Shane Watson: 'In teams that focus on results instead of processes, players start playing for themselves'

Shane Watson in Cricinfo

There are environments where the leaders talk about how big this game is, how important this game is, and say, "If we lose this game we are out." I have been in plenty of these team environments. There are also environments where leaders talk about how performance in this game will dictate selection, and that underperformance might lead to players getting dropped. I have heard from leaders of a number of teams that I have played in say things like, "Spots are up for grabs in the game" or "If you don't perform, you will get dropped."

So guess what people are thinking in those environments? "Don't lose. I really need to perform today. I need to score runs. We need to win. Don't get out. Don't bowl badly. Don't stuff up, otherwise I might be gone." All of these focus on results and fear of failure.

These environments can work for a shorter period of time, where fear of failure can drive individuals to be ready to lock in for one very important game. But these environments are not sustainable at all as stress and anxiety builds up to a point where the whole team implodes and I have been a part of these environments on a few occasions too. The telltale signs are that everyone starts to only play for themselves, for their individual spots, and as long as they do enough to get picked for the next game, they are happy. This always leads to an incredibly toxic team environment where the enjoyment factor of playing the game that you love evaporates and it turns into every person for themselves. We should be doing all that we can to do the opposite of this, as the best and most successful team environments always have a fun and enjoyment aspect to them as a very important undercurrent to all that they do.

Other environments I have been a part of are ones where there is a clear focus on the process and leaders ask the players to just bring the best version of themselves every time and to do it over and over again. They reiterate that if we all do this, we give ourselves the best chance of coming out on top. This is exactly what a championship mindset looks like!

This is what made Ricky Ponting such a good captain. He always said to the team in the lead-up to big games that the team whose individuals do the basics better and for longer will be the team that will come out on top. It focused our minds on the process, on doing the basics, controlling the A factors.

Paddy Upton for Rajasthan Royals built a process-driven environment that took all of the anxiety and stress out of a very pressurised tournament where performance and results were so important. The other team environment where this was done incredibly well was at Chennai Super Kings in the IPL under captain MS Dhoni and coach Stephen Fleming. I never heard either of them say, "We need to win this game today", or "If you don't score runs today or take wickets, you will be getting dropped."

My second year with CSK really stuck with me. There was no chopping and changing in selection. In other teams I had been with, players were turned over constantly. If a player didn't perform for a couple of games, selectors would think he wasn't good enough and would replace him immediately. This meant that everyone started looking over their shoulders and thinking, "Gosh, if I don't perform in a couple of games, then I could be gone too."

No matter who we are, we are always going to have times in our lives where we are in a "results-focused" environment. By understanding the mental-skills framework in this book, we know that this is the opposite of where we want to be mentally for us to be at our best both individually and collectively. We need to listen to what is being said by the leaders in this environment and we need to redirect their words ourselves to say, "I am not going to let their results focus influence the correct mindset I need for me to be at my best." This can be much easier said than done when players are being chopped and changed from one game to the next without any rhyme or reason, apart from someone not performing in one game. But understanding this will be a powerful tool for you to use throughout your life to ensure a negative environment doesn't infiltrate your thinking and pull you out of your high-performance mindset.

I've been a victim of a negative team environment. After the retirement of Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey, the Australian team drifted significantly. Pressure to perform began to affect confidence and consistency. Players, myself included, began to look over our shoulders. I didn't have knowledge of the mental skills I needed to redirect my thoughts to the right things at the right times to consistently bring the best version of myself into every performance, instead of being overcome with fear and overwhelmed by a need for results, which saw my performances go downhill throughout that time. And this was all at a time where I was in my prime, performing really well in the IPL in an incredibly enjoyable, process-driven team environment. But as soon as I went back into this other environment, my kryptonite, my performances started to tank again and the enjoyment factor of playing the game that I loved evaporated very quickly.



When Watson was able to let go of the negative mindset that gripped the team, he was able to play with freedom and the results automatically followed•Craig Golding/AFP/Getty Images


My last three months with the Australia T20 team from early January 2016 through to the T20 World Cup in India was another example of one of those environments. We played India in a three-match T20 International series, where the selectors picked a really big squad and chopped and changed the team significantly from game to game, and then this flowed on to a T20 series in South Africa before we headed to India for the T20 World Cup. The conversations and actions around the group from the leaders - that being the coach, captain, selectors - were consistent messaging like, "All spots are up for grabs if you want to play in the T20 World Cup" and "You need to perform in this game as you might only have one opportunity to press your claim."

As soon as I heard and saw this, I immediately acknowledged in my own mind what this ridiculous situation was creating. This time I opted out. I knew the importance of preparation and focus. The result was that I bowled as well as I had in T20 cricket for Australia, played one of the games of my life at the SCG as captain, and retired at the end of the T20 World Cup as the No. 1 T20I allrounder in the world.

