It's not just corruption. Entrance into elite US colleges is rigged in every way

An FBI sting revealed that wealthy parents are buying their children a place in top universities. But they’re not the only problem: the whole system is rigged writes Richard V Reeves in The Guardian 

 

‘Elite colleges are serving to reinforce class inequality, rather than reduce it.’ Photograph: Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images


Shock horror! Wealthy Americans are using their money to buy their children places at elite colleges. An FBI investigation, appropriately named Operation Varsity Blues, has exposed a $25m cash-for-admissions scandal. Coaches were allegedly bribed to declare candidates as athletic recruits; test administrators to change their scores, or allow someone else to take the test for them.

At the center of the cheating scheme was William “Rick” Singer, the founder of a for-profit college preparation business based in Newport Beach, California. Among the 33 parents caught in the FBI sting were Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. Loughlin starred in the series Full House. Huffman is famous for her role in Desperate Housewives; now she will be more famous as a desperate mom. And she’s not alone. The breathless anxiety among many affluent parents to get their kids into the very best colleges is a striking feature of upper-class American life.

Singer’s bribery scheme allegedly allowed parents to buy entrance for their offspring at some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, including Yale, Georgetown University, Stanford University, UCLA, the University of San Diego, USC, University of Texas and Wake Forest.

FBI officers were at pains to point out that the colleges themselves are not being found liable; though nine athletic coaches were caught in the net.

“Following 10 months of investigation using sophisticated techniques, the FBI uncovered what we believe to be a rigged system,” John Bonavolonta, the FBI special agent in charge said, “robbing students all over the country of their right to a fair shot of getting into some of the most elite universities in this country”.

But here’s the thing: the whole system is “rigged” in favor of more affluent parents. It is true that the conversion of wealth into a desirable college seat was especially egregious in this case – to the extent that it was actually illegal. But there are countless ways that students are robbed of a “fair shot” if they are not lucky enough to be born to well-resourced, well-connected parents.

The difference between this illegal scheme and the legal ways in which money buys access is one of degree, not of kind. The mistake here was to do something illegal. Meanwhile, much of what goes on in college admissions many not be illegal, but it is immoral.

Take legacy preferences, for example. This boosts the admissions chances of the children of alumni; and for obvious reasons the alumni of elite colleges tend to be pretty affluent, especially if they marry each other. (They are also disproportionately white.) The acceptance rate for legacy applicants at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Stanford is between two and three times higher than the general admission rate. If they don’t get in first time round, they might be asked to take a “gap year” and enter a year later instead, a loophole known as “Z-listing”. A Princeton study found that being a legacy applicant had the same effect as adding 160 SAT points – on the old scale up to 1600 – to a student’s application. Imagine if colleges gave that kind of admissions boost to lower-income kids?

As John W Anderson, the former co-director of college counseling at the Phillips Academy, an elite boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, once admitted, of the students from his school who are Z-listed for Harvard, “a very, very, very high percent” are legacies. The Harvard Crimson estimates the proportion at around one in two.

Or how about donor preferences? Rather than bribing coaches, the wealthiest parents can just bribe – sorry, donate to – the college directly. In 2017, the Washington Post reported on the special treatment given to “VIP applicants” via an annual “watch list”. Applicants whose parents were big donors would have notes on their files reading “$500k. Must be on WL” (wait list). Even better, these donations are tax free!

As a general rule, the bigger the money the bigger the effect on admissions chances. Among elite aspirational alums, the question asked is “what’s the price?”. In other words, how much do you have to donate to get your child in?

Whatever the price is, those with the fattest wallets can obviously pay it. Peter Malkin graduated from Harvard Law School in 1958. He became a very wealthy real estate businessman, and huge donor. In 1985, the university’s indoor athletic facility was renamed the Malkin Athletic Center in his honor. All three of Malkin’s children went to Harvard. By 2009, five of his six college-age grandchildren had followed suit. (One brave boy dared to go to Stanford instead.)

How elite US schools give preference to wealthy and white 'legacy' applicants


Or how about Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law? Kushner was accepted into Harvard shortly after his father donated $2.5m. An official at Kushner’s high school said there was “no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would, on the merits, get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it.”

David E and Stacey Goel just gave $100m to Harvard. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that their children probably have an excellent chance of Harvard admission.

Even those parents who are not in the wealthiest brackets, but are squarely in the upper middle class, can use their money to boost their kids’ chances, through tutors, SAT prep classes, athletic coaches. Students who apply early have better chances of admission, which favors more affluent families since early admission precedes financial aid decisions. Many colleges prefer students who have “shown an interest” in their college. How to show an interest? By visiting the campus – easy for those with money for flights and hotels, less so for those on modest or low incomes.

Small wonder that at elite colleges, including most of those targeted in the corruption scheme such as Yale, Duke, Stanford and Wake Forest, take more students from families in the top 1% of the income distribution than from those in the bottom 60% combined.

So hats off to FBI special agent Bonavolonta and his team for exposing the corruption admissions. But it is in fact simply the most visible sign of a much deeper problem with college admissions. Elite colleges are serving to reinforce class inequality, rather than reduce it. The opaque, complex, unfair admissions process is a big part of the problem. From an equality perspective, it is not just Singer and his clients who are at fault: it’s the system as a whole.

Whatever happened to cricketing common sense?

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo


I watched aghast as Hardik Pandya was needlessly run out/ in the first innings of the second Test against South Africa. I wondered: whatever happened to adhering to the basic principles of the game?

I'm not talking about coaches developing new techniques to enhance the power-hitting required in the modern game; or the tactics devised to curb the flood of runs caused by the increased boundary flow; I'm talking about simple, basic principles of the game. These principles apply in any form of the game and if ignored, they can lose you games, as Pandya's brain fade might well have done. "Always ground your bat when running between wickets": it should have been one of the first things Pandya was told by a coach.

There weren't many coaches when I was growing up, but fortunately I had a good one who didn't ignore the basics of the game. With so many coaches available these days, I'm wondering whether it's that they don't hammer home the basic principles or whether the players choose to ignore them.

Pandya's laziness, sloppiness, arrogance, call it whatever you want, it was unforgivable. Basic principles like grounding your bat, not turning blind, always balancing yourself with a slight foot turn before taking a catch in the slips - these should be adhered to. If they're ignored, it's a fair bet they'll bite you on the backside at the most inopportune time.

And no sooner was Pandya back in the pavilion ruing his needless error than in another part of the world, South African Under-19 opener Jiveshan Pillay was out, obstructing the field. This used to be out "handled the ball" but the law has been changed.

