You have to Teach People how to Feel about you

 

The beat of cricket

PETE LANGMAN in Cricinfo


 Getting the timing right, when playing and elsewhere, sets you free


Time, as a wiser man than I once said, is the author of authors. No matter how fast we run in the hope of outpacing it, it always catches up with us. This is because it is attached to our heels with elastic. And it always has the last word, just as it does the first.

Cricket also has an elastic view of time, packing its excitement into barely a quarter of the actual minutes available. In Test match cricket, each ball bowled is in motion for between six and 12 seconds, with the important bit, from hand to bat, taking up barely an entire second. A typical hour's play, containing, say, 13 overs, thus involves barely 15 minutes of action, of which around two minutes are ball to bat to field. They also serve, as Milton would say.

And yet, within this game of contradictions built on dichotomy, this game that challenges us on every level, forcing us into unnatural positions, demanding fluidity when for the greater part of every match the entire field is almost entirely still, within this game the great players appear to manufacture their own time. Time is the umpire of umpires, if you like.

It's no wonder that when we are struggling with our personal game we explain it in temporal terms: we can't time the ball; the rhythm in our run-up has gone. It even works for keepers: a mistimed take bounces out of rather than buries itself into the glove.

I was once at a milonga, an organised event where you dance the tango, where tradition has it that the women choose their partner for each dance. I noticed one gentleman, maybe in his late fifties, who was in high demand. He danced a simple dance, little more than the basic walk of tango, but he was obviously preferred over the younger and flashier leaders, all leg flicks and twirls. I asked one of his partners why he was so popular (even though I thought I had it nailed), and the response was that he just felt better. I'd been watching his feet, however. The reason he felt better was because he knew where the beat was. This meant that his dancing partners could predict when his feet were aiming at, which made for a dance in which coordination was total, where two dancers merged into one. The others were merely there or thereabouts.

But cricket revolves around the ball, and specifically getting the ball to bend to our will rather than somebody else's. And to do that we need as much information about it as possible. In fact, we need to predict where it's going to be at any given time in its trajectory. Only in this way can it be propelled to just the right length, hit with just the right amount of force into just the right gap, clasped at just the right moment.

 When you play music (by which I mean contemporary popular music; classical music, with a conductor, is a different kettle of fish), the living and breathing heart of the music is the drummer, for they define the groove, they create the contingent time in which the music exists. For the ensemble to work, each instrument must find its place within that time, as asserted on the drum kit. The bass, for example, will find its home in the kick drum, not played at the same time, but inside the drumbeat. The bass must make the kick drum play a note. In similar fashion, the guitar must make the hi-hat or snare play a chord. For a drummer to play at their best, they must be balanced, relaxed and confident in every stroke. They must feel themselves inside the beat and avoid second-guessing their instincts. The best drummers produce a groove so big, so fat, that each beat acts as though it has its own gravity, with the default placement of a note being in the exact centre of each beat.

It is this knowledge of the beat's precise centre that allows the ensemble player freedom to make a rhythm that is irresistible, a rhythm so simple, so beyond mere precision that it enters the realms of inevitability. From this place, the note can be placed a little in front of the beat, a little behind, on top, underneath... the player controls the note, and thus the music.

And so it is in cricket.

When a bowler's run-up goes, the suggested fix is invariably technical, but what is needed is for them to tap into how it felt when all was dandy. They must feel like the drummer - relaxed, balanced, confident. They must feel that the ball is part of them, on a string, as is said of Jimmy Anderson when he's in the groove. The game is not the time to practise but just to kick back and play.
For the batsman, the process is the same. As you wait for the bowler to deliver the ball, so you tap into the feel of the game, allow your body to connect with it, and as the ball traces its arc towards you, your instinct knows where the centre of the ball is. Then control is yours. Play it early, play it late, play it spot on. Close the face, open the face, show the maker's name. Whichever you choose, the ball will obey.

Cricket is all about timing, and timing is not technique, it's feel. Perhaps, just perhaps, if we learn to feel differently, to trust our instincts to place the ball, bat or gloves just so, it might just help us to slot back into the groove.

Cricket - What does it mean to be in the zone?

Nicholas Hogg

 
 

Mike Atherton on his Johannesburg epic in 1995: "... it feels like a different person out there"  © Getty Images

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The Collins American Dictionary defines being "in the zone" as "a state that produces achievement with such an extraordinary, often unlikely, degree of success that it seems to defy purely rational explanation". Google the three magic words and the more prosaic top result is a website inspired by the 2012 Olympics to "discover how our bodies work during sport, activity, movement and rest".