Surprise surprise, we lost to India in the quarter final knockout game. We left a few runs on the table and didn't execute that well with the ball against an Indian team that had barely changed their XI from the first game that we played against them during the series in Australia, three months before.

But the attitudes I saw in that T20 World Cup are everywhere. I saw it recently in a game of junior cricket. The result of the match was important as a place in the grand final was riding on it. A number of the parents had really built this game up as being a knockout game and had stressed to the kids how important it was to win to make the final. Then one of the calmest kids in the team went out to bat with two overs to go and one of the parents said, "Don't get out, otherwise we will lose" as he walked out to bat. And guess what happened. This poor young kid ended up getting out, and because of all of the build-up of importance for this game by the parents and kids around him, the calmest child on the field lost the plot, throwing their gear everywhere in disappointment of letting the team down. It was so sad to see and something that should never happen if the parents around the team simply understood the fundamentals of how to create the optimal environment. Reinforcement of the correct mindset would then filter down to all of the young kids.

It is so easy to allow the "live or die by results" environment to infiltrate your mindset and start to corrupt it. It is easy to start to move your thinking to fear of failure and how important it is to perform and get the results. But by understanding all of the mental skills in this book, you will be armed with all that you need to be mentally tough enough to create a super-strong cocoon around yourself, to just direct your thoughts to continually creating your optimal mental environment to bring the best version of you, no matter what team environment that you are in.

We need to do all that we can in our power to help with creating the best team environment possible, so that individuals don't have to feel like they are rebelling against the team leadership just to stay process-driven, to bring their best A game possible, game in game out. I'm convinced that more and more teams should be open to allowing players to manage their own mental and physical preparation. Everyone is different; everyone comes to know what best suits them; just as a lot of cricket is individual, so should a lot of the preparation be too. Understanding this will create so many more high-performing team environments, higher-performing individuals and most importantly, much more enjoyable team environments too, so that we never lose the fun and joy that we get playing the game that we love.

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What do we mean when we say a cricketer is mentally tough?

Paddy Upton in Cricinfo

At this juncture, it is worth having a conversation about the concept of 'mental toughness', which is currently the most overused and least understood concept in sports psychology. I neither agree with nor use the term.

When helping the Indian players to develop better mental resolve and manage their emotions in preparation for the World Cup, we were not attempting to create 'mentally tough' athletes. Because there is no such thing as mental toughness, and even if there was, the idea of striving to be mentally tough is flawed.

There's no such thing

I contend that mental toughness is like Batman and Superman. We all know them. But they're not real and don't actually exist.

In a review of over thirty published academic papers on mental toughness involving forty-four world-class researchers, it emerged that there is no agreement on the definition of mental toughness. Sport psychologists cannot agree on what mental toughness is. In trying to define this concept, they broke it down into subcomponents like grit, resilience, focus, emotional control, mental control, hardness and so on. Collectively, those thirty-plus papers present as many as seventy-five subcomponents that supposedly make up mental toughness!

Of all the instruments available to measure mental toughness, there are only two that have been validated: The Australian Football Mental Toughness Inventory (AFMTI) and Mental Toughness Q48 (MTQ48). These are the only two instruments that reliably measure what they are supposed to measure.

However, there is no agreement on whether these instruments are relevant for both men and women. There is disagreement about the relevance to different age levels, different experience levels, different levels of competitiveness and, importantly, there is no transfer between sporting codes. Thus, the Australian Football instrument does not necessarily apply to other sports.

Further, when 'mentally tough' players assess themselves, and coaches, who know them well, also assess them, the results are fundamentally different. There isn't even agreement over how players see themselves and how a coach sees those same players. There is also no agreement on whether mental toughness is to do with nurture (something we're taught), or nature (something we are born with).

What becomes patently clear from a review of these academic papers and literature on mental toughness is that sport psychologists, who are supposed to be the experts, cannot define and don't even understand the concept. And yet, as coaches and parents, we continue to use the term and judge players based on it. Players also use it to judge each other and commentators apply it liberally in their descriptions of players.

How then should we ordinary sportspeople interpret the findings and subcategories in those thirty-odd research papers on mental toughness? Let's have a closer look.

The following is what, and who, some of these researchers studied: 160 elite athletes, ten international performers, twelve mentally tough UK cricketers, eight Olympic champions, and thirty-one elite coaches. In other words, what the world's academics are trying to tell us is that they've studied the world's best.

Psycho-what? 

When we study the best of the best, consider the following as a list of definitions associated with mental toughness: massive belief in self and one's ability; emotional control; clear thinking under pressure; ruthless pursuit of goals; operating well in chaos; not intimidated by others; unaffected by loss and failure; easily spots weakness in opponents; inspirational, popular, influential; and compulsive liar.

