The Great UPSC Coaching Fraud

 

Highly structured coaching dehumanises cricket

Greg Chappell in Cricinfo

 
I believe that cricket coaches should have an oath not dissimilar to that laid down by Hippocrates in Of the Epidemics: "first do no harm".

At a time when the head coaching role with Australian cricket is in the spotlight, it is worth looking at the role of coaching in the game more broadly.

The developed cricket countries have lost the natural environments that were a big part of their development structure in bygone eras. In those environments, young cricketers learned from watching good players and then emulating them in pick-up matches with family and friends.

Usually any instruction that was received was rudimentary, and interference from adults generally was minimal. In these unstructured settings, players developed a natural style while learning to compete against older players, during which they learned critical coping and survival skills.

The Indian subcontinent still has many towns where coaching facilities are rare and youngsters play in streets and on vacant land without the interference of formal coaching. This is where many of their current stars have learned the game.

MS Dhoni, with whom I worked in India, is a good example of a batter who developed his talent and learned to play in this fashion. By competing against more experienced individuals on a variety of surfaces early in his development, Dhoni developed the decision-making and strategic skills that have set him apart from many of his peers. His is one of the sharpest cricket minds I have encountered.

England, on the other hand, have very few of these natural environments and their players are produced in a narrow band of public schools, with an emphasis on the coaching manual. This is why their batting has lost much of its flair and resilience.

The games that young people make up and play are dynamic and foster creativity, joy, flexibility in technical execution, tactical understanding and decision-making, which are often missing in batting at the highest levels.

Invariably, when an adult gets involved with kids playing cricket, they break up the game and kill its energy by emphasising correct technique. This reduces a dynamic, engaging environment that promotes learning to a flat and lifeless set of drills that do little to improve batting in games.

The growth in structured training in the preparation of batters has not only failed to take batting forward, it has actually resulted in a decline in batting. Highly structured environments, and an excessive focus on teaching players to perform "correct" technique, dehumanise cricket.

The environments that attempt to reduce batting to mastery of technique, and to break it up into a number of distinct components, reflect a misunderstanding of how complex batting is. Quality batting requires good imagination, creativity, and the ability to identify and respond to challenges in matches.

In response to this problem, we must change the education of coaches. From training them to be the font of all wisdom, we must instead enable them to become managers of creative learning environments in which young cricketers learn the game with minimal invasion and interference from adults.

In this approach the coaches' work involves setting up conditions for learning through engagement with the physical learning environment - which involves some degree of awareness and decision-making.

There are a couple of significant challenges to the status quo of coaching involved here. One is the shift from the idea of the coach as having all the knowledge that he hands down to the players as passive receivers, to one of the coach facilitating and guiding players in constructing their own knowledge as active learners.

I can hear those who believe batting is all about technique asking how these "free-range" cricketers will become technically adept, but I would remind them that for the first 100 years of Test cricket, that is how the very best were bred.

In his wonderful book The Art of Cricket published 64 years ago, Don Bradman wrote: "I would prefer to tell a young player what to do than how to do it." I would take this further by suggesting that good coaches should also help them learn when and why.


The author with MS Dhoni in 2006, whom he describes as "one of the sharpest cricket minds I have encountered" Dibyangshu Sarkar / AFP/Getty Images

Training must be focused on improving game play by locating learning in contexts that, to different degrees, replicate game conditions, so that improvements in practice sessions lead to improvements in matches.

This does not mean just playing cricket instead of practising. It means designing and managing modified games and activities aimed at particular outcomes that suit the skills, attitudes and motivations of the players and the preferred learning outcomes - whether for children learning to play or for batters at the highest levels.

The best coaches ask questions to get players thinking and working together to solve problems. The questions are aimed at drawing players out to come up with solutions to the problems presented to them.This does not neglect technique but, instead, develops it by having players learn and improve the execution of technique in the context of a match. This develops decision-making, flexibility of execution, awareness, and the ability to adapt to the range of challenges that batters face.

The greatest batters developed their talent over long periods of time by playing and learning in creative, informal learning environments from young ages without an excessive focus on perfecting someone else's idea of what an ideal technique should look like.

England would do well to look at their coaching methods and how the best batters develop their skills as part of any review that they initiate on the back of another resounding defeat in Australia. The England batting was bereft of class, short on imagination, and lacked resilience throughout this tour. If I was in charge of English cricket, I know what I would do first - but I won't be giving that information away for free!

If they don't do something drastic, they will be accused of behaving as in the aphorism that has often been misattributed to Albert Einstein: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Cricket Coaching: Follow in the bare footsteps of the Kalenjin

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cricketing technique is a myth

David Hinchliffe in Cricinfo

  

Trying to hit a ball through the covers is totally different from being taught the proper way to cover-drive. One makes robots, the other makes runs © Getty Images

Technique is a myth.

For every technical perfectionist, there are many more who defy the copybook. Even Bradman, with his unusual backlift, was no stranger to the unorthodox. Yet you could argue that he is the greatest sportsman of all time; certainly the greatest batsman in the stats book. Bradman is far from alone. If I were to ask you to name the technical masters you could give me a list of grand heroes: Dravid, Boycott, Gavaskar and so on. Yet if I asked you to name some greats regardless of technique your list would likely be much longer.

You might argue that within this elite group, there are similarities. All great batsmen watch the ball with a still head. All great bowlers have exceptional balance. The variations are fine, but the core is essentially the same. There's a fair chance you were told these by a coach or heard it from a TV commentator with first-class experience. Reliable sources everyone, so why would you think otherwise?

Except, the more we look into technical elements scientifically, the more we see that even the core of skill has variation between individuals. Some people are moving at the point of delivery. Some people are not watching the ball closely. Some bowlers generate pace with horrible actions. These are tested and proven facts.

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It makes sense when you think about it. Cricket is played by the imperfect mess that is a human being. Each one is genetically unique from height to physical strength to preferred hand and eye (yes, we all have a stronger eye). We all move differently and think differently. From that primal soup of genes, we are thrown into a culture that influences us further. To expect a boy growing up on the streets of Mumbai with a tennis ball to have the same method as a girl from Surrey with hours of formal coaching at a club is ridiculous. And, isn't that the joy of cricket anyway: It can accommodate every type of person from anywhere in the world? Not many sports can offer the same inclusiveness, even at the highest level.

I'm a coach for my day job and I was brought up on "proper technique". You play straight. You bowl side on. You iron out flaws in players who are doing it incorrectly. As the years passed I began to soften to what was correct. I started to realise that there is scope for variety, scope for what works for an individual. Then one day I realised that there was nothing left in the correct column any more. Everything was open to negotiation. Coaching was no longer about correcting technique, and all about helping the player find his or her best technique. Sometimes - most of the time - that means shutting up and letting the players work it out for themselves. That takes a heck of a lot of confidence because on the outside you look like someone who knows nothing and has nothing to say. In fact, you know that a player will understand himself far more that you will ever understand him. It's your job to help accelerate that process. That's why mystery spinners appear most often from cultures where there is little formal coaching. Players have to work it out for themselves and are never told they are doing it wrong. The ones who do that best end up playing Test cricket, often out of nowhere.

There is still a role for the coach at every level. Learning happens faster with someone to guide you. It's just that the modern coach has a different approach. Players are given challenges to complete and asked to work out the answer for themselves. For example, trying to hit a ball through a gap in the covers is totally different from being taught the proper way to cover drive. One makes robots, the other makes runs.

