable outcome Adrian Murrell / © Getty Images

Mike Brearley, the former England and Middlesex captain, recently gave a talk about "the zone". Before cricket, Mike was an academic philosopher; after cricket, he became a psychoanalyst. Taken as a whole, professional sport is a relatively small proportion of Mike's career. But it afforded him an intense period of practical absorption and experience. Looking back on three careers spread over one varied life, Mike spoke to an audience at the London School of Economics about what cricket had taught him about concentration, technique and freedom.

Sometimes the best way to define something is to describe its antithesis. "The zone" can be a slippery concept. But we all know what bad form feels like. Brearley began with a memorable description of a player in crisis: "We try to focus on all sorts of things that should be unconscious - like the centipede, who, trying to think about each leg before it moves, ends up on its back on a ditch." 

"The zone" is the opposite. When we are in the zone, there is a sense of effortlessness, your body acting as though it does not require instructions from the mind. Many batsmen have written about the zone, but this was the first time I've heard anyone describe "captaincy in the zone". 

It was 1982 and Brearley was captaining Middlesex against Nottinghamshire. It was a bouncy pitch, and he was trying to think of a way to dismiss the opposition star player, Clive Rice. Brearley not only sensed there was a chance of Rice misjudging the bounce - many captains would have done that - he also began to imagine as though he, Brearley, was in fact the batsman.

In Brearley's phrase, "Here I felt my way into Rice's body and the shape of the shot. I sensed there might be a thick outside edge, and I pictured the ball flying to a deep wide slip, perhaps 20 yards back. I put Clive Radley in this position, and shortly afterwards it went straight to him at catching height. When something similar happened in the second innings, this time on the leg side, Rice thought there was something magical about my captaincy; in fact, it was a mixture of bodily intuition laced with a great deal of luck."

Brearley is describing something rarely discussed in a sporting context: the practical value of imagination. It transcended merely "visualising" a probable outcome. Brearley used his imagination, as a novelist might, to bring to life a very unlikely potential scenario. "Many years later," he added, "I saw a film of Bushmen hunting a deer on foot. As they followed the tracks of the deer in the stony ground, the hunters 'became' the deer, using the identification to find the faint footprints in the ground; they shaped themselves into the way of moving and likely course of the deer."

It is a rare perspective. We hear a lot about plans, very little about imagination; much about strategy, little about adaptiveness. Brearley's point is that a captain has to balance conscious planning with imaginative hunches.

A team can also enter "the zone", just as a single player does. Brearley explained what happens when a team is "hot": "Each player breathes in the others at their best, is strengthened by that identification, and gives off similar vibes to the rest of the team."

Note how the positivity becomes self-perpetuating, even contagious. That is why good teams always have a strong core of senior players: this core takes the weaker "waverers" with them on the journey towards self-belief. Thus the team - rather than being just a list of individuals - becomes an organic entity in its own right. One of the truest phrases about good teams is that they become "more than the sum of their parts".

What of the individual? One of the thrilling aspects of watching a player in the zone - and I am thinking more of football and rugby than cricket - is the sense that he is both aware of the whole pitch and yet totally absorbed in the small details; he is ahead of the game, yet also living in the here and now.

I once had a memorable conversation with the film director Stephen Frears about the French footballer Zinedine Zidane. Frears saw parallels between a football playmaker in full flow and a film-maker in the zone. "What I really admire - and you see it particularly in players who are just past their prime - is the feeling that what they have lost physically they make up for by seeing the whole picture. They grasp the shape of the game. They can somehow stand above it and see it clearly."

Brearley calls this "seeing the wood and the trees: he looks and takes in the detail; but he also looks with a broader gaze, in a way that allows unconscious ideas and connections to flow". The sportsman in the zone, like the artist, has both a wider and a narrower focus.