I would bet that, until you got to the last point, you were in agreement that this was a pretty accurate list of mental toughness attributes.

However, the list I provided above is not a list of definitions of mental toughness - those are character traits of psychopaths taken from an article on psychopathy.

At this juncture, you'd be perfectly justified in asking why on earth I would include this list of psychopathic traits in a discussion on mental toughness. What if I told you that the academics who studied mental toughness amongst elite athletes might unknowingly have unearthed their psychopathic traits and prescribed these as characteristics of mental toughness? Barring only one or two, the traits are the same.

Okay, so who are these people, and how many of them are out there?

Psychopaths are born with brain functioning that is different from 'normal' people, and this is not reversible. As luck would have it (for them), these brain differences manifest outwardly in that individual possessing many of those performance assets mentioned earlier - all of which are highly sought-after qualities for success (and leadership), and of so-called mental toughness. This is the reason for so many psychopaths achieving such high levels of success in business, as well as in politics and sport.

Prof. Clive Boddy from Middlesex University suggests that one out of every hundred people is born a psychopath. He suggests that one in twenty managers in corporate America is a psychopath, called a 'corporate psychopath' because they thrive in business environments. In industries like the media, the legal fraternity, finance, banking and politics, Boddy suggests one in five top executives or CEOs are in fact psychopaths. Research has not yet been conducted on the prevalence of psychopaths in sport, but do the math.

If this is the first time you've encountered the concept of corporate psychopaths, you may be struggling to join the dots between serial killers and successful businessmen (and athletes). The only difference between a corporate psychopath and Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs) and Co. who torture animals as children and end up as jailed serial killers as adults, is their propensity for violence. Illustrating this point, one study at the University of Surrey on thirty-nine high-level British executives compared their psychopathic traits to those of criminals and psychiatric patients. They found that business executives were more likely to be superficially charming, egocentric, insincere and manipulative, and just as likely to be grandiose, exploitative, and lacking in empathy as criminals and psychiatric patients. The criminals only scored higher than these executives on being impulsive and physically aggressive.

If you're still not quite joining the dots, remember Lance Armstrong, the cancer survivor and seven-times Tour de France champion who put both cycling and the fight against cancer on the world map! A study of Armstrong the cyclist will reveal possibly all you need to know about what mental toughness looks like.

This is the same person that the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) called 'the ringleader of the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen'. He cheated, lied and bullied his way to those seven titles, and when threatened with exposure, he covered his tracks, intimidated witnesses and lied to hearing panels and to the world. When the prosecution presented irrefutable evidence of his doping from twenty-six people, including eleven of his own teammates, he still vehemently denied having ever doped. The prosecution went on to suggest that some of the most shocking evidence had to do with Armstrong's vindictive, mendacious and vicious character. One report suggested, 'He comes across less like a cyclist, more like a psychopath.'

Without going too far down this rabbit hole, the following is worth noting: What sport psychologists, coaches, parents and players are prescribing as a model of mental toughness is equally likely to be the success-producing traits of highly successful and highly functional psychopaths. I have worked with a few psychopaths. I've seen the so-called attributes of mental toughness in them, which help deliver results on the field. I have seen how fans, friends and the media adore these people. But I have also seen what it looks like when their mental toughness is unmasked as psychopathic behaviour. They come across as being narcissistic and entirely self-serving, compulsive (and clever) liars, manipulators without any remorse and an inability to take responsibility for their errors. These are not qualities we should encourage as general conditions for performance.

In short, psychologists themselves cannot agree about what mental toughness is. At best they have provided a list of seventy-five subcomponents to describe the concept. There's also a case to suggest that researchers have inadvertently identified the success-producing traits of a sports version of the 'corporate psychopaths', and are prescribing those as a model of mental toughness. Although only a recently detected (and initially confusing) phenomenon, there are already a few papers published and books written on corporate psychopathy, which we might hear more about in the time to come. One final note is that corporate psychopaths exhibit degrees of psychopathy, with some possessing a greater number of psychopathic traits than others, both positive and negative.

Mental toughness as a failed concept

The second reason Gary and I were not trying to create mentally tough players relates to the judgement directed at athletes based on this. It's sad that someone is either mentally tough, or not. And if they're not mentally tough, they're 'fragile', 'weak', 'soft', 'they crumble under pressure', 'they can't handle the heat', 'they're insecure', 'they're vulnerable' or 'they're doubting'. That's how we label athletes who make mistakes under pressure.