A world with flexible technique is a fun world to watch as well as coach. Bowlers and batsmen who are different are much more watchable. Imagine a team of technical grinding batsmen and right arm medium-fast bowlers. Now throw in someone like a Pietersen, who has a crazy uncoachable technique and approach to batting. Add a Narine with the ball and equally individual method. Now we are having a good time. For this reason I'm glad the idea of technical perfection is dying. Cricket is all the better for variety at every level. So, the next time your team's coach - or your son's coach - is quiet instead of prescriptive, or doesn't just run a net and bark instructions, give him a nod of silent recognition that you understand.

Poor basics have brought down the standard of cricket

Test teams are more competitive these days, but it's probably because the fundamentals of backing up, running between the wickets and catching are being ignored

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo

August 10, 2014

 

Are pre-game routines designed to build on cricket's fundamental skills? © Getty Images

The wildly fluctuating series between India and England reflects Test cricket in the last decade. Where there was once domination by West Indies and then Australia, we now have parity, at least among the top five or six teams. Certainly there's a tendency towards home advantage, but as we've seen with India and England, there's very little standing between the top teams.

Is parity better for the game than dominance?

There's no doubt cricket is a more interesting spectacle when there's a genuine tussle, as witnessed in the contrasting Tests played at Trent Bridge and Lord's. Give bowlers some encouragement and the contest can be compulsive viewing.

Unfortunately, parity has come about because the standard of the better sides has slipped a little rather than it being a case of the lesser teams raising the bar. Still, it's preferable having a logjam at the top of the table rather than one standout team followed in the distance by a bunch of also-rans.

Why has parity only been achieved through a dip in standards?

We are constantly told that batsmen are more dominant these days and that fielding standards are better than ever, but the information doesn't match reality. Batting survival techniques have deteriorated. It's power-hitting that has dramatically improved. And while some amazing catches and saves are enacted near the boundary, in the crucial area of the close cordon, chances are too often spilt because simple but critical footwork is lacking. The pursuit of the spectacular has outstripped the desire to master basics.

Much of the pre-game routines are fairy-floss rather than the meat and potatoes that help win cricket matches. One of my main concerns when the idea of international coaches was first mooted was that decisions would be taken to justify a large contract rather than be in the best interests of the player. It seems that many coaches want to leave a monument behind, and consequently there are numerous theories in existence replacing good old-fashioned tried and tested techniques.

It's interesting to reflect on the thoughts of two great practitioners of their art, Australia's Bill O'Reilly and West Indies' Sir Garfield Sobers. O'Reilly once advised a young cricketing hopeful: "If you see a coach coming, son, run a mile." Sobers was even less subtle. When some ill-informed official had the temerity to suggest he didn't have the required qualifications to coach, Garry exploded: "What do you think I got my f#@%&*! knighthood for, singing?"

Sobers deplored the fact that "great cricketers are treated as freaks; admired for their feats but ignored for the way in which they achieved them".

The basics of backing up, running between wickets, catching in the slips, and some to do with ground fielding, are being ignored. There's a tendency to salivate over the latest fashionable theory but gag on tried and tested techniques.

Two classic examples are slip catching and running between wickets. Many chances go down in the cordon because of the failure to initiate the slight turn of the foot that balances a fielder before attempting a catch away from the body. The tendency is to attempt a spectacular catch by simply falling sideways - at the risk of spilling the chance.

Why do batsmen turn blind, not watch the ball leave the bowler's hand when backing up, and insist on running down the on side of the pitch after playing a stroke when that greatly increases the chance of a collision with a partner?

These are violations of simple basics that have brought good results. They should be learnt before a budding cricketer reaches teenage years, and be ingrained in him by the time he reaches voting age.

While many coaches seek fame, players tend to concentrate on methods most likely to earn their fortune. While the former is lamentable, the latter approach is understandable.

No other sport has three vastly different forms of competition, and this complicates the issue of technique, especially in batting. However, Kumar Sangakkara is a classic example of how you don't have to sacrifice the basics in order to succeed in all three forms.

The aim should be to achieve parity by raising the overall standard.

Cricket - Let's hear it for the unorthodox spinner

V Ramnarayan in Cricinfo

Sonny Ramadhin troubled England with his variations in 1950 but lost his edge on the next tour, and later confessed to having chucked during his career  © PA Photos

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Back in the 1960s, my college team had a "legspinner" - for want of a better description - PS Ramesh, who bowled legbreaks, offbreaks and straight ones, all with identical actions and no obvious change of grip. We played all our cricket on matting, and while Ramesh bamboozled most batsmen at that level, we did not find out how he would have fared on turf, as the selectors never fancied him beyond college cricket. These days he would probably have been taken much more seriously, and have played representative cricket, for his armoury certainly included the carrom ball, if not the doosra.

More than a decade earlier, West Indian crowds had first chanted the calypso about "those little pals of mine", Ramadhin and Valentine when the spin twins decimated England at Lord's to earn West Indies their first Test win in England. Bespectacled, nerdy-looking Alf Valentine was an orthodox left-arm spinner, but short and squat Sonny Ramadhin had a whole box of tricks that batsmen found hard to unravel. Bowling in long sleeves, he made the ball go this way or that at will, giving no hint of the deviation with his action. 

Ramadhin's spirit was broken seven years later, when Peter May (285 not out) and Colin Cowdrey (154) put on 411 for the fourth wicket in the second innings of the first Test at Edgbaston. While May counterattacked, Cowdrey showed he was a master of pad-play in an ultra-defensive display of attrition. Ramadhin never recovered.

Cowdrey's padathon probably played a role in the introduction of the new lbw rule that enabled the umpire to rule a batsman out to balls pitching outside the off stump if he offered no stroke and the umpire believed the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps. In 1999, Ramadhin sensationally confessed in the wake of widespread arguments over the legality of the doosra that he threw the odd ball in his time.

Were he playing today, Cowdrey could not have got away with the generous forward thrust of his leg in front of his bat to demolish the Ajantha Mendises and Sunil Narines of world cricket, considering umpires are ever so willing to give lbw decisions, unlike their 20th-century counterparts, many of whom had their hands firmly in their pockets except when the batsman was palpably in front - while playing fully back!

Perhaps the first freak spinner in Test cricket history was Australia's Jack Iverson, who gripped the ball between thumb and middle finger and bowled a bewildering array of offspin, legspin and googlies. The mystery of his bowling was, however, short-lived. He barely lasted five Tests.

I had the pleasure of watching a mystery spinner at close quarters. My Hyderabad team-mate, the left-arm spinner Mumtaz Hussain bowled Osmania University to a Rohinton Baria Trophy triumph in 1966-67. No batsman at that level had an answer to his wiles, as he sent down orthodox left-arm spin, the chinaman and the googly with no perceptible difference in the action. His prize scalp of the tournament was Sunil Gavaskar, who says in his autobiographical book Sunny Days:

"Their (Osmania's) left-arm spinner Mumtaz Hussain, the hero of the tournament, proved deadly with his disguised chinaman and regular orthodox spin. In the second innings, Ramesh Nagdev and I were going strong after Naik's cheap dismissal. But Nagdev was not able to fathom Mumtaz Hussain's spin when he bowled the chinaman. I thought I knew, so in a purely psychological move I called out loud to Nagdev at the non-striker's end: 'Don't worry, Ramesh, I know when he bowls that one.' When Mumtaz heard this, he smiled mysteriously and tossed the ball up to me for the next few deliveries. I came down the wicket, but managed to hit only one four while the others went straight to the fielder. Mumtaz tossed up the last ball of the over slightly outside the off-stump. Too late I realized that he had bowled a googly and was stranded down the track, to be easily stumped."