This sounds very abstract. What does it feel like in more practical terms? I would say I felt fully "in the zone" only a few times in my career. One day, when I made 149 for Kent in about a session and a half, stands out. And, looking back on it, there was that sense of both narrower and wider focus. I remember being aware of gaps in the field. In fact, there seemed to be a ready-made "channel" - it seemed to exist in its own right - running in a line to the boundary, dissecting mid-off and extra cover. 

Time and again I hit the ball into that channel, as though I had only to aim vaguely in that direction and my body subconsciously directed the ball exactly into the gap between the fielders. Without straining or thinking about it, I could both watch the ball onto the bat, and yet also see that channel leading to the boundary rope.

Later I tried to recall what batting felt like that day: "You stay in the present, enjoying it for what it is: the feel of the bat in the hand, the rhythm of the ball arriving in sync with the shot, the feel of the earth under feet, a lightness and yet a rootedness. Your mind is revving at the same rate as the pace of the game. There is no sense of being rushed (the ball arriving too soon) or impatience (wanting the balls to be delivered quicker). There is harmony. I felt very clearly, on that day in July 2003, that my role was to not get in the way - to make myself the conduit more than the agent."

Brearley described batting in "the zone" in similar terms. But on one point I disagreed, or at least had a different take on things. Brearley interpreted "the zone" as an extreme version of the more common phenomenon of "good form". At one level that is obviously true. But I feel that "the zone" exists in a different sphere to the question of form. Form is an achievement, the zone is a feeling. A batsman can enjoy a spell of scoring heavily without getting anywhere close to the zone. The zone is subtler than form, more mysterious.

	I would draw a distinction between success that follows from an effort of will and success that is just allowed to happen. I associate the zone with "letting go", relinquishing the controlling grip of your own will power

In particular, I would draw a distinction between success that follows from an effort of will and success that is just allowed to happen. (I acknowledge that even the latter relies on a great deal of preliminary hard work and practice.) I associate the zone with "letting go", relinquishing the controlling grip of your own will power. In the zone, the world is co-operative; you do not have to bend it to your will.

An awkward, perhaps impossible, question follows: what is the sportsman's optimal relationship with his own will power? On the one hand, we know that will power drives athletes to many of their victories. And yet I also believe that your controlling mind prevents you from playing at your absolute best.

So would you achieve more if you trusted yourself just to "play", instead of trying to manipulate events with your will power and strength of character? I suspect the answer is different for different players.

A good example of two opposite approaches is the rivalry of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Nadal relies on his phenomenal will power - as though he draws confidence from the strength of his own character. Federer, in contrast, seems to play best when he does not interfere with his own talent. It is as though Federer's brilliance exists of itself, in its own right: he merely has to set it free. It must be difficult to advise Federer when he is losing: "try harder", "fight more" - those ideas seem entirely inappropriate for his game.

Maybe for some players (the Federer type), the zone is almost a prerequisite of performance. For others (the Nadal type), the zone is practically an irrelevance.

****

At the dinner after Mike's talk, where the guests were mostly LSE professors, I reflected how easily he could be mistaken for a distinguished lecturer in philosophy. And yet each of the worlds he has touched - academia, sport, psychoanalysis - has benefited from insights and experiences he developed in the others. Had Mike lived a narrower life, and focused on one strand to the exclusion of the others, I suspect he would have had a less surprising life - and, I think, a less influential one. Breadth, paradoxically, can lead to depth.

By nature I am an optimist: my firm conviction is that sport is getting better in many respects. But I could not escape a feeling of sadness that it is highly unlikely that a similar career could happen in today's ultra-professional sporting world. I doubt an academic philosopher in his 20s would be persuaded to return to professional cricket, or that a professional cricketer, having retired from the game in early middle age, would subsequently pursue a full career in psychotherapy.

Perhaps Mike's insights will help a new generation of players get into the zone more often. But I suspect the particular zone he experienced is an increasingly uninhabited space.

Is sport an art?