Here's the rub. Except for out-and-out psychopaths, all other athletes, professional and amateur, make mistakes, often under pressure, and all of these so-called mistakes are frequently labelled as 'weak' and 'soft'. Almost every one of us has doubts and insecurities. I have hardly ever worked with an athlete who is fully confident, secure and ever positive. Sure, I have worked with some who are good at hiding their doubts, but their vulnerabilities and insecurities still gnaw away at them from the inside. They try really hard to protect themselves from the public perception that these normal human fragilities are in fact unforgivable weaknesses. But they all have them. The 'mentally weak' labels we place on those who fall short of our unrealistic expectation of perfection are harsh, unfair and I'd say, uneducated.

I did some of my best and least effective mental conditioning work with Gautam Gambhir, the International Test Cricketer of the Year in 2009. I worked with him up until that time, but I had little to do with him being named the world's best cricketer.

Often, when I got onto the Indian team bus, Gautam would invite me to sit next to him. What followed was predictable: 'Paddy, man, I know I just scored 100, but I should have got 200. I mishit too many balls, I struggled in the beginning, I hit the fielder too many times ... It just wasn't good enough. I need to sort things out.' He would be in mental agony about losing his wicket and about needing to fix things.

He was so riddled with insecurities, doubts and vulnerabilities. He was one of the most negative people I have ever worked with. I tried everything I knew to at least try to get him to be a bit more positive, become more optimistic, and to at least get some perspective.

We must have had fifteen sessions on the bus in one year, but I just couldn't help Gautam shift. Until I came across some research that could potentially help me understand why. It was either that I lacked the skill or knowledge to help Gautam (which could have been the case), or there were some lessons to be learned from Martin Seligman's work on positive psychology.

Positive self-talk, being positive, is very important, especially when we want people to 'believe'. It's the 'Yes, we can' attitude that defined President Barack Obama's first presidential election campaign.

However, research suggests that most people sit somewhere on a continuum between being an optimist and being a pessimist, with 100 standing for über-optimistic and 0 for pessimistic. Gautam was definitely wired towards the 'lower' end of the optimism/pessimism scale; let's say his range was from 20 to 40, with 30 being his normal. When he scored 150, he would be disappointed at not scoring 200. And when he got the ICC Test Cricketer of the Year award, he shifted to about 40, but he very soon moved back to his set point at around 30. When he didn't score runs in 2 or 3 consecutive innings, he'd drop down to 20.

No matter what we did, Gautam was negative and pessimistic. In his remarkably honest interview after receiving the ICC award, he said, 'The award does nothing to help overcome my insecurity. I can't help it.' I'm not letting out any of Gautie's secrets here either; he has openly acknowledged his insecurities and doubting mindset.

Using the popular notion of mental toughness, he was one of the 'weakest and mentally most insecure' people I have ever worked with. But at the same time, he was undoubtedly one of the best and most determined, and successful, Test batsmen in the world. Something he would prove, yet again, in the 2011 World Cup final.

So, when we tell people to have positive self-talk - this pillar or subcomponent of mental toughness - it would probably work for about 50 per cent of them, those who are lucky enough to be wired on the optimistic side of the scale.

When a great athlete who also happens to be wired as an eternal optimist has an accident, breaks their body or worse, is paralysed, they might go from being 95 on the scale to about 75. That is their low end. But they're still very high on the 'positive' side of the scale. And as soon as they accept and then reconcile with their situation, they shift back to 90 or 95 on the scale. And those people are the ones who are generally admired for being mentally tough; the eternal optimists. They become the shining light we all have to aspire to, and they are often encouraged onto the public speaking circuit where they share their optimism in an attempt to help others become as positive as they are. Audiences are inspired and motivated, but only temporarily, before the vast majority return to their normal set point, often the very next day.

Trying to engage in positive self-talk for people who naturally have more negative thoughts can be frustrating, and because they often can't get it right, can cause them to further think negatively about themselves.

In Oliver Burkeman's book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, he suggests taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid, like failure, negativity and death. He makes a case for learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. We're often told to 'face your fear', to embrace it rather than run or hide from it. It turns out, we might also benefit from facing and experiencing negative emotions - or, at the very least, by not running quite so hard from them. Fear of failure is one of the world's most prominent negative thoughts. Failure will happen, so why not rather face and embrace it?
After all those sessions of trying to get Gautie to be more 'positive', which never worked, at least not for any length of time, I changed track and got him to try and accept exactly how he felt.

We made it okay to feel frustrated, negative and disappointed. Once these thoughts and feelings were acknowledged, we'd say, 'Okay. So, what do you need to do to get even better?'