No matter what appears in the scorebook, it can easily be avoided. When I was nine years old, my father, Martin, was captaining a club side filled with young talent. An opposition youngster used his hand to stop the ball hitting his stumps and Martin appealed; the batsman was given out.

On the ride home, Martin asked me what I thought about the decision and I replied; "It's the law - you don't stop the ball with your hand when batting."

"Good," replied Martin, "I don't ever expect to see you given out that way."

In all my years of playing cricket, at every level, I never - never ever - touched the ball when I was batting. Never mind the laws of the game or the pretentious spirit-of-cricket doctrine, I didn't want the wrath of Martin coming down on my head.


"My concern with the proliferation of coaches at all levels is that cricketers will grow up relying on their advice at the expense of self-education"


It's like being Mankaded. If you back up properly, it won't happen. If you don't touch the ball when batting, you won't be out obstructing the field.

Recently I read an interview with former Indian, South Africa, and now Hobart Hurricanes coach Gary Kirsten. He talked about the role of the coach in cricket. "If you look at the coach or manager in other sports they play a fairly significant role," he added, "I think cricket's moving in that direction, in T20 cricket."

My concern with the proliferation of coaches at all levels is that cricketers will grow up relying on their advice at the expense of self-education. The best advice I received from my coach came at seven years of age: "It doesn't matter how good I am as coach," Mr Fuller told me. "I can't help you when you're out in the middle. The quicker you learn this game for yourself, the better off you'll be."

Which leads to another point. With the proliferation of coaches, is there too much emphasis placed on physical preparation rather than spending time on the mental side of the game?
Shane Warne once bemoaned being subjected to endless fielding drills prior to a day's play. "All I need," groaned Warne, "is to bowl a few balls in the nets, go back to the dressing room, have a shower, then enjoy a cup of tea and think about the batsmen I'll be facing today."

Pure common sense from Warne. Common sense, like basic principles, is to be ignored at your peril in the game of cricket.

What's the next generation of batsmen learning?

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo


It's now eight years since Misbah-ul-Haq's ill-conceived attempted scoop shot ballooned to short fine leg at the Wanderers Stadium and India were crowned inaugural World T20 champions.

Much has happened in cricket since that exciting five-run victory and the bulk of it revolves around the evolution of T20. Leagues have sprung up like daisies in summer, with the IPL being the most affluent and gaudy, whilst the other two versions of the game - Test and 50-over cricket - have receded into the shadows.

Now that kids from all over the world who watched that Wanderers final are at an age where they could make their own name in the game, it's time to look at how young players are being developed.

The dilemma involving the development of young cricketers is simple. For batsmen, it's: do you concentrate on a method that provides hitting power and the capability of scoring at ten runs per over, or do you develop a solid foundation that allows for adjustment to any form of the game?

For a bowler it's even more straightforward: do you implant in his mind a metronomic desire to produce a string of dot balls, or a mentality that stresses the priority of wickets?

Having just witnessed a 40-year-old Michael Hussey shred a Big Bash League attack with a mixture of scorching off-drives, gentle taps to initiate a scampered single and four power-laden shots that cleared the boundary, I'd opt for the solid foundation method.

Hussey, along with a number of other fine batsmen from an era when players were brought up with success in the longer forms of the game as a measuring stick, is proof a solid all-round technique is easily adaptable to T20 cricket. The best T20 teams have a combination of batsmen who can survive and prosper against good bowling and those who regularly clear the boundary rope.

The ideal fast bowling blueprint is Dale Steyn, a bowler who combines an excellent strike rate with a relatively low economy rate. For spinners, R Ashwin is a good role model; he takes wickets at both ends of the batting order and keeps the long balls to a minimum.
The secret to good bowling is to keep believing you can dismiss a batsman. Once that thought turns to purely containment, the batsman is winning the battle.

Given reasonable pitches, the bowlers adapt well, but many batsmen struggle in anything other than serene conditions. On the evidence of the eye test and the average length of a Test, it's obvious that solid foundations are crumbling and most batsmen are ill-equipped to survive a searching test by a good bowler. This has been a recent trend but I don't see any attempt to alter the way batsmen are being developed.

I suspect batsmen are being over-coached and bombarded with theories in structured net sessions that often involve the dreaded bowling machine. There's a lot to be said for the old-fashioned method of simply advocating a solid defence and then encouraging a youngster to spend hours playing in match situations - either in the backyard or at the local park - in order to learn how his own game works best.

This method worked extremely well for batsmen as successful and diverse in style as Sir Garfield Sobers, Sachin Tendulkar and Greg Chappell. As Sobers says in his excellent coaching book: "One of the tragedies of cricket coaching is the greatness of the game's best players is revered but never followed."
It would be a good start for a budding young batsman to emulate the style and development process of a Tendulkar, a Hussey or an AB de Villiers. It would also help if the youngster avoided listening to coaches with theories on batting that haven't been proven in the middle. As former great Australian legspinner Bill O'Reilly once stated: "If you see a coach coming, son, run and hide behind a tree."
I'd modify that for a young batsman and say: "Seek good coaching or else avoid it at all costs and learn the game for yourself."

Why blame culture is toxic for sport

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

Is ranting at players during team talks like bloodletting in the age of quack doctors?


Shouting at players: Satisfying? Yes. Effective? No © AFP



The subversive in me would love to whitewash over the usual clichés and catchphrases that are splashed on dressing-room walls and replace them with a more cynical message:

The six phases of a project:

1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Rewards for the uninvolved

Not very cheering, I admit, but a salutary warning about our obsession with blame - a preoccupation sustained by dodgy narratives about "causes" that leads not to institutional improvement but to self-serving politics. Having pinned the blame on someone - rightly or, more likely, wrongly - the next task is "moving on". Sound familiar?

The "six phases" were attached to an office wall by an employee at the Republic Bank of New York. The story appears in Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed's new book. Syed (a leading sports columnist and double Olympian) argues that our preoccupation with convenient blame - rather than openness to learning from failure - is a central factor holding teams and individuals back from improving. I think he is right.

Syed expresses admiration for the airline industry and its commitment to learning from failure - especially from "black boxes", the explosion-proof devices that record the conversations of pilots and other data. If the plane's wreckage is found, lessons - no matter how painful - must be learned. In the jargon, learning inside the aviation industry is an "open loop". (An "open loop" leads to progress because the feedback is rationally acted on; a "closed loop" is where failure doesn't lead to progress because weaknesses are ignored or errors are misinterpreted.) Syed presents harrowing examples from hospital operating theatres, of "closed loops" costing lives. Indeed, with its recurrent plane crashes and botched operations, the book takes the search for transferrable lessons to harrowing extremes.