Ed Smith

In the early 1990s, there was a famous Reebok t-shirt with the simple slogan: "Sport is an art." Nice idea, but is it true? Can sport - which, by definition, is practical (score runs, take wickets) and competitive (beat the other guy) - belong to the same sphere as painting, literature and music?

The debate is not helped by the fact that sport and the arts are usually portrayed as antagonistic opposites - athletes v aesthetes, hearties v arties, jocks v thespians. From school to adult life, it is often (wrongly) assumed that there is little overlap between artistic creators and sporting competitors. (Writers, in fact, are often just as fiercely competitive as sportsmen.)

And yet no one (well, almost no one) disputes that sport can be beautiful. Last month, I tried to describe the aesthetic pleasure of watching David Gower bat - or just seeing him stand languidly and unhurriedly at the crease. When we watch Sachin Tendulkar turn his wrists at the very last moment, flicking the blade of the bat towards the on side just as the ball arrives under his eyes, we have experienced something beautiful: not just poise and grace but also concision and completeness. Nothing can be added or taken away from that Tendulkar flick that would not diminish the shot. Within its own terms, it cannot be improved upon.

A couple of years ago I watched Arsenal play Barcelona. The game finished a draw, but it was the spectacle rather than the result that left the deepest impression on me. Judged in terms of pure beauty - the physical grace of the players, the inventiveness of their movement - the match was surely the equal of any artistic or cultural event taking place in London that evening. Only someone with his eyes closed could pretend that the match had been defined completely in terms of goals scored and points bagged.

Occasionally I still hear arts-lovers complain that all sport is dull or anti-aesthetic. They are watching the wrong stuff. Anyone who loves ballet must surely recognise Roger Federer as one of their own. Again, elegance is matched by economy: the Federer effect is created not only by what he does but by what he avoids doing. There are no false brush strokes, no unnecessary chords, no superfluous sentences. There is no straining for effect, nothing is artificially tacked on.

There is another parallel between sport and the arts. In each sphere, the greats often have golden, productive spells late in their careers - periods when the insecurities have faded, when the urgent confusions that follow from deep ambition have receded. In his essay "Late Style", the academic Edward Said described how "age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works". Yes, the artist may have been at the peak of his powers in his middle or "High" phase. But there is something even more moving about the final creative outpouring. (If you take only one thing from this article, listen, as I am doing now, to Richard Strauss'Four Last Songs - true Late Style.)

Said was writing about the arts, but the same principle applies to sport. The discerning fan will know the feeling of having watched a great player near the end of his career play sport on a higher level - without the fear and frantic-ness of his younger, restless days. We saw Late Federer in the Wimbledon final this summer, conjuring victory despite being outplayed for most of the first two sets. Late Zidane, too, seemed to grasp the whole football pitch before he made even the simplest pass. There was greatness in the small things - especially the small things.

But being beautiful does not make something an art. Many things are beautiful that cannot be classified as art. In The Principles of Art, the English philosopher RG Collingwood (no relation) set out to define the difference between an art and a craft. A skilled worker in a furniture workshop might be highly skilled - and might derive deep satisfaction from his work - but he is not an artist. He is a craftsman. A carpenter assembles bits of wood according to a plan for a table and, usually, the more exact the plan the better the table.

In contrast, art (according to Collingwood) demands a separation of means and ends. There must be an act of alchemy, the emergence of a creative vision. A poet "converts emotions into poems". Unlike the assembly of a table, the final poem is more than - and different from - the sum of its parts.

	A great sportsmen, very occasionally, does something that transcends the activity of scoring a goal or making a shot. He taps into a deep instinct that he cannot quite understand

Where does this leave sport? I would say sport usually has more in common with craft than art. The batsman practising in the nets over many years is honing his craft. He is searching for a technique that is reliable, consistent, resilient and robust. And if one bit breaks or becomes damaged, he hopes the rest of his game will function adequately while he makes running repairs. The job of a good craftsman is to create a finished article that can be repaired without the whole thing always needing a structural refit.