Seligman contends that it is possible to learn to be more optimistic about a negative situation; he calls it 'learned optimism'. Let's use the example of a batsman scoring three low scores in a row. An optimistic approach would be to attribute it to external circumstances. 'It was unlucky', rather than the pessimistic approach of turning the mirror inward and blaming yourself by saying, 'I'm not good enough'. Next is to see it as a setback in one small area of your life: 'It's just my batting, but so much else about my game and life is great', rather than an all-encompassing negative perspective of 'I'm a failure'. Finally, and not necessarily in this order, is to see that the failures are temporary. 'This will soon pass and I'll be back to scoring runs', rather than 'I don't know if I'll ever get out of this slump', which is the more permanent worldview of the pessimist.

Because of the way they view problems, pessimists suffer 'poor form' for longer than optimists. In fact, Seligman's work suggests pessimists are eight times more likely to become depressed when bad things happen, they do worse at school, in sport and at their jobs than their talent suggests, have poorer health, shorter lives and rockier relationships. This is a tough pill to swallow, considering that over 50 per cent of people are wired on the pessimist side of the continuum. The good news is that optimism can be learned, by attributing the problem to external factors, seeing it happening in only a small area of your life, and as being temporary.

It's also worth mentioning that a dose of pessimism is healthy, especially in situations where mistakes may have significant consequences. Where optimists will charge ahead with full (sometimes unfounded) confidence and without much considered thought, pessimists will think through everything that can go wrong, take necessary precautions and come up with contingency plans. Pessimism helps by preventing us from taking unnecessary risks or acting recklessly. Any athlete engaging in a dangerous sport needs to have a healthy dose of pessimism. Too much, and they'll never get out of the starting blocks; too little, and they may not reach the finish line. George Bernard Shaw famously said, 'Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.'

Because people are different, the concepts of being mentally tough, positive and optimistic, or of being in control of one's emotions, at least outwardly, are unrealistic for everyone. M.S. Dhoni, as an example, has incredible emotional control. He never shows emotion, and he is lauded for that. Just as with being openly optimistic as opposed to being pessimistic, 'having emotional control' is sometimes seen as evidence of a player's mental toughness. But I would go as far as to say, with the greatest respect for MS the man and the cricketer, that it is not emotional control, but lack of access to emotions. MS is not wired as an emotional type. It's almost as if he doesn't have them; a performance-enhancing gift from birth. Imagine taking that trait as the ultimate characteristic of a 'mentally tough' athlete, and then try to prescribe that to someone who is very emotionally wired, like his successor Virat Kohli. Virat uses his visible and overt emotional charge to drive his success, whereas MS's success is facilitated by his lack of emotional charge.

The emotional and mental side of the game does not have generic prescriptions for performance. 'Mental toughness' is perhaps not even a generic drug. It's closer to being a placebo prescribed by coaches, psychologists and academics who don't really appreciate the art, beauty and complexity of working with athletes as individual human beings first, and as high performers second. When the placebo doesn't work, the athlete gets blamed.
Judging athletes who are not 'mentally tough', optimistic and positive, inhibits us from effectively dealing with the legitimate mental side of the game -specifically when instruction-based coaching is the preferred method.

I honestly believe that we should do away with the concept of mental toughness and replace it with something that is more real and relevant to most people. It has to be authentic to the individual and something he or she can relate to. The overwhelming majority of players lack confidence, have insecurities, doubts and vulnerabilities. So do most of us. We're human and this is normal. Let's keep it real.
With this in mind, our strategy with the Indian team was not to convince the players of how special and tough they were. The media and fans tried to convince them of that 24/7. Our job was to convince the players that they were actually human, and thus to keep things real. Enclosed in that acknowledgement were relief, understanding of the self, and the tremendous power that flowered in conditions that could otherwise easily see self-proclaimed superstars choke up.

On Batting: What does a batsman see?

S B Tang in Cricinfo


It is late December 1971. A tall, 23-year-old South Australian by the name of Greg Chappell walks down the ornate wood-and-iron staircase of Hadley's Orient Hotel in Hobart. He is meeting his older brother Ian for dinner. The two have been parachuted in to bolster a Tasmania Combined XI for their first-class match against a star-studded World XI featuring Sunil Gavaskar, Garry Sobers, Bishan Bedi and Zaheer Abbas at the Tasmania Cricket Association Ground.

The younger of the two Chappells follows the staircase as it takes a 90-degree left turn, walks past the large portrait of a young Queen Victoria and emerges into the beautiful red-and-gold carpeted lobby of the hotel built by convicts more than a century ago. Ian is running late, as usual. Greg, on time as usual, waits patiently. The concierge approaches him. "Mr Chappell," he says, "there's a letter for you." Greg immediately recognises the handwriting on the envelope - it belongs to his father.