Mumtaz was tragically converted to an orthodox spinner in first-class cricket, and though he had a very respectable career, he was never again the wonder bowler of his youth - at least not until he unfurled his magical wares again in his last two Ranji Trophy matches. Legspinner BS Chandrasekhar was luckier. In a land notorious for coaches who would try to fit every spinner into a single mould, it was a miracle that allowed him to continue to deliver lightning-quick missiles all his life, with no concession to orthodoxy.

A story similar to Gavaskar's, but probably apocryphal, involves Geoffrey Boycott and legspinner John Gleeson, who posed quite a few problems for English batsmen during the 1970-71 series in Australia. When one of his batting partners told him he was now able to distinguish Gleeson's googly from his legbreak, Sir Geoffrey allegedly whispered to him, "Don't tell anyone. I could always read him."

V Ramnarayan is an author, translator and teacher. He bowled offspin for Hyderabad and South Zone in the 1970s

Kevin Pietersen: The England dressing room during the Ashes series was no fun - I'm glad to be out

By Kevin Pietersen

in The Telegraph 10:59PM BST 08 Jun 2014

I will have no anger, no negative thoughts whatsoever when England walk out without me at Lord’s on Thursday to play their first Test since the winter. I wish my friends in the England team well. I have moved on from the England and Wales Cricket Board’s decision to end my international career and have put things in perspective.

Fourteen years ago, I was an off-spinner from Pietermaritzburg who did not know where his life was going. I had a notion that I wanted to make a life in England but had no idea if I would succeed.

Now I have played 104 Tests, batted at all the best grounds in the world and been lucky enough to score hundreds everywhere. Could I play more Test cricket? Yes of course, but should I sit here thinking I should be playing on Thursday? No, because that is when jealousy and negative thoughts come into your head.

I am grateful for what I have had and moved on with my life. I have scored 13,500 international runs for England and it would be greedy to want more, so I am at peace with everything.

It took only a couple of conversations with my family to start thinking this way because of how much I really did not enjoy the winter. 

In fact, it has been a relief to be out of the dressing room because it was not a pleasant place in Australia. We were losing and in my opinion the environment was poor and I was not alone in thinking that. It is a view shared by a number of the players who have spoken their minds since coming back from the tour.

Now I have had time to reflect on the winter it is clear to me that back-to-back Ashes should never happen again. It was really hard for the England team to go to Australia and defend the Ashes just weeks after winning at home.

As soon as we arrived the Australian media turned the heat up on us. I have had that for years so it did not bother me. It was fun. But for other players you could sense it was a problem. The senior players were tired and it soon became a really long grind against an Australian side that had their backs up in their own country.

Australia knew they came close to winning here. The 3-0 defeat last summer was not a true reflection of that series in terms of the way they played their cricket and we played ours, so I knew it was going to be a tight return contest and we were not equipped to handle it.

Mitchell Johnson was sensational on those pitches and he was handled brilliantly by Michael Clarke. Even if he picked up a wicket in his third or fourth over of a spell, Clarke would take him off and save him for later in the day. It was brilliant captaincy. Johnson’s bowling was the best and most aggressive I have seen during my career, and I told him so at the end of the Test series when we shared a beer.

By then I thought that Andy Flower wanted me out. After the Sydney Test, a headline came out claiming Flower had said to the ECB it was either “him or me”. He denied saying that but the damage was done.

But my relationship with the other players was fine. We had an incredible tour on and off the field. I was helping all the bowlers out with their batting, and the night we lost 5-0 we were all having a drink in the bar together with our wives and girlfriends, which proves all was OK between us and still is.

I have no issue with the players, as many have said in interviews since the tour ended. I speak to Stuart Broad and I even organised for Graeme Swann to go on holiday to one of my friend’s hotels after he retired.

On a personal note, I did not score the runs I would have liked in Australia but I have played a certain way throughout my career and will continue to do so. There is method to my batting but I play on instinct as well and I would absolutely play that way again if we could go back in time.

In the first innings at Brisbane, I was caught at midwicket. As soon as the ball left Ryan Harris’s hand I thought ‘four’. I saw the angle and thought ‘bang it through midwicket’, but I got caught out. In the second innings, all I tried to do was help a short ball from Johnson to fine leg because it was too tight to pull, but I was caught again.

In Adelaide, I walked out to the crease and felt like I did not know which side of the bat I was holding. I felt that terrible and that is why I was walking at Peter Siddle and playing him on the full.

As soon as I was dismissed I walked out of the dressing room to the nets with Richard Halsall, the assistant coach, and spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to bat again. I felt that bad, the worst I have ever experienced in an Ashes series.

Why? I do not fully know. But my knee was hassling me a bit. I had an injection a few weeks before and during that innings it was hurting. In the dressing room everyone takes the mickey out of how I bend my knee during my stance because of how exaggerated the movement can be. But in Adelaide, because of the knee pain, I was standing a lot taller in the crease and that changed my game. I said to Halsall and spin coach Mushtaq Ahmed: “I can’t bat like that again.” I had to work hard to get myself back to playing normally again. In the second innings I made 53 and played very responsibly.

My dismissal in the second innings at Perth has received a lot of attention. I was caught at long on trying to hit Nathan Lyon for a second six. But if I see that ball again, I will still try to hit it for six. No problem. As he tossed it up I thought ‘six more there’. If you look at my career, that is how I play. People say it is irresponsible but it was not; it was successful.

Look at the innings that started it all off – the 158 against Australia in the 2005 Ashes at the Oval. I was hooking Brett Lee at 95mph into the stands. Any one of those shots could have gone straight up in the air and been caught. The 186 in Mumbai in 2012 is talked about as the best innings by a foreigner in India. I took risks during that hundred. I am England’s leading run scorer in all forms of cricket because of playing that way.

People say I should have ground it out. Should I? What would have been different?

What I have done during my career is ignore the ridiculous praise and the ridiculous criticism. I have stayed even and been mentally strong enough to keep believing in my methods and what I think is the best way for me to be successful.

It would have been easy for me to start defending a bit more. Would that have made me a better player? No. I am a risk-taker in cricket, in business and all parts of my life.

Coaching needs to focus more on natural talent

I have kept busy since my England career ended. I loved the Indian Premier League, even though results were disappointing for Delhi and now I am focused on Surrey and my business life.

I am extremely excited about establishing my cricket academy and foundation, which will launch in October in Dubai.

In total we have identified seven countries, including England, where we want to establish academies. The first is being built at the moment on a great plot in Dubai which will include a cricket field, pavilion and classrooms with the plan to coach kids between the ages of eight and 18.

My foundation will fund 13 disadvantaged kids and two chaperones from seven countries to come to my facility to be trained there for two weeks, guided by our coaching, taught the fitness and mental side of the game but to also have fun too. Then two years later I will pay for all the kids from the seven countries to come back and play a mini World Cup in Dubai against each other.

At the moment we are setting down how I want the kids to be coached and making sure we get that set up right.

My guiding principles are that I want to coach kids the way they play and not from a textbook. You want kids to grow up believing in their own natural talent and strengths.

I do not have a good technique at all. Sometimes I watch myself on television and I am embarrassed about my technique. I do not know how I score runs other than through self-confidence and belief in my ability.

Look at Lasith Malinga. How the hell does he get wickets bowling like that?

But his technique works for him. If he was a young England player he would probably have drifted out of the game. I have seen how coaching is now especially for kids. Ball on a cone, high elbow and hit through the ball.