But sport is not limited to being a craft. A great sportsmen, very occasionally, does something that transcends the activity of scoring a goal or making a shot. He taps into a deep instinct that he cannot quite understand, let alone articulate. But I suspect this artistic strand can only be achieved by accident. If I was a coach, I would be worried if my star batsman said, "Today I am going to bat beautifully." Far better that he tried to bat as simply and naturally as possible - and the beauty happened along the way, as a happy but unintentional by-product.

Sport, I think, can momentarily touch the arts. But it cannot permanently belong as one.

But sports certainly fulfil some artistic roles. In the classical world, the arts had a defined religious purpose. For the Greeks, watching a play was a communal act of piety, a form of shared worship. Modern sport achieves something similar. What do we feel when we walk among the masses to a vast sports stadium? We are part of the crowd, we share a purpose and sense of hope with the thousands around us - we belong to a broader congregation. That religious language follows naturally. The art critic Robert Hughes famously wrote that train stations were the cathedrals of the industrial age. To update Hughes: sports stadiums are the cathedrals of the post-industrial age.

Above all, sport provides us with timeless stories. It reveals, in dramatic ways, essential elements of the human condition. A few years ago, speaking at a BBC debate called "Sport v the Arts", the classical scholar Edith Hall made this startling claim: "Sport has only two narratives - either you win or you lose - how boring!"

The truth could not be more different. A moment's reflection reveals that within the overarching narrative of victory or defeat (there are also draws and ties, Edith), there are countless twists and subplots - often far more interesting and affecting than the headline-grabbing result. Sometimes you have to look more carefully to see the real story.

Sport can be experienced at many different levels. Just like the arts.

Former England, Kent and Middlesex batsman Ed Smith's new book, Luck - What It Means and Why It Matters, is out now. His Twitter feed is here

How do you play cricket without becoming a machine?

The challenge for most cricketers- and other sportsmen - is to retain their personality while getting better at the game

Ed Smith

September 26, 2012

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	Afghanistan haven't yet had the joy ironed out of them by the cricket grind © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links Series/Tournaments: ICC World Twenty20 Teams: Afghanistan

"The challenge is to play cool without being cold." That was the assessment of the great jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. What he said of playing jazz is also true of playing cricket. A sportsman cannot be at the mercy of his moods and emotions. And yet sport becomes dull and lifeless when it is drained of warmth and spontaneity. Sportsmen must search for the right emotional bandwidth: they want enough coolness to feel in control, and yet sufficient rawness and authenticity to feel excitement.

There is no doubt where the Afghan cricket team lies on that continuum. They are joyful, volatile, emotional, unpredictable and deeply expressive. That is why they are wonderful to watch and have lit up this T20 World Cup, even without winning a game. Their performance against India was deeply moving because you could see how much it mattered to the Afghan players. Every six was joyous, every fielding error was agony.

These were not the learnt, mannered responses of professional sportsmen playing to the gallery. The Afghan cricketers have not yet learned how to hide their feelings. In time, they will become more controlled and clinical. But hopefully not too much. Indeed, we can all learn something from the spirit and the naturalness of the Afghan cricketers. Joy - even vulnerability - has its practical uses, too.

There is a counter argument to my view, of course. Some argue that sport is not about self-expression or enjoyment at all, but rather resilience and reliability under pressure. I've never seen this view better expressed than by Chad Harbach in his excellent novel about baseball, The Art of Fielding. (I make no apology for quoting it at length):

The making of a ballplayer: the production of brute efficiency out of natural genius […] This formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport […] Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer - you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error […] Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine.

It is a wonderful passage, full of insight. But while I agree with many of the steps, I cannot follow all the way to Harbach's final conclusion. Sport is not quite about the elimination of human individuality, or the progress - if that is the right word - towards machine-like efficiency. True, a good player cannot be too vulnerable, he cannot allow his human weaknesses to surface so often that they undermine his performance.