He doesn't know it, but the contents of this envelope will change his life. There's no letter inside, just a newspaper clipping - an opinion article by the Adelaide Advertiser's chief cricket writer, Keith Butler. It says that Chappell is wasting his enormous talent and the way he's batting he won't make the forthcoming Ashes tour. At the end of the article he sees the one-line message his father has written: "I don't believe everything that Keith says, but it might be worth thinking about."

Suddenly, Greg doesn't feel hungry at all. "Mate," he tells Ian when he arrives in the lobby, "I'm just going to stay in." He walks back upstairs. He doesn't turn on the lights. In a corner of his single room, there is an upholstered chair. He sits down on it in the dark, alone, and thinks. He thinks about every single game of cricket that he has ever played, from his very first in the backyard with his brother Ian, to park and beach cricket with his mates, to schoolboys' cricket for Prince Alfred College, to grade cricket for Glenelg District Cricket Club, to Sheffield Shield cricket for South Australia, to county cricket for Somerset, to Test cricket for Australia.

What he seeks is nothing less than the answer to the question that has plagued every batsman since the dawn of time: what is the cause of the massive performance differential between my good days and my bad days? What exactly is it that I'm doing better on my good days than on my bad days? 

As he searches his mind for the answer, he enters a deep meditative state. Time passes quickly. Hours later - it is difficult for him to tell how many - he emerges with a stunning realisation: by playing cricket since the age of four, he had, without realising it, developed a systemic process of concentration and a precise method of watching the ball; but he had only been using them consistently on his good days.

There lay the answer to his question: all he had to do was use his own systemic process of concentration and precise method of watching the ball every single time he walked out to bat.

From that day forth, he stops mindlessly hitting balls in training. Instead, he focuses on his process of concentration and method of watching the ball. The aim is to be able to use that mental routine against every single ball that he faces in a match. Five days after his epiphany in Hobart, he gets the opportunity to apply his newfound theory in a match. He is called up to play for Australia - captained by Ian - in their third unofficial Test against the Sobers-captained World XI at the MCG, starting on New Year's Day 1972.

In Australia's first innings, he scores an unbeaten 115. Eight days later, he scores an unbeaten 197 at the SCG in the fourth unofficial Test. As he walks off to the applause of the 19,125-strong crowd, he knows deep down that his batting has gone to an entirely different level. At the tender age of 23, he has discovered what most batsmen spend their entire careers searching fruitlessly for: the secret - for him, anyway - to scoring runs at Test level.

Before his epiphany in Hobart, Chappell scored 243 runs in five Tests at an average of 34.71. After his epiphany, he scored 6867 runs - including 23 hundreds - in 82 Tests at an average of 54.93.

The mental routine that enabled Chappell, in an era when Test bowling was arguably the strongest that it has ever been, to maintain a Test average in excess of 50 for nearly a decade is not particularly complicated.

It starts with the logical principle that mental energy is a finite resource that a batsman must conserve if he is to achieve his ultimate objective of scoring as many runs as possible, which will require him to spend hours, if not days, out in the middle.

Bradman had less than 20/20 eyesight. Barry Richards made the same discovery. He tried corrective lenses, but the 20/20 vision freaked him out - he saw too much

Chappell realised that he had three ascending levels of mental concentration: awareness, fine focus and fierce focus. In order to conserve his finite quantum of mental energy, he would have to use fierce focus as little as possible, so that it was always available when he really needed it. When he walked out to bat, his concentration would be set at its lowest, power-saving level: awareness. He would mark his guard and look around the field, methodically counting all ten fielders until his gaze reached the face of the bowler standing at the top of his mark.

At that point, he would increase his level of concentration to fine focus. As the bowler ran in, he would gently and rhythmically tap his bat on the ground, keeping his central vision on the bowler's face and his peripheral vision on the bowler's body. He believed that a bowler's facial expression and the bodily movements in his run-up and load-up offered the batsman valuable predictive clues as to what ball would be bowled. He would not look at the ball in the bowler's hand as he ran in.

As the bowler jumped into his delivery stride, he would switch up his concentration to its maximum level - fierce focus - and shift his central vision the short distance from the bowler's face to the window just above and next to his head from where he would release the ball. Once the ball appeared in that window, Chappell would watch the ball itself for the first time. He could see everything. He could see the seam of the ball and the shiny and rough side of the ball, even when he was facing a genuine fast bowler. Against spinners, he could see the ball spinning in the air as it travelled towards him. In the unlikely event that he failed to pick what delivery it was out of the hand, he could simply pick it in the air.

"There weren't too many balls that I faced that I was unsure about," Chappell tells the Cricket Monthly matter-of-factly. Because he was able to so quickly decipher where a ball was going to be, he was able to confidently move into position early to, if at all possible, play an attacking, run-scoring shot. Like all of Australia's great Test batsmen, Chappell believes that a batsman should always have the positive mindset of looking to score runs. The greatest threat to that mindset is, and has always been, the thought that lurks omnipresently in the back of every batsman's mind, simply because he is a human being: the fear of getting out. By giving the mind something to do at each and every stage of an innings, a well-defined mental routine such as Chappell's helps quash that fear.