One question prompted by Black Box Thinking is why is sport is not instinctively enthusiastic about evidence-based discussion. You might think that sports teams would be so keen to improve that they would rush to expose their ideas to rational and reflective scrutiny. But that's not always the case. As a player I often felt that insecure teams shrank from critical thinking, where more confident teams encouraged it.

The first problem sport has with critical thinking is the "narrative fallacy" (a concept popularised by Nassim Taleb). Consider this statement, thrown at me by a coach as I left the dressing room and walked onto the field after winning the toss and deciding to bowl first: "We need to have them five wickets down at lunch to justify the decision."

Hmm. First, even thinking about "justifying" a decision is an unnecessary distraction. Secondly, it's also irrational to think that the fact of taking five wickets, even if it happens, proves the decision was right. I might have misread the wicket, which actually suited batting first, but the opposition might have suffered a bad morning - five wickets could fall and yet the decision could still easily be wrong.

Alternatively, the wicket might suit bowling - and hence "justify" my decision - but we might bowl improbably badly and drop our catches. In other words, it could be the right decision even if they are no wickets down at lunch. What happened after the decision (especially when the sample of evidence is small or, as in this instance, solitary) does not automatically prove the rightness or wrongness of the decision.

Fancy theorising? Prefer practical realities? This kind of theorising, in fact, is bound up with very practical realities. Consider this example.

For much of medical history, bloodletting was a common and highly respected procedure. When a patient was suffering from a serious ailment and went to a leading doctor, the medical guru promptly drained significant amounts of blood from an already weak body. Madness? It happened for centuries.

And sometimes, if we don't think critically, it "works". As Syed points out, in a group of ten patients treated with bloodletting, five might die and five get better. So it worked for the five who survived, right?

Only, it didn't, of course. The five who were healed would have got better anyway (the body has great powers of self-recuperation). And some among the five who died were pushed from survival into death. Proving this fact, however, was more difficult - especially in a medical culture dominated by doctors who advocated and profited materially from bloodletting.

The challenge of demonstrating the real usefulness (or otherwise) of a procedure led to the concept of the "control group". Now imagine a group of 20 patients with serious illnesses - and split them into two groups, ten in each group. One group of ten patients gets a course of bloodletting, the other group of ten (the control group) does not. If we discover that five out of ten died in the bloodletting group and only three out of ten among the non-bloodletting group, then, at last, we have the beginnings of a proper evidence-based approach. The intervention (bloodletting) did more harm than simply doing nothing. It was iatrogenic.

Iatrogenic interventions are common in sport, too - such as when the coach tells a batsman to change his lifelong grip before making his Test debut. (Impossible? Exactly that happened to a friend of mine.) The angry team meeting is a classic iatrogenic intervention. Shouting at the team and vindictively blaming individual players, like bloodletting, provides the coach with the satisfying illusion that it works well sometimes. By "it works", we imply that the team in question played better after half-time or the following morning. Even having suffered an iatrogenic intervention, however, some teams - like some patients enduring bloodletting - inevitably play better afterwards. But on average, all taken together, teams would have playedbetter still without the distraction of a raging coach. (This insight helped win Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize, as I learned when I interviewed him.)

The great difficulty of sport, of course, is the challenge of conducting a proper control group experiment - because the game situation, pressures and circumstances are seldom exactly the same twice over. However, merely being open to the logic of these ideas, constantly exposing judgements and intuitions to critical thinking, takes decision-makers a good step in the direction of avoiding huge errors of conventional thinking.

That is why much of what Syed calls "black box thinking" could, I think, be filed under "critical thinking" - the desire to refine and improve one's system of thought as you are exposed to new experiences and ideas. Here is a personal rule of thumb: critical thinkers are also the best company over the long term. Critical thinkers are not only better bets professionally, they are also more interesting friends. Who wants to listen to the same set of unexamined views and sacrosanct opinions for decades? If you believe that your ideas don't ever need to evolve and adapt, can we at least skip dinner?

It is hard to imagine how anyone who is interested in leadership, innovation or self-improvement could fail to find something new and challenging in this book. Rather than presenting a simplistic catch-all solution, Syed takes us on a modern and personal walk through the scientific method. The book makes an interesting contrast with Syed's first book,Bounce, which proposed that talent is a myth - an argument that can be summed up in a single, seductive phrase: genius is a question of practice.

Rather than presenting a single idea, Black Box Thinking circles around a main theme - illustrating and illuminating it by drawing on a dizzyingly wide and eclectic series of ideas, case studies and lines of philosophical enquiry. The reader finishes the book with a deeper understanding of how he might improve and grow over the long term, rather than the transient feeling of having all his problems solved. The author, we sense, has experienced a similar journey while writing the book. Syed doesn't just preach black-box thinking, he practises it.

Peter Moores: 'The portrayal of me as a coach is wrong'

George Dobell - Cricinfo

"Frustration" is a word that crops up often in Peter Moores' sentences at present.

He is "frustrated" that he cannot finish the job he started in rebuilding the England team. He is frustrated that he will never lead England through an Ashes series. He is "frustrated" that history appears to have repeated itself. And he is, in his words, "doubly frustrated" that his portrayal in the media differs so markedly from reality.

That portrayal stems, in part, from a radio interview conducted by the BBC moments after England's World Cup exit. In it, Moores was alleged to have said that England would need to check the "data" before coming to any conclusions about the reasons for their failure.

It came to be a defining moment in his downfall. It has been used to illustrate his perceived faults: an obsession with stats and a propensity to overanalyse. England's talented young players, it was said, were stifled by such a policy.

But it never happened. As was reported by ESPNcricinfo, Moores actually said "later" in that BBC interview. But his words were misheard - an honest and understandable mistake as there was a minor microphone malfunction during the interview - and while the BBC subsequently apologised to him (at first verbally and then in writing), the error was public and the apology was private. The damage, in terms of public perception, was done.

The image of Moores as stats-driven has little basis in reality. So frustrated was Nathan Leamon, England's analyst at the World Cup, by the lack of use of his statistics that it was briefly feared he may go home. Meanwhile Paul Farbrace, Moores' faithful deputy and the man who has recently been portrayed as a liberator of the England team, has said repeatedly that the Sri Lanka team he coached to success in the 2014 World T20 used such data far more.



"I don't have regrets. I look back with quite a lot of pride" © Getty Images





While it is true Moores used the word "data" during an excellent eight-minute interview on Sky (he said "we'll have to analyse the data") it was in response to several detailed questions and after an initial answer that started: "Now is not the time to be analysing."