In my opinion that is not the only way to coach and its holding back some natural talent. The game has changed and coaching has to change too.

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.

Arthur Morris on batting

Extracted from an interview by Steve Cannane in Cricinfo 

You used to hit over the top a bit and Bradman didn't like that, did he? Did he ever tell you to stop hitting the ball in the air?
No, never. In fact he said to me one day - and this is why I get cranky about coaches - "I don't know how you do it, but keep doing it." It means I played so differently from the way he played. In our day you had players of different physiques and they played differently. There were no coaches to tell them to perhaps end up looking like a lot of sausages coming out of a machine, all doing the same thing.

I believe in coaches teaching the fundamentals to youngsters. But cricket doesn't have a place for coaches. You have to have them in football for positions, playing. In cricket, there's no case when a bloke is bowling 100mph and drops one short for a coach to say, "Don't hook that. There's a bloke out on the field." Your little computer in your head tells you what to do. If you see kids with a lot of ability, don't coach them. Let them develop their own cricket, because they will learn to bat by watching better players play. Bradman, McCabe, Trumper had no coaches. It started when the big money came in. Then you started having coaches for everything.

Didn't you and senior players like Lindwall play a kind of coaching role to younger ones coming in, like Richie Benaud?
Very little. If they asked a question, then that's all. When you get into bad habits you can ask another player, what am I doing wrong here? But you don't need a coach to tell you that you must put your foot there or do that. I think Ian Chappell was right when he said he used coaches to get to the ground.

I would never get involved in coaching or go tell a player that this is what I think you should do. Sometimes I could say, please use your back leg a bit more, or use your feet a bit more instead of getting defensive, use your back foot to get into defence, or don't put your front foot down, because once you put your weight on the front foot, you're stuck there. Feet are the most important thing in batsmanship. It goes for everything - football, boxing. If your feet are in the right spot, you're a good player.

Do you think many modern batsmen tend to lunge on the front foot too early?
I think so. I've been seeing it, particularly in opening batsmanship. It is a very good defensive but it doesn't win games. McCabe never played forward in his life and he was the fastest batsman I saw. People tend to say, "Oh, he's on the back foot", but I found most of the players on the back foot are very fast scorers.

The Haal Of Pakistan

• 11Mar 2013
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Osman Samiuddin looks for cultural answers to why Pakistan can turn it on like no other team in world cricket, in an article from new Wisden Cricket Quarterly, The Nightwatchman. 

One November night in Sharjah, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene came together to do what they had been doing for what now seems like forever. It was a warm, oily evening, the air heavy and lubricated. The pair had joined forces at 53 for 3, chasing 201 for the win. The pitch was a grubby orangey-brown, where batsmen were regularly through their strokes too early. Pakistan were 2-1 up in the series and playing in a recrudescent stadium, but this was still pretty routine firefighting for the Sri Lankan pair.  

Neither batsman was comfortable to begin with because you couldn’t really be on that surface. But once they got past the first 20 minutes, the familiarity of the task took over. Boundaries were bonuses – only three came in 17 overs from the 18th onwards – so, like good traffic cops, they simply kept the flow moving along. Single here, double there, single here, double there, nice and steady. By the 38th over, they had put on 102 and were looking as settled as two old buddies watching the game on an old, much-shared couch.

Sri Lanka now needed just 46 with 74 balls still to come (the required run-rate wasn’t high, but the nature of the pitch made it a little steeper). The crowd, largely Pathan, were still pretty cheery but attention from the match had slipped, and was focused on the occasion itself; Pakistan were, after all, returning after many years to a venue where they had created love and magic and darkness.

We were sitting in the press box which, in the revamped stadium, was at Sangakkara’s long-on when, from around the wicket, Shahid Afridi skipped in to bowl his sixth over. He’d had an eventful game and an even more eventful but inactive six months preceding the series. In that time, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) had stripped him of the limited-overs captaincy after he made public a dispute with Waqar Younis, the coach at the time with whom his relationship had always been the wrong side of edgy.

It went the way all big feuds in Pakistan cricket do. It became legal after the PCB, in a fit of pique, stopped Afridi from playing for Hampshire. Then it became political, Afridi pooling the many cards permanently at his disposal – Pathan by birth, a lifelong Karachiite, the land’s most popular cricketer, a true celebrity and among their best limited-overs bowlers in recent years – and bringing them to bear down on the board. The interior minister got involved, as did the President (rumoured only, and in the kind of detached way he is said to be ultimately involved in everything, at the level of invisible ombudsman).

Compromises were reached, petitions and objections withdrawn. Afridi, who had “conditionally” retired in protest, eventually withdrew his retirement but only after Ijaz Butt had been replaced by Zaka Ashraf as board chairman. Now in his fourth game back, he’d first steadied Pakistan with the bat: his 75 from 65 balls, plump with loudly cheered singles and doubles, meant Pakistan survived being 97 for 6. The innings was slow by Afridi’s standards but his best and most mature in some time.

Now he came in, shining with sweat, and angled one in. First he beat Sangakkara on length, the batsman pressing then pushing forward but realising he wasn’t forward enough. Then his leg-break spun, which doesn’t always happen, zipped through Sangakkara’s attempted drive and bowled him. Chewing gum, Afridi turned around and produced his trademark, star-man celebration. It was muted though, chest not as far out, legs only slightly apart. There was less gusto, more the resignation of a man who’d done a hundred takes of it already and this, really, was just one too many. Apart from the wicket-keeper Sarfraz Ahmed, happy just to be in the side, none of the players who gathered around Afridi looked overly chuffed.

In the press box I turned to Shahid Hashmi, the AFP sports stringer for Pakistan, and we both silently acknowledged a possibility. We did it knowingly, but without knowing precisely what we were being knowing about. As most agency guys would have done, he’d already prepared much of his copy, reporting a comfortable Sri Lanka win. Only the details needed to be put in. Now we looked at each other and he decided, just to be safe (which, as a rule for agency writing, is top five), to start writing an alternative version, describing a Pakistan win.

On air in the commentary box was Waqar Younis and he left behind a thought that, like a trail of cigarette smoke, hung around deliciously. “Has this come too late or is there a twist in the tale?” A few days later we were discussing the game and that moment in particular. “I was doing commentary and I said it very clearly on air, what I am saying to you right now, I can sense something here, we just need one wicket,” Waqar said. “When Sanga got out, I said OK. Roshan [Abeysinghe] was with me and he said, no it’s over. They showed some girls praying, he said those prayers aren’t going to work. I said hold on, I can sense something here. Just  one more wicket here and you watch this game, seriously, you watch this game.”

Indeed the game demanded watching. The night gave in to Afridi and Pakistan. He had been limping until then, the result of a nasty knee injury picked up while fielding that had forced him off the field and put in doubt his further participation. But now he took four more wickets. Sri Lanka lost seven for 19 including Sangakkara’s wicket in around seven overs to lose a game they had won in everything but the actual winning, by 26 runs. Hashmi sent in his copy, complete with alternative opening and end, on the dot of the last ball.

A week or so after the game, I met Younis Khan for an interview and asked him about the turnaround. “See, this is the tradition of Sharjah. Janaab-e-Aala [Gentlemen], 25 runs are needed and [Abdul] Razzaq and Azhar Mahmood come and take four wickets, three wickets, or Wasim Akram comes on and puts in a spell… this is a tradition we keep alive.”