As soon as he finished playing a delivery - whether he had driven it for four, left it, or played and missed it - Chappell cycled his concentration back down to its minimum level of awareness. He understood the importance of keeping his focus on the present. That meant that he had to completely let go of the last ball, even if it had missed his off stump by a millimetre. So he gave his mind something relaxing to do while it was powered down in awareness mode - he looked into the crowd and, whenever he was playing at home, he delighted in finding family and friends and seeing what they were up to. When they met up for dinner in the evenings, his friends were flabbergasted that he was able to recite their movements for the entire day.

After his revelation in Hobart, Greg Chappell made more than 6500 runs at 54.93 © Getty Images

"I have no doubt," Chappell says, "that what allowed me to achieve what I achieved was the fact that I was lucky enough to have learned early in my career that it was about… my mind, not my body. And my subconscious mind was a better cricketer than I could ever be, so what I had to do was get the conscious mind out of the way… give it a job to do - watch his face, watch the [window of release] - and allow my subconscious mind to react to what came."

He saw that the mistake that most batsmen make, especially when they are striving to fulfil their lifelong dream of playing Test cricket for their country, is that they try too hard. They stop trusting the natural instincts that have got them that far and start worrying about getting out, or fretting about the correctness or otherwise of their technique.

At club level, the mistake of trying too hard manifests itself in an even more fundamental error - watching the ball too hard. Former Australia batsman Greg Blewett vividly recalls playing against some grade batsmen who never took their eyes off the ball while they were on strike. They would "watch the ball go from the keeper's hands to first slip, from first slip to point, point to cover, cover to mid-off [and mid-off to the bowler's hands]". Then they would keep watching the ball in the bowler's hands from the top of his run-up to the point of release.

According to Chappell's theory, that method of narrowly watching the ball creates at least four substantive problems.

Firstly, the batsman burns through his finite quantum of mental energy at a rapid rate.

Secondly, watching the ball in the bowler's hand as he is running in has the potential to destabilise a batsman's eyes. "Some bowlers run in and their arms are going everywhere," explains Blewett, a follower of Chappell's theory in the back end of his playing career and now an advocate of it as the head coach of South Australia Under-19s and an assistant coach of South Australia and Adelaide Strikers. "It'd be really hard to focus on that ball [because] your eyes would be darting all over the place."

Thirdly, if the batsman watches the ball in the bowler's hand as he's running in then once the bowler jumps into his delivery stride, he will have to quickly shift his central vision from the ball in the bowler's hand next to his thigh up to the area above his head from which he will release the ball. That is a long distance to have to rapidly shift one's central vision, certainly much longer than the short distance - from the bowler's face to the window of release - that adherents to Chappell's theory have to shift their central vision. "It's ad hoc," says Chappell. He "could get there 75% of the time, but 25% of the time might struggle to get there at the right time, whereas… he could get [from the bowler's face to the window of release] nearly 100% of the time."

Greg Blewett firmly believes that the subject of watching the ball and how to best watch it is "one of the most important things there is" for batsmen

Fourthly, if the batsman focuses his gaze solely and exclusively on the ball in the bowler's hand as he is running in, then he undermines his peripheral vision of the bowler's face and body, thereby robbing himself of the visual clues that may help him predict what ball the bowler is going to bowl.

Thus, "watch the ball", that generic bit of advice that every cricketer has heard at some point in their life, could, says Chappell, "be the wrong instruction" - if it is unaccompanied by any explanation or discussion as to how to watch the ball.

Indeed, one could argue that the batting maxim reportedly promulgated by the current Australian head coach Darren Lehmann - "watch the ball, c**t" - is problematic for more reasons than one. It could easily be misinterpreted to mean "watch the ball really hard", which would lead batsmen to watch the ball in an overly narrow fashion.

When Chappell first became aware of his method of watching the ball some 46 years ago, the technology did not exist to scientifically test and evaluate it. That technology - in the form of glasses that allow scientists to record and see where a batsman is looking - now exists, and in the past seven years two strands of research have emerged to support Chappell's method.

The first strand consists of two empirical studies. The first of those studies, conducted by sports scientists David Mann, Wayne Spratford and Bruce Abernethy in 2012, tested the batting performance of two Australian Test batsmen - each of whom had played more than 70 Tests and averaged in excess of 45 - and two Australian grade batsmen. This was done with the players wearing Mobile Eye eye-tracking glasses. The second study, conducted by sports scientists Abernethy, Mann and Vishnu Sarpeshkar in 2017, tested the batting performance of 43 batsmen while they wore the same glasses - 13 elite adults who had represented their state or country at senior level (including four members of the Australian squad), ten elite juniors who had represented their state or country at U-19 or U-17 level (including four members of the Australian U-19 squad), ten adult club batsmen (with an average age of 31.7) and ten young club batsmen (with an average age of 21).