But nor do the best sportsmen, I believe, allow themselves to lose touch completely with their human dimension. We must think carefully before trying to turn ourselves into machines: we may find we lose more than we gain. There is a balance to be struck: between naturalness and pragmatism, between voice and efficiency, between joy and control. Crucially, that balance is different for every player (and every team).

Inevitably there are outliers on that continuum - some players are exceptionally self-denying where others are extraordinarily natural. Rafael Nadal's game is based on the fearless elimination of error, the repeatability of relentlessness. In contrast, Roger Federer's is freer and more intuitive. Federer has said how he cannot bear to "play the same point twice". He needs to be trying something new, at least to some extent, in order to fully engage his talents.

	There is a balance to be struck: between naturalness and pragmatism, between voice and efficiency, between joy and control

It is a myth that sportsmen can simply choose to adopt the best strands from the personalities of other players. Instead, they must search for the right balance that suits them. The natural, laconic David Gower would not have benefited from trying to become more like the dedicated professional Graham Gooch - nor vice versa. The quest for self-improvement must be tempered by the retention of authenticity.

The same balance applies to teams as well as individuals. Every team has an instinctive personality, a natural temperament. The challenge is to develop and strengthen that collective personality without losing what makes it unique. Over decades as a rugby fan, I have noticed that France play best when they keep their innate flair but harness it within collective discipline. They are much less successful when they rely too much on flair or when they travel too far in the direction of self-denial. To win, France must be France - they cannot pretend to be England.

This logic has consequences for the way we think about getting better at sport. Development - for both the individual and the team - is only partly about honing skills and perfecting techniques. Perhaps the bigger part of the story is learning how to be yourself. This can become harder, not easier, with experience, which explains why many players do not improve with age, but regress. The more they try to become machines, the worse they become. That is why the art of coaching - yes, the art, not the science - is at least as much about understanding people as it is about imparting technical knowledge. What kind of player might he become, what kind of person?

Where does all this leave Afghan cricket? Yes, they need to become more consistent. Yes, they will need to become better at controlling their emotions. Yes, their techniques will have to become more polished and reliable.

But all those things must be developed within a context of remaining true to themselves. They should not lose sight of the spirit and innocence that makes them such a compelling team to watch, and such a dangerous team to play against. In the lovely phrase of ESPNcricinfo writer Sharda Ugra, they "bring to a somewhat tired global community the fresh, bracing air of the mountains".

Afghanistan's cricketers are so refreshing because they aren't like everyone else. It would be a shame if they merely become part of the crowd.

It takes more than a stroke of genius to become a true champion

Dominic Lawson in The Independent

When does talent become genius? We all have a view; but when asked to be precise, it's hard not to sink into the hopelessly circular argument that we know what genius is when we see it. Yet anyone who watched Roger Federer's forensic dismantling of Andy Murray in the men's final at Wimbledon would have no problem in identifying the Swiss as a genius, and that simple fact as Murray's nemesis.

Thus a familiar-sounding headline on one report of the match was: "Only one winner when talent meets genius." Familiar sounding, because it repeats what was written the last time the two met in a grand slam final, the 2010 Australian Open: "Federer's genius alone beats Andrew Murray". Murray cried after that one, too. Well, it must be frustrating when you push yourself to the limits and beyond, and the opponent wins with apparently effortless ease.

Except it isn't like that at all. Although we tend to think of genius as something akin to magic, a kind of short-cut to mastery of the elements, it is nothing of the sort. A proper investigation of the careers of the supreme achievers, whether in sport or other fields, reveals that they are based above all on monomaniacal diligence and concentration. Constant struggle, in other words. Seen in this light, we might define genius as talent multiplied by effort. In cricket, this would be true of Sachin Tendulkar; in chess, Bobby Fischer.