I don’t know how or why it was that I, like Hashmi and Waqar, sensed the continuation of this tradition at that precise moment. There was no sound reason for it. Even after that wicket, Sri Lanka could and should have coasted it. But millions of others had it as well, probably, a fleeting feeling when Sangakkara went that Pakistan were about to turn it on, a feeling as real as a smell you smell, a sound you hear, a taste you taste and a dance you dance.

***

What we know about what happens, roughly, is this. Pakistan are in the field (almost exclusively so), drifting, amiably and contentedly, to defeat over five days, or one. They are comatose flat. Bowlers, uninspired, are on autopilot, the fielders heavy and ponderous. If there is a target, it’s down to, say, 45 off the last 10 with seven wickets in hand. If it’s a Test, the target being chased is a small one, under 200, or if it is the first innings, the opposition are 200 for 2. Coasting.

Sometimes, but not always, it takes an unusual dismissal to turn on the light – a run-out, an electric catch, a part-timer taking a wicket. And then there is total frenzy, so overwhelming and real you can almost hold it in your hands. Such is its force that it can be deeply moving even through the sensory dilution and sanitisation of TV, even on ball-by-ball commentary online. But to let it get right inside your head and start rearranging your brain – like acid but a lighter, less paranoid burn – you have to be there as it happens.

There is music, not heard but felt, a beat somewhere in the background, rising, unrelenting. Up front is the dissonance of a reality that is proceeding swiftly but with an impact that is unveiled languorously. Wickets begin to fall in heaps, twice, thrice in an over and each one seems the only logical conclusion to that particular spell of play. There is an appeal almost every ball, most justifiable. Fielders start hitting the stumps and taking catches which, in other situations, we can easily imagine them dropping.

If you’re a Pakistani, to watch this phase is to be removed into the elemental tape-ball game you might’ve played at the weekend in some street somewhere which only has a field on the leg-side. It is a devolved version of cricket; amateur, random, frantic. There is no ICC code, no strategy, no rules, no coaches, no support staff, no coaching manuals, no formality.

Pakistan begin to inflict their own chaos on the opposition, except that where they are using it as a force for good, the opposition is crumbling under the weight of it. If one moment accurately captures this frenzy – not the skill or beauty of it, but just the two-sided chaos – it is the run-out of Jonty Rhodes in an ODI Pakistan played in Durban in February 1993.

Pakistan had limped to 208 in their innings and South Africa were cruising, first at 101 for no loss, then with 10 overs to go, when they needed just 50 with nine wickets in hand. Asif Mujtaba, of all bowlers, began the collapse and by the time Rhodes fell – the sixth wicket – the show was in full, uncensored flow. Brian McMillan plays and misses at a Wasim Akram delivery. Spooked by the collapse, Rhodes tries to sneak a single. The wicket-keeper Rashid Latif, alert to this now, hits the stumps with an underarm throw. McMillan is safe but Rhodes has just arrived at the same end and, defeated, runs on, his fate decided.

Akram has run halfway down the pitch and appeals to nobody in particular as the stumps are broken, maybe just celebrating a direct hit. Realising that it isn’t a run-out but instead an opportunity for one at the other end, he starts running back. Mujtaba comes jogging in from point, still aware, picks up the ball and lobs it gently and high to the non-striker’s end. There, along with the retreating Akram, are now assembled Mushtaq Ahmed, Salim Malik and Inzamam-ul-Haq. They look like people who congregate around a road accident in the subcontinent within a second of it happening with nothing to offer but curiosity: haanji [yes, so] what’s happening?

Mujtaba’s lob is a little high for Akram, who has to leap to get it as he’s backpedalling, his momentum carrying him past the stumps as he grabs the ball. Momentarily, as he turns and finds no stumps in front of him, there is panic. Meanwhile, Malik also tries to catch the ball behind Akram – just to make sure? – and as he moves back he hits the stumps, nearly falling over, and knocks the bails off. More panic. Luckily little Mushy is at hand logging everything that is going on (Inzamam, as always, is inert) and he deliriously points Akram to the stumps: “Behind you, behind you!” as if Akram may not recognise the three stumps he’s been bowling at for the better part of his life.

Akram plucks out a stump and gleefully taps it with the ball, relief, elation, adrenaline all coiling into one another. Rhodes is halfway back to the hotel by this point, unaware of the mess he has left behind. It’s YouTube gold (type in “Waqar Younis 5 for 25 vs South Africa 1992–93”). Put it in black and white and it’s a Three Stooges out-take (and check out the contrast with the pristine, natural athleticism of the next run-out, again Akram; the story of Pakistan cricket in two run-outs).

Waqar calls these moments a tamasha, a spectacle, but also a cross between a rolling circus and a fair. “I don’t think you need anyone at that time to calm you down because if somebody calms you down, you just break the rhythm. The other day, when Afridi and Saeed Ajmal was happening, thak-thak-thak it was going, you don’t need anyone to come and say ‘no, no, we need to do it like this or that’. Misbah was just sitting waiting, letting it run: ‘Tamasha lag gaya he, chal ne do isse [let the tamasha run]’.

“And it is a tamasha. I swear to God, we used to say it, we used to talk about it like this. Chal para kaam, chaloji, pakro [‘It’s begun, come, grab on to it’], that kind of language in the middle.”

To the spectator, the entire passage can be supremely disorienting, the head buzzing like a mobile phone on silent. You’re trying to understand what’s happening in front of you – how it’s happening, when it started happening, how it will finish, will it ever finish, do you even have time to enjoy it – and before you know it, it’s over and you’re sitting there stunned, like the first reaction to death and not knowing how to react and you’re alive and flushing and you’re a fool because it’s happened already and it’s over… and what the fuck just happened?

WTF just happened is that Pakistan did a Pakistan, a tamasha that is so unique and delirious and Pakistani, that it says something specifically about them.

***

Pakistan doing a Pakistan represents the occasional triumph of raw over manufactured, of organic over processed, of individual craftsmanship over mass production. That is to appreciate it. To understand it? That is important because we’re talking here about moments or days during which life doesn’t work as we know it should.

There are rational ways to look at this, no less compelling for their reasonableness. And each incident has its own specific context. After the Abu Dhabi Test win over England in 2012, when Pakistan bowled them out for 72 (defending 145), Misbah-ul-Haq rationalised how they had done it (he seemed also to be consoling England): fourth-innings targets, you know, always tricky no matter how small; five days’ worth of pressure aggregating itself in one chase; struggled against spin, and so on.

In the ’90s these passages of play came to personify the Pakistan side so much, in England, Sri Lanka, in the West Indies, in Sharjah, in New Zealand (especially and always New Zealand), they became so abundant that it looked like it was happening to formula. It was the unplanned plan: wait for the ball to become old (or make it so), get it reversing, hand it to either Wasim or Waqar or maybe one of the new kids who’s just come in but was born with balls of steel and knows just what to do with the ball. And then watch the tamasha.

Alongside Wasim, Waqar remains the most vivid ringmaster of the tamasha and as he’d also just had a productive stint as the side’s coach, I asked him to make sense of it. “I tell you what, you know why this happens?” Waqar begins. “Because we’ve always had match-winners, individual match-winners. Not the team. Our team used to be titther-bitther [literally meaning scattered, but in this sense disunited and disparate] in the early days but there were guys like Wasim, myself, Inzi, Saeed Anwar, you know, one-man-show kind of players. We used to have so many that we would never lose hope.

“Even the game you are talking about, the Total Trophy, 40 runs with seven or eight wickets left… I still remember. I remember very few things from the ground, some big wickets of course, but there are certain things you do remember. I ran when Kirsten got out to Mujtaba, I ran to the guys and said, look, they need 40 runs, we need seven wickets, but we can see a window, there is a window. I said, it’s one wicket, the ball was swinging, new batsmen, no chance.”