Whether being in the zone is a measurable phenomenon or a mystical trance, all cricketers know when they're in that halcyon space because they're scoring runs or taking wickets.

RELATED LINKS

• Ed Smith:
 
• The zone and the importance of imagination
 

• Talking Cricket:
 
• 'I've never been in the zone'
  

My first image of a cricketer in total focus is Mike Atherton in Johannesburg, 1995, when along with fighting terrier Jack Russell, he batted for 643 minutes, facing 492 balls and scoring 185 runs to stave off defeat. Chatting to Vic Marks 14 years on, Atherton observed, "Whenever I do see old footage, it feels like a different person out there. It's like an out-of-body experience… as if I'm watching somebody else." He's not the only athlete to remark on an exemplary display as a near dream-like event. When ice-dancing pair Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean recorded 12 perfect sixes (judges' scores, not boundaries) at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, Dean would say, "I don't remember the performance at all. It just happened."

This vague recollection of a sporting excellence is not uncommon. In the grandly titled paper "Towards the Development of a Conceptual Model of Expertise in Cricket Batting", published in the 2009 Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, Juanita Weissensteiner of the Australian Sports Commission confers that "much of the anticipatory skill of experts [batsmen] occurs largely below the level of consciousness."

Therefore, if you're "thinking" rather than "feeling" at the crease, whether it be about your footwork, backlift or what's for dinner, the bails are more likely to come off.

For a bowler to "feel" rather than "think" himself into a match-winning performance, he must not be troubled - or he must find a way of ascending the many variables that may detract from the best of his abilities. As a bowler who depends on a swinging delivery to get my wickets, I have a multitude of excuses prepared: the brand of ball, foot holes, wind direction, an uneven run-up, or even a bad slice of cake at tea. Importantly, I also tend to up my game if I get hit for a couple of boundaries, that spike of adrenaline reducing thought and enhancing feeling. My swearing - usually at myself rather than opponents - is key to my performance.

And I'm not the only angry man with a ball in his hand.

When I picture bowlers in the ephemeral zone I see Bob Willis sailing down the wind at Headingley in 1981. Angered by selectors and the press, a dead-eyed Willis ripped through the Australian batting line-up, with only the tenth wicket engendering any reaction to his remarkable spell - against the stiff upper lip of the time, Willis, arms aloft, leaps into the air and briefly, very briefly, the death mask breaks into joy before he sprints through the pitch invasion and growls at the waiting journalists.

If you're "thinking" rather than "feeling" at the crease, whether it be about your footwork, backlift or what's for dinner, the bails are more likely to come off

It took a bouncer in the grille to focus the often wayward Devon Malcolm at The Oval in 1994. After a Fanie de Villiers bumper had thunked off his helmet, Malcolm made that prophetic announcement to the South Africans: "You guys are history." His first delivery nearly took off Jonty Rhodes' jaw, and the second deflected off his glove to short leg. The fire did not fade, and Malcolm finished with 9 for 57.

In Tod, Thatcher and Rahman's 2010 Sport Psychology, we can correlate Willis and Malcolm's form to Drive Theory, "a linear relationship between arousal and performance". Unfortunately, this anger = excellence formula only works with elite athletes who, through practice, application and natural talent, have achieved a "go to" skill that isn't reduced by rage. Unless anger is contained, especially with batting, technique crumbles and frustration and failure are more likely than fame and glory.

Whatever we call the optimum condition of mind and body that produces our peak performance, each player must find his own way of entering this premium space. Personality type, match-day temperament and the particular skill to be executed, from an archer steadying his body and slowing his heartbeat to a weightlifter summoning brute force, change the atmospherics of our unique zones. Glenn McGrath, a metronome of line and length, surely didn't need the firebrand to perform at his best. Flintoff, on the other hand, buoyed on by the baying fans and the big occasion, revelled in the game when the crowd roared the loudest.

Strategies to increase or decrease arousal, such as relaxing (Phil "The Cat" Tufnell kipping, or the dressing-room card schools), imagery (picturing that smite out of the ground, a leg stump flying), and self-talk (from bowlers swearing at themselves to batsmen commentating on their own innings) vary between players.

In Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket's Greatest Spin Bowlers, Amol Rajan writes that Shane Warne used sledging to help him concentrate, and that baiting Paul Collingwood about his MBE, "For scoring seven at the Oval? It's an embarrassment," was a motivating exchange. "It was making me more determined," said Warne, as if he ever needed the extra fizz to his sparkling bowling.

The zone, wherever it is, exists. Some call it a groove, others call it form. Directions to it are vague, and it may vanish as quickly as it appears. But you'll know when you are there, scoring runs and taking wickets.