I was at a dinner with that supreme raconteur among philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, when he was asked how he would sum up genius. He immediately recalled the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who was questioned about how he managed to leap in the way he did. The Russian replied that most people, when they leapt in the air, would come down at once, but: "Why should you come down immediately? Stay in the air a little before you return, why not?" That effortless ease defined genius, said Berlin. To watch Federer at his greatest is to see something similar to Nijinsky's description: the movement of his body appears to defy the laws of gravity, as if hovering above the surface of the planet, free of all weight or friction. Yet in logic we know that this cannot be. He is constructed of the same matter as the rest of humanity, with nothing remotely abnormal or other-worldly in his skeleton or musculature.

In a wonderful 2006 essay entitled "Federer as Religious Experience", David Foster Wallace wrote that "Roger Federer appears to be exempt from certain physical laws... a type that one could call genius or mutant or avatar, a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light." Yet this is nothing more than an illusion – one which the performer will be keen to encourage, both to thrill the public and to intimidate his opponents. Nijinsky, for example, must have known very well that his astounding entrechats and grands jetes were the product of thousands upon thousands of hours of excruciating practice, without which his talent could never have evolved beyond dilettantism.

By the same token, the greatest talents of our age appreciate that in a brutally competitive world, to skip a day of such rigorous training is to risk decline and even mediocrity. If you saw the film [Itzhak] Perlman in Russia – about the supreme violinist's 1990 tour of that country – you will probably have been struck by his great discomfiture when asked to perform a piece spontaneously on a visit to the Moscow Conservatory. "But I haven't practiced today," Perlman says; and yet when you watch the Israeli play in concert, he can make even the most appallingly difficult pieces seem like a bit of fun, or as easy as drawing breath. It is, as the saying goes, the art that disguises art.

Perhaps the idea of the effortless genius is partly born of the need to reassure ourselves in our relative laziness: if genius is simply something innate, God-given and unimprovable, then perhaps we can also do as well as we are able without making extraordinary efforts. Unfortunately, this is not so: and we must recognise that what the greatest musicians and sportsmen have which the rest of us lack is not just an aptitude, but a fierceness of desire and a commitment to self-improvement which we can scarcely begin to comprehend. Nowadays, Federer seems a serene spirit, but as a young, up-and-coming player, he was a noted racquet hurler, with no less of an inner rage to succeed than, for example, John McEnroe.

In the purely cerebral sport of chess, the one living player most often described as a genius is the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen – who at 19 became the world's highest-ranked grandmaster. Yet his father Henrik told me that what had first alerted him to Magnus's possibilities was the fact that as a toddler he would spend hours doing 50-piece jigsaw puzzles; the very young Magnus had an astonishing capacity for hard work and concentration– which is, after all, the very essence of learning.

Francis Galton, the slightly creepy founder of eugenics, sought to define genius by reference to an inherited form of intelligence, which he thought could be measured via the analysing of a person's reaction time and sensory acuity: this Galton referred to as "neurophysiological efficiency". You might think that, within sport, the activity most requiring preternaturally quick reactions would be Grand Prix motor-racing. Yet viewers of the BBC1 series Top Gear might recall Jeremy Clarkson engaging in a competitive test of reaction times with Michael Schumacher,: the lumbering Clarkson demonstrated that his reactions in a hand slapping contest were the equal of the then Formula One champion's.

This is actually what one should expect: we all have the same basic reaction times, which are determined by the nervous system rather than the brain – as evidenced by the fact that we all pull our hand away from a flame with identical suddenness. The difference between us and the champions is that they have trained their minds to process information with astonishing speed in situations requiring complex assessment. Watch how Federer reacts in the less than half a second it takes for a first serve from Murray to reach the opposing baseline and you see just what a special talent honed by obsessive determination and hundreds of thousands of hours of practice can achieve.

Conducting the on-court interview after his victory, Sue Barker began: "Genius tennis?" "Yes," Federer replied, deadpan. If only it were so simple; and the fact that it looks so simple is the strangest thing of all.