It is Moores' frustration - that word again - at such a characterisation that has prompted him to talk now. While he remained silent the first time he was sacked as England coach, declining lucrative invitations to give his side of the story, this time he has decided to speak in an attempt to correct at least a few of the misconceptions about his period as coach. He was not paid and the only item he would not discuss is how he was sacked.

While Moores will not be drawn on it - he is simply not the sort to be dragged into mudslinging - ESPNcricinfo understands that he learned of his fate after his wife read about it on Twitter and phoned him. Whatever you think of him or Paul Downton (who learned of his fate a similar way), they deserved better than that. The ECB, to its credit, apologised in private and public.

He does not comment, though. He hardly ever does. When he was sacked as England coach at the start of 2009, he said nothing. When England went to No. 1 in the Test rankings in 2011, largely with players he had selected, he said nothing. When Kevin Pietersen's book came out, he said nothing. And each day he woke up and read another column from an ex-player - usually an ex-player he had dropped during his first spell as England coach - rubbishing his methods and caricaturing his personality, he said nothing.

"I have to accept my time as England coach has gone," Moores says. "It's pretty hard to accept. But it's done. The umpire's finger is up. I have to look at where I go next.

"But I am frustrated. The portrayal of me as a coach in the media is just wrong. If people said 'I don't rate you as a coach' then fine. But when it's not what you are, it's really frustrating.

"I don't know how to change that. I've not spent my life trying to be really good with the media; I've spent it trying to make players better. I still passionately want to do that.

"I have an official letter from the BBC. It's a tough one, I didn't say it. I know what I am as a coach. I've done it for a long time. I've been in the game for 33 years and I've coached for 17. I know the game. And what I've learned is, my job is to simplify the game for players and free them up to go and play.

"We moved away from stats and data. Coaching doesn't work like that at all. You watch a lot to say a little. It's not a numbers game. We kept it simple. We tried to give the players responsibility to lead themselves.

"There is a big support staff with England. And they're all valuable. You need the security staff, the physio and the doctor. But there are times when you just want the 11 players and two coaches to watch the game and talk about it together. We were creating that environment. We were getting there."

The "we were getting there" phrase is another recurring theme. Moores felt his England side were on the right track. While he accepts the World Cup was wretched, there was evidence in Test cricket, that they were making progress. At the time he was sacked, England - a side containing half-a-dozen young or inexperienced players - had won four and lost one of their last six Tests.

Against relatively modest opposition that is perhaps decent rather than exceptional. But Moores did inherit an England side that had just been beaten 5-0 in the Ashes and was clearly in a transitional phase. It was always going to take time.

"In Test terms, we felt we had turned a corner," Moores says. "We were getting there. Would I have been sacked had we won in Barbados? You'll have to ask the people who made the decision. I was aware that things were building but I wasn't expecting it.

"The frustration is not being able to carry something through. When I took the job, I knew we would go through this period of trial. And transition is difficult. You will lose sometimes.

"The evolution, of a team, of a player, is that you're going to be inconsistent. You're going to lose. But in Tests we were moving and moving quite fast. You could see it happening. Young players were developing fast. And you know there is a timeframe for that.

"I'm also confident in my ability to evolve teams to become very good teams. And, given time, I've always gone on to be successful. And you're not trying to be successful for a short time, but for a long time.

"So to not have time to finish the job with England... I thought we were getting there. I was genuinely excited when we got back from the Caribbean."

Moores denies any mixed emotions at watching England's improved showing against New Zealand. But it has not gone unnoticed that, just as he built the side that Andy Flower went on to lead to such success (Flower, it should be noted, was always the first to praise Moores' contribution), he will spend the next few years seeing some of those he selected this time flourish in international cricket.

It was, after all, Moores that replaced the new-ball pair of Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard with James Anderson and Stuart Broad. He installed Graeme Swann as first-choice spinner and Matt Prior as wicketkeeper. He laid many of the foundations on which Flower built.

This time, his commitment to Jos Buttler, Moeen Ali, Gary Ballance (originally selected by Flower), Joe Root (who had been dropped by the time Moores took over) and others could have similar long-term benefits.



Moores brought new faces into the England side during both spells in charge © AFP





"I didn't go into the job to get the credit," he says. "But yes, history probably has repeated itself a bit. I'd love it if England won the Ashes. I'm an England fan.

"I've probably debuted more players than most England coaches. You hope when you introduce players that they'll carry on in the long term. I think we picked some good players who will become good England players over time. They'll go through ups and down.

"I know I left a united group of people - players and coaches - with a clear vision of where we were going and working towards it. I don't have regrets. I look back with quite a lot of pride."

It seems he was rated in his second spell as England coach, in part, by the mistakes he made in his first. Famously described as "the woodpecker" by Kevin Pietersen - an image that suggests a man forever tapping away at players and, as a result, preventing them from relaxing - Moores admits he made some mistakes the first time around.

"I don't think there was any truth in the woodpecker thing, no," he says now. "But I do think the version of me as a coach now to the version that first coached England is a better version.

"I evolved quite a lot as a coach, as a player would. It's no different. This time I knew what I was going into. You understand the real challenges for players, as you've been there before.

"I've reflected on that first time. We needed to change. And I look back and think, yes, in my enthusiasm, I pushed too hard. You should allow that to happen. I wanted them to be fitter and, yes, you can push too hard.

"So I knew when I came in this time, there had been mistakes made. I wanted to allow captains to evolve themselves and create a place where the players felt supported.

"Part of the skill of a coach is to disappear. You're in the room but it's as if you aren't. You're not making anyone nervous. Because if you need 40 to win in four overs, nobody wants a coach who is twitchy.

"Look, I've made loads of mistakes as a coach. But you make fewer as you learn. That side of my coaching, I know, I've got better."

England's performance - or lack of it - at the World Cup does not reflect well on anyone, though. While they went into the event talking an aggressive game, they played pretty timid cricket, with Moores' selections - Ian Bell as opener and Gary Ballance at No. 3 - contrasting starkly with the approach in the recent ODI series against New Zealand.

So does he accept that either the selections were flawed or he was unable to coax the best out of the players?

"In terms of selection, we got to the final of the tri-series with Ian Bell playing very well. I think he made two centuries and we made 300 against Australia. And Moeen was playing with freedom.

"We moved James Taylor down the order as we felt he was a good finisher and brought Gary in as he has a very good record in limited-overs cricket. He's a very good player. Ravi Bopara was struggling a bit and not really getting a bowl. It all felt natural at the time and we tried to stay consistent in selection.