Pakistan’s traditionally rich variety of unorthodox bowlers also means they pounce on new batsmen like no other side in the world. But in that situation, before it happens, why are they so flat?

“No, no, it’s not flat. It’s a waiting game. Sometimes in any game when the momentum goes to the other side, the fielding side becomes a bit flat. But we knew, back of our minds, every guy, Wasim, me, Inzi, Moin, even he could see and sense those small things, that there is an opportunity. Suddenly, jaan aajati he [you become alive]. When you have match-winners, when your bowler senses something, then your fielders pick up on it, they go along with them, you can see, you can see it in the eyes.”

You could tell that day in Durban?

“Not just in that match, but in that series, where Wasim also got five wickets in East London and they needed 30-odd runs in a similar situation, and thak-thak-thak, gone. You can sense those things. That was us.”

But how have Pakistan been so good at doing this?

“We’ve never given importance to coaching. We were never analytical or scientific. That guy is there [he points to the video analysis man on the dressing-room balcony], yah sure he’s there. And he’s sitting there, and it’s kind of a highlights package and you can sit and analyse moments. But actually in the ’90s we never did analyse anyone: ‘he plays well here, don’t put it there.’ It’s not how long do you bowl at him there, what kind of field, what lengths, what is the B plan, the C plan, after that if it goes wrong, what happens? We had one plan. Go out there, get a wicket. We had resources. We sensed it and said, OK, bring Waqar back. Not even the captain [decided]. Sometimes I would go to the captain, give me two overs, let me do it. It was a kind of teamwork within the team but not like we’ll have a plan from before.

“No other country does it. Match-winners are always handy. Shoaib Akhtar? Match-winner. He’ll be ugly throughout the game, but with one or two overs he’ll change it, one spell. That’s why you play those characters. You can’t put the game in a shell where you have to be calculating, or planned or on this laptop, seeing how often this guy has gotten that guy out. Don’t do that.”

And then, quite unprompted, he inadvertently revealed just how powerful a thing it is to be part of (or, unsaid, to watch). He spoke of it like someone who’s gone cold turkey.

“It’s that thrill I miss, you know. If you ask me what I miss about cricket, I don’t want to go out and bowl again because I’m dead, tired. But I miss that part, the thrill… in that [South Africa] match, we were so hyped up, so much adrenaline was pumping. When we got back to the hotel, my eyes were swollen. I had to go to a doctor, there was so much there. That I miss, that rush of blood.”

But the easiest mistake to make would be to assume that this is only about the pressure of fourth-innings totals, or the ability to reverse, or even that this is a recent manifestation. Take Sarfraz Nawaz’s spell of 7 for 1 in 33 balls in Melbourne in March 1979 (just repeat that slowly to yourself, roll it around your head slowly like some fine wine to fully appreciate the flavour: yup, it’s that crazy a spell). Not only is it commonly thought to be one of the first sightings of reverse swing as we now know and love it, but it’s also one of the most startling instances of Pakistan doing a Pakistan: Australia were coasting at 305 for 3, chasing 382 for victory. Soon they were all out for 310.

The only thing is, it’s not so clear if it was reverse swing. The frazzled footage available of it does reveal swing, and late swing in particular, but it’s not conclusive. Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack records that Allan Border and Kim Hughes, in putting on 172, had “carried on steadily through the second new ball and until half an hour after tea, when Sarfraz bowled Border off a deflection with a beautiful ball that cut back sharply.” That dismissal began the slide and it seems the ball was oldish by then. In his autobiography, captain Mushtaq Mohammad freely admits that players gave “the seam a bit of a lift” during the spell, as well as the more legal application of “good old-fashioned sweat, spit and polish” to get such swing; in other words, it was probably reverse (and Sarfraz could nurse the ball like he nursed grievances, carefully and deliberately).

In the unintentionally comic post-match TV interview, Sarfraz credits this bowling starburst to the dowdy black-and-white virtues of sticking to line and length, though it seems like interviewer and interviewee are playing some Candid Camera-type practical joke on the viewer. (It is entirely possible that Sarfraz was still hiding the idea of reverse swing from the public.) But a few years ago, I asked him about that spell and he was emphatic. “That wasn’t reverse swing,” he said, as if offended that he was being reduced to a one-trick pony. “I had taken two wickets with the new ball, then three or four with the old ball, and then the new ball again.”

Sarfraz is often an unreliable teller of stories though. The evening he told me this, he also tried to explain the connections between match-fixing, Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and a Scotland Yard cover-up. But in his earliest autobiography, Imran Khan also makes no mention of late swing of any kind; only that Sarfraz, as he always did, used the conditions extremely well and had a good eye for picking the new ball that might swing most.

Forget this and go further back for more definitive proof that this is about the soul of Pakistan cricket and reverse swing was merely a means of expression. What else but an intrinsic condition could explain the manner of Pakistan’s landmark 24-run win at The Oval in 1954? England were 109 for 2 on the fourth day of that last Test, chasing 168, with Peter May and Denis Compton at the crease. Pakistan were playing their ninth Test ever, against arguably the strongest side of that decade (between 1951 and 1961 England won nine out of 11 home series) and reverse swing was not yet even a twitch in someone’s fingernail.

And yet, led primarily by Fazal Mahmood, Pakistan managed to drop catches and still instigate a remarkable collapse of eight for 34 in about two hours. Fazal began landing the ball every time exactly where he wanted. So sharp and overpowering had his intuition become that once, as Kardar was about to take him off, he snatched the ball before another bowler could be found, ran in and bowled. He immediately got the critical wicket of Peter May, caught (to cross the “t” and dot the “i” of this tale) by Kardar himself. Later, Fazal would show to Shujauddin exactly where he wanted him to stand at short square leg: “You put your right foot here, left foot there, unfold your hands and stand ready for a catch. The ball will come right into your hands and you just grab it.” Next ball the last remaining English hope, Johnny Wardle, prodded Fazal’s leg-cutter straight to Shujauddin, who didn’t need to move.

The most forceful evidence that this unique ability to summarily summon chaos is a character trait more than just a skill, has come recently. The shows Pakistan put on in Sharjah against Sri Lanka and in Abu Dhabi against England were not even created by fast bowlers. Spinners wrote these scripts.

As partial explanation, I’m tempted to put some stock in simple Pakistani bluster and bluff. It’s the old Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (the first truly populist and most seminal prime minister of Pakistan) trick of being down and out but fooling – or willing – everyone into believing that you’ve never been as powerful as this before. Bhutto’s political career and legend was built on this tricky but captivating duality.

The most outrageous and instructive example was his abetting in the splitting of the country in 1971 and then pretending that it was a gargantuan slight upon him and the country. It was crystallised in a memorable address to the UN Security Council in December 1971, a day before Pakistan surrendered to India in the war that turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh. Lounging back in his seat, allowing for the full effect of his feudal lordship, Bhutto promised that his country would fight (he had earlier promised they would fight for a thousand years, as they had already been fighting for the last thousand years), admonishing the Security Council, chiding and taunting them. It was all bluff because he himself – and West Pakistan – had played such a role in matters coming to this pass. Then, mid-rant, he tore up the notes in front of him and walked out, vanquished to everyone, but victorious to himself and his country. He then proceeded – briefly – to shake the country alive.