"As to getting it out of them... great players don't always play great cricket. It didn't happen for them. Senior players didn't grab the game by the scruff of neck. But you learn from failure and the reaction of those players who went through it is encouraging.

"But yes, I felt hollow at the end of the tournament."

The one thing Moores will not ever do is blame the players. Never, in public or private, does he seek to do so. In fact, it is notable that, on or off the record, he does not criticise anyone. Not Andrew Strauss, not Kevin Pietersen (about whom he says, "he's a funny mix. There are things I admire") and not Colin Graves, who was in Barbados at the time of Moores' last Test but didn't find the time to tell his coach he was about to be sacked. His only gripe, really, is with his public image as a stats-driven, robotic coach and the interview that may have cemented that reputation.

It is notable, too, that several of the players have made their support of Moores public. Joe Root, who called him "brilliant" and praised him as knowing "how to get the best out of me", crediting Moores for his "drastic improvement", was the most vocal but also far from atypical. Whoever Strauss consulted before making his decision, it certainly was not the England Test squad. Many of them remain in touch with him. "Once your coach, always your coach," Moores says with a smile. "They know they can call me.

"Joe's words were appreciated. It was brave of him to say that at that time."

And yet, after two sackings and some treatment that can only be described as shoddy, Moores says he would still work for the ECB again. While he has not yet been approached for a role at Loughborough - an organisation that is about to have a radical overhaul - it remains highly probable that he will be. His eye for young talent, his record as a developer of that talent, and his ability to impart knowledge to other coaches, remain assets.

"Yes, I'd work for the ECB again," he says. "A role at Loughborough would be exciting. I love coaching and that would be working with the best players and coaches. Yes, it appeals.

"Professional sport can be cruel. Or maybe ruthless is a better word. You know that when you go into it. You are immersed in it."

His fault, as much as it is one, was his inability to play the media or political game. His failure to understand that style is as important as substance when it comes to selling yourself to the public. His failure to understand the dark side of the organisation that had employed him.

While a perception that he was closely aligned to an unattractive ECB regime - the regime of Downton and Giles Clarke that talked of people being "outside cricket" - no doubt hurt him, his main fault may well have been simply being a decent man in an increasingly indecent world. A man who thought that, if he worked hard, planned for the future and forged a strong relationship, it would be enough.

And that's the lasting impression of Moores. For whatever you think of his coaching - his international record is modest; his county and development record excellent - as a man, he has a dignity that is rare in professional sport.

A sense of perspective, too. After England lost to India at Lord's last summer, Moores was asked if he was at "rock bottom". His reply - "who knows what rock bottom is, but it isn't losing a cricket match" - sums him up better than anything else he said in his period at the helm. Even after his second sacking, he found a positive. "If feels as if I've got my wife and kids back," he said.

Following this interview, he went to see his son, Tom, a hard-hitting wicketkeeper-batsman, play for Nottinghamshire seconds against Warwickshire. The sacking has hurt, but he will cope. "A glass of wine helps," he says.

"I don't put this on," he says as the interview draws to a close. "I don't know if it's from my mum or what. But I am a calm person who can see the value of looking at people in their best light. It was such a slanging match last time. There were so many opinions. And so much of it was wrong. I didn't want to get involved. It's all so easy to do that. I'm not going down that route.

"I've been offered book deals, but it's not who I am. And if I did one, I would want it to be things I've learned and stories to help people get the best out of themselves and others. I have to be true to what I am. There's not a lot of mileage in negativity, you know.

"Of course it's been tough. This is the first summer for 33 years I've not been involved in the game in a professional way. But I'm a coach. It's what I do. I love England and I love cricket. The game doesn't owe me anything. It's been great fun working in it. And the hunger... it's just starting to come back."

Pro athletes cannot be bullied into better performances

Valuable notes from a book that explains the intricacies of coaching and captaincy without once mentioning either

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

November 9, 2014

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Coaches must remember that practice isn't an end in itself © Getty Images

I've just read a brilliant book about captaincy and coaching. It might be the best book ever written on leadership in sport. The author not only studied many of the greats at first hand, he also did the job himself. There is a surprise, however, and I'm not going to spoil it. So guess, by all means, but I'm not giving away his name until the end.

I've gone through the notes in my book, collecting his advice into several themes.

Mystery
"The better a captain is, the less you know why. You certainly can't get the qualities from a textbook, and they can't be faked by copying a great captain. But there is also a practical side: however much talent you're born with, there's a lot to learn. All the best captains and coaches work hard at their craft, developing their own individual ways. They all do it differently, so there can't be only one "right" way. To put all young leaders through a training course only means that a mass of mediocrity will be let loose on the world."

Instinct
Intuition rather than rationality often drives inspired decisions. "Some captains and coaches are totally instinctive and can't describe what they do. [After one game] I was so impressed that I complimented the captain on a detail. 'Oh! Did I do that?' he replied."

See the big picture
Being preoccupied with details can't be allowed to obscure what really matters. "Skilful captains and coaches can transform the way a team plays in a very short time, even though some of them wouldn't be able to tell you much about tactics or technique. Before modern video and analytics, there was far less emphasis on precision and more on capturing the overall mood of a team. Captains were listening for bigger and more important things. We've lost something in demanding total accuracy."

Show, don't tell
One great captain "could tell me what he wanted with his eyes," the author writes. "It's important to look at players as if you expect the best, not as if you fear the worst. Many inexperienced coaches seem to be "looking for trouble", a real turnoff for a team. When I look at players during a match, I'm trying to involve and communicate what I'm feeling rather than police them."

Authenticity
Waving your arms around and acting for the cameras doesn't fool anyone. The author advises captains to have the integrity to stay focused on the game situation rather than get side-tracked about the impression he's making. If the captain is "naturally flamboyant, then it's a natural expression of his feeling". But when his self-conscious gestures are just acted out, "and don't have a real relationship with the game… then it's just a circus."

Practice is not the real thing
"The most important thing about a practice session is that it's not an end in itself. Everything a coach does must aim at a good performance on match day. Take a chance and leave some things fluid. Don't cross every "t" and dot every "i". This may feel risky, but it keeps a team on its toes and gives the match day an "edge". Don't practise a team to death; I've never had much sympathy for coaches who "program" a team at practice and then just "run the programme" during the match. There is more to it than that."

Seek authority not power
"Captaincy and coaching are like riding a horse, not driving a car. A car will go off a cliff if you "tell" it to; a horse won't. A team has a life of its own, based largely on the players sensing what each other will do."

	Be true to your captaincy instincts © Getty Images  Enlarge

Some coaches have an "unfair" knack
"An assistant coach told a story about how he couldn't get the team to work together at practice sessions, despite giving crystal clear instructions. Some time later he attended a practice led by the brilliant head coach, who began with the same practice drill. The head coach gave his characteristically vague and wobbly advice, and the whole team played together perfectly. It's an unjust world."

Allow room for mavericks
However good you are, some players won't listen - and nor should they. "One of the greatest players in history said he never looked at captains in the field as he couldn't understand what any of them were doing."

****

It's a very good list. But here is a confession. The book, though real, is not about cricket. The words captaincy and coaching are not mentioned at all, not once. The book's real subject is classical music, the title is Inside Conducting and its author is conductor Christopher Seaman. In quoting from the book, each time the term "conductor" appeared, I changed it for the word "captain"/"coach".

First, I want to demonstrate that cricket is not a ghetto, a special case that cannot learn from other disciplines. The art of performance is largely universal. As I found out when I made a series for the BBC comparing the life of a cricketer with that of a classical musician, the differences are dwarfed by the similarities.

Secondly, given the evolved state of professional sport, we need to rethink the outdated assumption that the way to inspire better performances is to threaten, bully, intimidate and scream at players. It's not wrong because it is undignified (though there is that too), it's wrong because it doesn't work. As I've argued before here, instead of seeing sportsmen as a rabble of unmotivated shysters in search of a sergeant-major to whip them into shape, professional athletes have more in common with surgeons and musicians.

Above all, captaincy and coaching are collaborative. No one, no matter how brilliant, can lead without followers. So I'll leave my favourite anecdote from the book in its original form, "untranslated" into cricket-speak:

"A famous conductor was conducting a major work without the score. At one point in the concert his memory failed him, and he gave an enormous downbeat in a silent bar. Nobody played, of course, and he froze in horror. A voice at the back of the violas whispered, 'Aha! He doesn't sound so good on his own, does he?'"

Why are Asians under represented in English cricket?

by Girish Menon

A recent ECB survey found that 30 % of the grass root level cricket players were of Asian origin while it reduces dramatically to 6.2 % at the level of first class county cricketers. Why?

When this question was asked to Moeen Ali, he opined among other things, "I also feel we lose heart too quickly. A lot of people think it is easy to be a professional cricketer, but it is difficult. There is a lot of sacrifice and dedication," While some may view Ali's views as suffering from the Stockholm syndrome, in my personal opinion it resembles the 'Lazy Japanese and Thieving Germans' metaphor highlighted by the economist Ha Joon Chang. Hence, Ali's views should not be confused with what in my perspective are some of the actual reasons why there is a dearth of Asian faces in county cricket.

The Cambridge economist Ha Joon Chang has acquired a global reputation as a myth buster and is a must read for all those who wish to contradict the dogmatic neoliberal consensus. Chapter 9 of Ha Joon Chang's old classic Bad Samaritans actually discusses this metaphor in detail. He quotes Beatrice Webb in 1911 describing the Japanese as having 'objectionable notions of leisure and a quite intolerable personal independence'. She was even more scathing about the Koreans: '12 millions of dirty, degraded, sullen, lazy and religionless savages who slouch about in dirty white garments...'  The Germans were typically described by the British as a 'dull and heavy people'. 'Indolence' was a word that was frequently associated with the Germanic nature.

But now that the economies of Japan, Korea and Germany have become world leaders such denigration of their peoples has disappeared. If Moeen Ali's logic was right then Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Indians living in their own countries should also not amount to much in world cricket. But the evidence is to the contrary. So the right question to ask would be why has English cricket not tapped into the great love for cricket among its citizens from the Indian subcontinent?

If it wants the truth, English cricket should examine the issue raised by the Macpherson report on 'institutional racism in the police' and ask if this is true in county cricket as well. Immigrants, as the statistics suggest, from the subcontinent can be found in large numbers in grassroots cricket from the time they joined the British labour force. There are many immigrants only cricket leagues in the UK, e.g in Bradford, where players of good talent can be found. But, as Jass Bhamra's father mentioned in the film Bend it Like Beckham they have not been allowed access to the system. Why, Yorkshire waited till the 1990s to select an Asian player for the first time.

----Also read

Failing the Tebbit test - Difficulties in supporting the England cricket team

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Of course, if the England team is intended to be made up of players of true English stock only then we need not have this discussion. Some of the revulsion towards Kevin Pietersen among some of the establishment could be better understood using this lens. However, now due to its dwindling base if the ECB  wishes to get the support of Asian cricket lovers it will have to transform the way the game is run.

Secondly, to make it up the ranks in English cricket it is essential to have an expensive well connected coach. Junior county selections are based on this network and any unorthodox talent would be weeded out at the earliest level either because of not having a private coach or because the technique is rendered untenable as it blots the copybook. So, many children of Asian origin from weaker economic backgrounds are weeded out by this network.

This is akin to the methods adopted by parents in the shires where grammar schools exist. Hiring expensive tutors for their wards is the middle class way of crowding out genuinely academic oriented students from weaker economic backgrounds. Better off Asians are equally culpable in distorting the grammar school system and its objectives.

So what could be done. I think positive discrimination is the answer. We only need to look at South African cricket to see what results it can bring. My suggestion would be that every team should have two places reserved: one for a minority player and another for an unorthodox player. This should to some extent break up the parent-coach orthodoxy and breathe some fresh air and dynamism into English cricket.

Personally, I have advised my son that he should play cricket only for pleasure and not to aspire for serious professional cricket because of the opacity in the selection mechanism which means an uncertain economic future. He is 16, a genuine leg spinner with little coaching but with good control on flight and turn. Often he complains about conservative captains and coaches who were unwilling to gamble away a few runs in the hope of getting wickets. Many years ago, when my son was not picked by a county side, I asked the coach the reason and he said because, 'he flights the ball and is slower through the air'. With what conviction then could I have told my lad that you can make a decent living out of cricket if you persevere enough?

The high-wire act of modern coaching

 Russell Jackson in Cricinfo

Peter Moores now gets a chance to redeem himself after a short-lived first term as a national coach  © Getty Images

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Sometimes the harder you look at something, the more confusing it seems. Thirty years ago we didn't even have national cricket coaches. Now their appointments, successes, struggles and everything in between are endlessly dissected and considered every bit as newsworthy as the comings and goings of players themselves.

At times we're overly critical of them and at times we probably don't look clearly enough or with sufficient perspective when we shower them with praise. England's recent appointment of Peter Moores is interesting from a number of perspectives and probably encompasses everything that is good and bad about the way we discuss modern cricket coaching. 