On a cricket field, this is like Pakistan strutting around pretending that the opposition needs 30 runs to get off two balls with a single wicket in hand, when in reality they need 35 runs off eight overs with seven wickets left. A game lost, in other words, merely being the apparition of a game won. Bhutto was the most potent symbol of this. But running through the list of the greatest names of Pakistan cricket, note how many of them were of similar blood, some to the point of delusion: Abdul Hafeez Kardar, Fazal, Sarfraz, Waqar, Afridi, Wasim, Javed Miandad, Imran, Shoaib.

The more illuminating examples are actually those with less talent still bluffing the opposition with their bluster. Ask yourself how on some days guys like Aaqib Javed, Azhar Mahmood, Aamer Sohail (on most days), Moin Khan and Ijaz Ahmed walked around like they owned not only the pitch, but the world itself?

I had an email discussion with Saad Shafqat about this, suggesting to him that this bluster, the sense that even if they’re wrong or losing, they are right and winning, is critical to such moments. A little denial perhaps, or even a refusal to accept matters for what they are. Saad is a cricket writer by love and a leading neurologist by reason. He ghosted Javed Miandad’s autobiography and writes regularly for ESPNcricinfo, an elegant and rational voice on screen, and a loving, believing one off it. He is untouched by cynicism to the point of being a Pollyanna. In true Saad style, he kind of agreed but saw a rosier picture.

“I see it more as self-belief and hubris, not so much denial,” he wrote back. “You could say denial if the outcome ended in failure; but here the outcome is success. Most times that self-belief is latent, but it gets triggered by some unexpected circumstance. And once triggered, it feeds on itself and explodes. I guess another way of seeing it is that this self-belief has an activation threshold, and once the threshold is met, there’s no stopping it and it goes all the way. The biological parallel would be a nerve action potential or a sexual orgasm.”

This leads to another imprecise consideration. In an article on Pakistan cricket last year, a state-of-the-nation kind of piece, I’d suggested that “Pakistan lives fullest in the imagining of its own imminent death. It is at – and for – this moment that Pakistan and its citizens stir and fight and burn bright.” It was written in the context of the wider troubles afflicting country and cricket, to explain how Pakistan had managed to turn things around in arguably their darkest moments.

In hindsight that could work as an explanation for these moments too. Only when Pakistan realise that they are on the verge of losing the game do they begin to do something about not losing it. It was a point Ramiz Raja, who’s lived first-hand through many such days, made to me just before the Abu Dhabi Test against England.

“We don’t know how the team is coping with the logic of method,” he said. “In our times it was always up to the brilliance of certain individual players. So when you get to a desperate situation, where you know you are going to lose, when you know you are going to get killed, for example, your reflexes and body matter reacts absolutely differently.

“If you were jumping 5ft and suddenly you know you have to jump 10ft to save yourself from a kill, you do that. It’s the kind of mechanism that, in a desperate situation, brings out the best in our make-up, and individual brilliance comes through and we look not only to survive but to kill our opponents. The aggressive mechanism within a defensive frame, that comes out and becomes haavi[heavy or overbearing] on the opponent.

“In our time we used to wait for the ball to get old and then ek naara lag jaata tha [a chant went around the team], a feeling on the field that it is happening now, a trigger point. We then had the quality to knock them over. Now it’s a different team altogether and a different opposition and different rules. But the principal mechanism is the same, where in a desperate situation it brings out the best in us. Fielding becomes better and you know you cannot make any more mistakes, that kind of a desperate mindset.”

Where Ramiz sees desperation, Saad sees opportunity. Of course. “It’s a combination of three major national characteristics – laziness, impatience, and latent brilliance. Since we’re lazy, we don’t get engaged until we sense an opportunity. But once we do get engaged, our impatience drives us to get the job done quickly, and our latent capacity for brilliance makes it all happen. Seen another way, we are an enormously gifted team that’s too lazy to apply itself. But when the circumstances are right and an opening appears, our natural gifts take over, with our innate impatience ensuring a speedy resolution.”

What Ramiz is talking about could be an offshoot of a tangible phenomenon which, most popularly, manifests itself in those apocryphal tales of mothers suddenly finding the strength they didn’t know they had to lift cars under which their babies are trapped. In his book Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger, the science journalist Jeff Wise goes deep into this, but one brief extract (prefacing the tale of a man who did lift a car to save a cyclist trapped underneath) is too relevant not to reproduce here.

“Here’s how it is: one minute, you’re going through your daily routine, only half paying attention. And the next you’re sucked into a vivid, intense world, where time seems to move slower, colours are brighter, sounds more perceptible, as though the whole universe has suddenly come into focus.”

In an email discussion, Wise equated this to the idea of the clutch performer. “There’s been a fair amount of debate as to whether there is such a thing as a ‘clutch performer’ – someone who’s so-so most of the time but consistently plays at a markedly better level when forced to come from behind to win a game,” he wrote. “Physiologically, there might be some people who are able to use that rush of adrenaline that comes over us in a high-tension situation and lets us run faster and react more quickly. On the other hand, some argue that this kind of clutch performance is just a statistical fluke, that inevitably sometimes sports people are going to come from behind in the end, and by chance some people will wind up doing so more often.”

***

Listen if you can to “Chori Chori”. An old folk song, it has been reconstructed by Coke Studio, an intelligent and hip Pakistani music show created by the soft-drinks giant which has managed to defy the fact of its own polluting commercialist birth, and produced more freewheeling creative authenticity than could be expected from such a union between art and commerce. Every season – this year will be Coke Studio’s sixth – the creative force behind it, Rohail Hyatt, digs out musicians big, obscure and lost from any scene or tradition, throws them together into a studio with a house band, and has the entire process of creation and final output filmed, recorded and then aired. Broadly, the formula is to mix contemporary sounds of Pakistan with older, more traditional ones. But really there is no formula and it’s not fusion in the Peter Gabriel style of forced fusion. Hyatt has fused sounds from Pakistan with those from elsewhere, from a previous age to this, so organically that he has created something anew.

“Chori Chori” was sung originally by Reshma, one of Pakistan’s greatest folk singers, and is rendered modern by Meesha Shafi. It was once written of Jimmy Connors that he played women’s tennis inside a man’s body; Reshma’s voice could be that of a man inside a woman’s body. Shafi – an elfin, glammed-up Beth Gibbons – is different but no less striking, bringing to the song a sore throat and smoking sexiness. Her voice has pain.

As the song begins to end, about five minutes and 45 seconds in, it does so with a quietly gathering gravitational pull. A gentle auditory whirlpool ropes in the different threads, building a pyramid of sound, higher, narrower. To the listener, vision and sense is tunnelled into nothingness, but in this crashing and mild percussive chaos, everything can actually be seen. When I first heard it, it was an indescribably powerful and briefly paralysing moment. That denouement, the world ending and simultaneously beginning, has become one of the many leitmotifs of Coke Studio: the slow, long build, the gradual bringing together to make one, the swift finish in ecstasy.

To me, this was a partial epiphany because it sounded like the musical and emotional resonance of what Pakistan do. Specifically it pushed me into thinking about Qawwali, even though “Chori Chori” is not Qawwali at all.

Briefly – and dryly – Qawwali is a form of devotional music, originating centuries ago but in the form that we now know it around the 13th century by one order of the Sufis. (Sufism is a practice of Islam but, with its modern puritanism belt much loosened, it asks for a more personalised relationship with God.) Generally but not exclusively, the lyrics will be the work of great Sufi poets, rendered in soaring, shrieking voices but to bare music; a tabla or dhol for a beat, a wheezing harmonium for rhythm and the clapping of an entourage. The voice, the clapping, the chanting: these are the structural planks. But the spiritual base is the most important because Qawwali is not just music. To those versed, it is a call to prayer, to ritual, to contemplation, to faith, to hope, to despair, to love, to mourning, to celebration. Other music, especially modern music, asks you primarily to listen. Qawwali asks that you submit, that you immerse yourself. Otherwise it asks – and gives – you nothing.