Here you have a guy who is widely acknowledged as an excellent technical coach, who in his previous attempt at the top job made the mistake of spectacularly failing to manage his relationship with his captain and star player. This kind of personality clash can be inevitable in the workplace but it's poison for coaches, especially when the other guilty party is a once-in-a-generation talent. The buck always stops with the coach, so much so that it almost makes you wistful for the days before they even existed to be blamed by players, fans and media.

On the ABC's Offsiders programme earlier in the year, Gideon Haigh wondered whether Australia's football league, the A League, was "addicted to the smell of death" when it came to the frequent dismissal of managers. Haigh noted, "The attrition rate amongst coaches is very high. It's almost like it's become ritualised, the sense of, 'Who is in the hot seat?' and 'Who is in the tumbrel next?'" The media and fans feed off one and other in that regard and while football codes are still far more susceptible to this mentality than cricket, the curve is trending rather worryingly in the same direction.

It's a bleak situation to ponder, no matter how high the financial rewards offered to modern coaches or the economic factors that hinge on the sustained high performance of their teams. Though it's easy to draw certain parallels between coaches and the cult that surrounds high-powered CEOs, it's with some irony that you have to note that even the most scandal-plagued among the latter rarely receive the same amount of heat in the media as sports coaches. Failures of big business are abstract in some ways, even when they tug at our purse strings. We take sporting failures far more personally.

When speaking of his former national coach Bob Simpson, the first man to fill that position full time and a cornerstone figure in Australia's emergence from the doldrums of the mid-1980s, David Boon theorised that coaches shouldn't stay in their positions for longer than four to five years. Any longer than that and fatigue, complacency or staleness might make lethal encroachments. In modern terms Boon might actually revise that estimate down even lower, because the spiritual toll taken by the relentless demands of coaching at the highest level must be wearying.

Perhaps Andy Flower's brand of dull, robotic, computer-driven managerialism is something closer to a defence mechanism against all of the forces that come bearing down on the modern coach. In that sense, each piece of impersonal protocol and procedure actually places the coach at incrementally farther distances from outsiders, from negativity, but also, it must be acknowledged, positivity and new modes of thinking.

Of course the flip side of the coin that tells us it's the coach's fault when everything is going wrong is that when a team is a raging success, little or no credit is generally attributed to the gaffer. John Buchanan's reign as Australia coach is the best example, obviously. There's no doubt he had a mighty group of players at his disposal but there's also every chance that he, to paraphrase Steve Waugh, got the extra couple of per cent out of them that pushed them on to greatness.

To be positive, I guess there is now the sense that with Kevin Pietersen out of the frame, Moores might now achieve some of the unfinished business from his short-lived first term at the helm of England. What will inevitably nag at him, though, is that at some point he'll be sacked again. Nearly every coach is, eventually. His methods probably won't change dramatically at any point. England will have successful patches and they'll also have unsuccessful patches. In a purely mathematical sense, Moores' fate and the length of his second tenure really hinges on how India and Australia, England's most frequently encountered opponents, develop in the next couple of years.

The same goes for Darren Lehmann, who famously brought the fun back into the Australian dressing room and was one of a team of staff who coaxed the best out of Mitchell Johnson for one golden summer. Sometime in the next few years there'll probably be a slump and he'll be discarded too, just like Mickey Arthur and Tim Nielsen were before him. Hopefully he'll go with a little more dignity, sure, but he knows they'll get him at some point.

All of this really begs the question: if you're a high-level cricket coach with aspirations to maintain a lucrative and lasting career, why would you not do as Victorian assistant coach Simon Helmot recently did and step away from the first-class arena altogether to specialise in the burgeoning T20 format? Jobs are seemingly easier to come by, pay rates range on a scale between handsome and obscene (probably better than all other coaching jobs) and the time away from home is far less demanding.

Say what you like about the IPL and the BBL and the CPL, but loyalty can't be any thinner on the ground there than it is in the international coaching ranks.

You can't control talent, only channel it

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

 

Will we increasingly see players prefer private guidance over their team's coaching system?  © PA Photos

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Bubba Watson won the Masters golf tournament on Sunday, taking his second green jacket in three years. While he isn't quite in the league of Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, Watson is - as those two did before him - playing a game with which the rest of golf is unfamiliar; at least at the Augusta National. The distance he hits the ball (with a pink driver) and the extraordinary spins that he applies in order to shape his shots through the air, mean that he attacks the famous course entirely differently to everyone else. He has never had a coach, and what's more he's never had a lesson, which makes him rare among high-end golfers (and most hackers) - it is after all the sport that authored the phrase "paralysis by analysis".

Nicklaus himself was reflecting on this during a commentary stint, and he recalled his own coach, a man named Jack Grout, who would speak to him twice a year, usually in a couple of clipped sentences. "His whole philosophy," Nicklaus said, "was to enable me to correct my own mistakes on the golf course." 

One of sport's great archetypes is the aged and taciturn coach, the kind of man who will watch silently for half an hour and then impart, often via a single and devastating sentence, a thought that changes not just how you play the game, but how you see it. When John Jacobs, a golf coach who has been working for 60 years and who is possibly the most influential instructor in the sport, sat down to write his first book, he said: "I remember that the first thing I wrote down on paper was, 'Golf is what the ball does.' That was my breakthrough as a teacher. I look at what the ball's doing, and then I ask, 'Why?'"

Jacobs had distilled his philosophy down to one thought: you can learn everything you need to know about a player's swing by watching what the ball does once it has been struck. It's fantastically obvious and wonderfully true, and it applies equally well to cricket. All that matters is that moment when bat meets ball. You could discover how to coach anything by talking to John Jacobs.

He came to mind this weekend not just during the Masters, but when I read Neil Burns' angry and telling excoriation of cricket coaching in England on this site (and a somewhat terrifying first-person account from Rupert Williams, the father of a county triallist subjected to some sort of intensive PE course reinforced with nonsensical slogans and punishment press-ups).

Burns' piece should be taken as a whole, but there were some key threads. One was: The "teach yourself about yourself" philosophy still speaks loudly to all who aspire to become top performers - or as Nicklaus' coach had it all of those years ago, "being able to correct your own mistakes". Then there was a wider notion of: "More art, less science" - or as Jacobs put it, "Golf is what the ball does."