Taken casually, it can be a mood thing. Sometimes it’s left me flat, a mish-mash of voice and noise that, to an ear attuned to Western music, is too disparate and incoherent. But sometimes – live especially and, thus, raw – it catches. Maybe it’s the right lyric or the force of repetition but then – forget mind, body and soul – it can set fire to eternity.

The more I thought about it, the more apparent Qawwali became as a revelatory point of reference for Pakistan’s cricket in those spells. Is it too crazy? I spoke to Abu Mohammad, one of the country’s leading Qawwals (better known alongside his brother Fareed Ayaz) about it. I’m not sure that the argument struck him immediately but, by the end of our conversation, as he promised to send me articles from 2005 (when former President Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistan cricket team and Mohammad and his troupe were all in Delhi together) linking Qawwali and cricket, I thought he might have warmed to it.

There were two questions I really wanted to put to him. Could it be said, I asked, that to the uninitiated, a Qawwali can sometimes feel like a living, breathing but random collection of voice and sound until, suddenly at one moment, it surges together. And then transformed, it becomes momentarily a single, powerful force. (Take also, I thought but didn’t ask, the alaap, that sudden vocal burst in a Qawwali. Is that not exactly like a riff of wickets by one bowler from out of nowhere, at odds with everything that has gone before?)

He thought about it a little. “Yes, completely. When Qawwali is being read it takes a little time for it to get warm, to get into line and get going. But there comes a time when a Qawwal and his audience both become like one, they both come to one side together.”

But it was the next question, about haal, that had really gnawed away in my head. The literal meaning of haal is state, as in a state of being, and it can refer to a number of different states. But it has come to be interpreted, more often than not, as one ultimate state of ecstasy, much sought after but rarely achieved, in man’s journey to get closer to God. “In the ecstatic state,” explains Idries Shah in his book Oriental Magic, “Sufis are believed to be able to overcome all barriers of time, space and thought. They are able to cause apparently impossible things to happen merely because they are no longer confined by the barriers which exist for more ordinary people.”

One of the primary objectives of Qawwali is to attempt to bring the performer as well as the listener to haal. Mohammad recites a Sufi poem and then says: “The state of haal is such that if you, God willing, get there in a gathering, after coming back from haal, you will not be able to describe or explain the feeling. This is just that state that only he knows who has experienced it. Haal or wajd[the literal translation for ecstasy] is such a state that comes to that man and takes him to the goal that he has been in search of all his life. Then he is not with himself, he has reached somewhere else.”

Is there a moment in live performances when you can identify that haal has been achieved? “No, no, no. You cannot identify this moment [haal ultimately can only be granted to you, you have no control over its arrival]. Sometimes it is the traditional chant Allah hoo and it happens, sometimes a verse like Dam a dam mast qalandar and it’s there. This is dependent on the individual and their state of existence, the mood of the moment, where their point of thinking is taken from.”

As a relevant aside, Pakistan’s 1992 World Cup triumph was soundtracked by the Qawwali of the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The players listened to him obsessively (on a stereo picked up by Ijaz Ahmed in Singapore on the way there) every day during practice, during lunch breaks, after games, before games. The entire tournament was, for Pakistan, like a Qawwali itself; disparate, floating aimlessly initially before suddenly coming together with such force that they became the best in the world.

Mohammad likes cricket and so I put to him that what Pakistan do when they do a Pakistan, when that tamasha erupts, could it be that they have come to haal? “The thing you have said about a team or group spirit, that happens directly, automatically, but not because of them. It happens naturally that they link together as one. You cannot understand how it happens. It happens to you.”

This isn’t so radical a connection because, from the off, the concept of haal struck me as a familiar one. In a way it’s what all athletes strive towards. Only in sports they call it “the zone”, that state of supreme focus which sees athletes perform for periods at the very peak of their potential. How similar is it? Well. Dr Roberta Antonini Phillipe, a sports psychologist at the Institute of Movement Sciences and Sports Medicine, University of Geneva, says that when a player is in the zone, it is like being in a trance.

“The zone is when your mind fully connects with achieving a goal,” she explains. “When you’re in the zone your mind only processes the thoughts and images that help you execute your task successfully. In that state of mind the athlete explains that he has positive thoughts, positive images and sometimes also music in his head.”

The trope that the zone has spiritual components and implications is not unexplored. The psychologist Andrew Cooper did so in his 1998 book Playing in the Zone: Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Sports. Cooper is a devout student of Zen. “The zone is the essence and pinnacle of the athletic experience, for it reveals that, at their root, sports are a theatre for enacting the drama of self-transcendence,” he writes. “Athletes and fans alike, focused as we so often are on the game of winning and losing, miss the deeper significance that is right before our eyes. But in the zone, the extraordinary capacities that lie within each individual are made manifest. To grasp this hidden dimension is to transform the very meaning of athletic play.”

Where haal deviates from the zone is in the idea that the latter can be sought, that through a series of steps or rigorous preparation and practice it can be achieved. Many sports psychologists – but not all – believe that using different techniques of visualisation, goal-setting and self-motivation can help athletes to achieve and stay in the zone. Pakistan employs no such techniques and never has done. Just as Abu Mohammad says that Qawwali rehearsed and recorded in a studio is the imprisonment of the form, so it is with Pakistan. Net practice and training – the rehearsed recordings of sport – are generally imprisonment for Pakistani players. That is not where they shine. For them, as with Qawwali, it happens live and it happens unprepared. Enlightenment, goes one saying of Zen, is an accident, as it could be in haal and as it is in Pakistan cricket.

There are other points to consider in Pakistan’s deviation. How often, for example, do you hear of a group of athletes going into the zone collectively? It can and does happen. According to Ed Smith, Mike Brearley recently described a team in a zone: “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.” Choking, almost an opposite of the zone, does spread through teams. But the most striking aspect of Pakistan’s haal is the effect it has on the spectator. When Pakistan achieve haal, to be there live is to almost achieve haal yourself, in unison, as is the hope of every performance of Qawwali.

The Abu Dhabi Test win over England in January 2012, to pull out just one instance, managed this. I wrote a piece in which briefly I wondered about haal and Sufism. One spectator, part of the English travelling support, read it and wrote in. “As part of the visiting England fan base we sat yesterday in awe of what unfolded. Seldom do you see a side in any form of cricket dismantled in two hours of play. What struck many of us – and we have all played the game throughout our lives – was the seeming inevitability of what was about to unfold. From the very start of the England second innings one could sense a quiet but definite shift in ownership of the moment, something beyond the playing conditions and the participants solely. It was like karma, strange as that may sound. Your article summed up the sense of ‘other worldliness’ some of us felt.”

In other words, submission. Because, finally, what Pakistan are doing in these moments is asking you to submit. They are asking you, opponent and spectator, to submit to their reality, their chaos, their unplanning, their spur of the moment, their pox, their talent, their wretchedness, their beauty, their spirit. They are inviting you to dance with them. Except that it isn’t just a dance. It is the dance of that great Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi:

Dance, when you’re broken open. 
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. 
Dance in the middle of the fighting. 
Dance in your blood. 
Dance when you’re perfectly free.