Burns likens the expansion of sports science and the growth of the "support systems" around international teams, counties and franchises to the cult of the manager in football, a valid comparison. There is one worth drawing with golf too. David Leadbetter's success with Nick Faldo, and Butch Harmon's with Woods, led indirectly to the development of a mini-industry of swing gurus, mind coaches, short-game experts and other potential saviours, an ecosystem that feeds on itself, producing endless ways to reframe old knowledge in new language.

From there it is a short step to the cycling coach Dave Brailsford's school of "marginal gains", where everything from the quality of bikes to the togs on the cyclists' duvets are micro-managed. None of these things are intrinsically wrong, but they depend on an ever-increasing complexity to survive. And then along comes a Usain Bolt or a Bubba Watson or a Virender Sehwag and the goalposts move again…

Golf, like any other sport, has its manufactured players. Faldo's partnership with Leadbetter made legends of them both, and Woods has undergone three major swing overhauls (in truth as much to lessen the damage to his body as to change his method), the most important of those with Harmon. It's easy to see a future in which superstar freelance batsmen discard the wider team coaching systems and use similar relationships - indeed, they already exist: Kevin Pietersen and Graham Ford, Alastair Cook and Graham Gooch; even Sachin Tendulkar and his brother Ajit, with whom he'd discuss each innings (and according to Sachin, sometimes each shot…).

Ultimately, sports like golf and cricket are games of skill. They are as much about art as science. Talent will out, and it cannot be controlled, only channelled. Any idiot can get fit. Not many people can bowl like Murali. That may not be an entirely appetising lesson for the coaching industry but it's one that must be absorbed, as Neil Burns points out.

Wanted: mentors, not coaches

Elite sportsmen today don't lack motivation, nor do they need to be whipped into shape. What they need from their coaches is tact, judgement and clear speaking

Ed Smith

March 30, 2014

 

	The best way for a coach to win the support of his players is to convince them that he can help them play better © Getty Images  Enlarge

Imagine you are about to make a putt to win the Masters. The gallery is packed, millions are watching on TV, there is an eerie silence as the Georgia sun sets. You stand over a nasty ten-footer, the moment of truth. And then, at the peak of concentration, you see your coach jumping up and down, beating his chest, shouting at you, "Just don't miss! Put it in the hole! Show some guts! Don't back down now! Make bloody sure you don't bottle this one! What kind of man are you?"

Now imagine you are the first violinist, about to make your debut at the Royal Opera House. Just before the first chord, with the curtain about to rise, the conductor turns to you and whispers, "If you make a mistake today, any mistake at all, I'll stab you in the eye with my baton. Now let's play Don Giovanni with freedom and expressiveness!"

And how would you treat a surgeon about to conduct a life-saving operation on your wife or child? Would you threaten, bully and intimidate the doctor? Or would you try to avoid adding further anxiety to an already fraught situation? In all these three situations it is widely accepted that no sane coach, mentor or observer would seek to add to the anxiety or effort of the protagonist. It is taken as a given that the golfer, surgeon or musician is already trying hard enough - perhaps too hard.

And yet in most sporting contexts, the default position of coaches - and pundits who judge coaches in the media - is to assume that the problem afflicting a team or an individual player is usually caused by a lack of effort. If only players cared more, tried harder, felt disappointment more deeply. That sentiment, so widespread in sport, gives rise to the knee-jerk response: give them all a good bollocking; expect there will be plenty of strong words in the dressing room after that shot; wouldn't want to be standing near the manager at half-time.

We will soon look back on that view of how to improve professional athletes as comically old-fashioned, a cul-de-sac in the evolution of elite sport. After all, epic levels of discipline and commitment are non-negotiable if you want to survive as a professional sportsman today. The era of flabby, lazy athletes coasting through their careers while focusing more intently on hard living and nightclubs is pretty much over. Today's professional athletes are generally exceptionally disciplined, committed and determined. Given the scrutiny they face and the scientific testing of their bodies, there is no alternative. As a consequence, the "edge" - as gamblers describe the tiny opportunities for strategic advantage - will not reside in bullying and shouting at players but in honing their skills and freeing up their talents.

	In most sporting contexts, the default position of coaches - and pundits who judge coaches in the media - is to assume that the problem afflicting a team or an individual player is usually caused by a lack of effort: if only players cared more, tried harder, felt disappointment more deeply

It is time to re-classify elite sport and stop seeing sportsmen as a rabble of unmotivated wastrels in search of a sergeant-major to whip them into shape. Athletes in highly skilled sports, in fact, have more in common with surgeons and violinists. They need mentors, wise advisors, trusted confidants. Consider the art of batsmanship. What kind of discipline is it? It requires touch, feel, finesse, trust, freedom, poise and balance. On a spectrum (with skill at one end and brute force at the other) batsmanship has more in common with playing a musical instrument than it does with punching someone in the face.

There is surprisingly little consensus about how to help elite performers to get better. Musicians, once they have reached the top, tend not to have full-time professional coaches. They rely instead on trusted mentors, people who might spot a tiny difference or lack of form. They refer to these mentors as their "outside ears", as top musicians admit that what they hear in their own heads can be different from the "real" music that reaches the audience. The mentor, though not in a position of authority over the artist, is able to see and hear with objective clarity. The relationship is based on trust not power.

Something similar - though it is called "coaching" - happens in many individual sports. In golf and tennis, the coach works for the athlete, not vice versa. This is not only a reflection of economic forces. When Roger Federer hired Stefan Edberg, he did not want the Swede to shout at him, "Try harder, Rog!" That would be useless, indeed counter-productive. Federer sought a new dimension to his net play, and Edberg, as the greatest volleyer of his generation, was asked to supply his unique perspective. The foundation of the relationship was knowledge and mutual respect.

In team sports, there is obviously a complication. The coach is usually the selector, collective tactician, and effectively in charge of hiring and firing. That changes the coach-player relationship. But not entirely. Over the long term, the best way for a coach to win the support of his players is to convince them that he can help them to play better. Appealing to their rational self-interest is the most reliable way of getting athletes on side.

The problem, of course, is that helping players score more runs and take more wickets is a rare and difficult skill. It requires astute observation, tact, judgement, and a talent for clear exposition and metaphor. Good coaches are able to articulate the same point in many different ways - until, finally, one phrase or description clicks for the athlete. A great coach, then, has more in common with a teacher than a conventional boss or employee. Ultimately, his contribution is expressed through the sum total of the improvements he makes to his players.

I never met a sportsman who preferred failure to success, nor one who didn't suffer pain at disappointment. Rare is the modern sportsman who is indifferent about the chance to get better. In today's ultra-professional and highly disciplined era, the starting point for all coaches should be the presumption: these people want to get better, how can I help them?