A key finding from these two empirical studies is that the elite batsmen - that is, the two Australian Test batsmen from the 2012 study and the 13 elite adults and ten elite juniors from the 2017 study - were distinguished from club batsmen by their superior ability to predictively saccade their vision: that is, they could accurately jump their vision ahead of the ball's live flight path to where the ball is going to be.

When they were facing anything shorter than a full delivery, the elite batsmen were generally able to accurately saccade their vision twice - once to the point of bounce, and once following the point of bounce to the point of bat-ball impact.

Watching the ball actually involves a certain amount of prediction about where the ball is going to be once released © Getty Images

They were also able to maintain their gaze at the point of bat-ball contact when hitting the ball. Hence, elite batsmen are more likely than club batsmen to be able to see their bat hitting the ball. Justin Langer, for example, told Mann, "I know that I watch the ball at the moment I hit it," and could clearly describe seeing markings on the ball as it made contact with his bat during his playing days. Don Bradman believed that this is possible too, instructing batsmen in his classic coaching book, The Art of Cricket: "Try to glue the eyes on the ball until the very moment it hits the bat. This cannot always be achieved in practice but try."

The superior ability to accurately perform the two saccades against balls of all lengths, Mann tells the Cricket Monthly, "seems to be non-negotiable" for elite batsmen. As a scientist, he is quick to acknowledge that "it's always hard to tease apart what makes [a batsman] great, or what's an effect of him being great", but underlines that "all the elite guys that we've tested" do the two saccades.

As a matter of logic, in order for the elite batsmen's saccadic eye movements to work successfully, they have to be able to accurately predict where the ball is going to be (so that they can saccade their vision to that spot before the ball gets there).

Think about that for a moment. Such an ability more closely resembles the powers of a (fictional) Jedi Knight than those we typically associate with real-world flesh-and-blood athletes. "He can see things before they happen," said the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn of a nine-year-old boy named Anakin Skywalker. "That's why he appears to have such quick reflexes. It's a Jedi trait." Well, science now tells us that elite batsmen aren't much different: they know where the ball is going to be before it gets there and saccade their vision to that point. That's how they appear to have such quick reflexes.

That predictive ability is - as Chappell theorised 46 years ago in a Hobart hotel room - partially derived from the visual information batsmen obtain from a bowler's run-up and load-up. That information, explains Mann, is one of "three key sources of predictive information" for a batsman. The other two are the "online" information that a batsman can obtain from the live ball flight and the "contextual information" that a batsman can obtain about a bowler from having faced him before in a match, watching TV footage of him, or studying statistics about his prior behaviour.

The second strand of research lending support to Chappell's theory is a study conducted at the Australian Institute of Sport in 2010 by Mann, Abernethy and Damian Farrow. The scientists gave ten Australian grade batsmen with natural 20/20 vision contact lenses blurring their vision at three increasing levels: +1.00, +2.00 and +3.00. The batsmen - some of whom had represented their state or territory at senior or junior level - wore liquid crystal occlusion goggles that on random deliveries occluded (that is, completely blocked) their vision at the approximate moment when the bowler released the ball.

What Chappell seeks is nothing less than the answer to the question that has plagued every batsman: what is the cause of the massive differential between my good days and bad?

The scientists then tested the batsmen's performance against three bowlers - two medium-pacers who were opening the bowling in second grade in Canberra and a quick who had played in the Big Bash League as an opening bowler. The batsmen were asked to perform one of two tasks: try to strike the ball with their bat, or merely call out whether the ball was an off-side or leg-side delivery. The scientists then recorded whether the batsmen swung their bat on the correct side of the wicket, and whether they correctly called out off side or leg side.

The results they obtained were interesting. With their vision occluded when the bowler released the ball, the batsmen were able to swing their bat on the correct side of the wicket nearly 80% of the time when they were wearing +1.00 blurring lenses. This suggests that a batsman's ability to access the predictive clues in the bowler's run-up and load-up is arguably as, or even more, important to his ball-striking performance as his ability to actually see the ball at the moment it leaves the bowler's hand. (In case you were wondering, the +2.00 and +3.00 blurring lenses clearly reduced the batsmen's anticipatory performance.)

The batsmen's accuracy in calling out whether the ball was an off-side or leg-side delivery when they had 20/20 vision was terrible - barely above 50%. Their verbal calling performance clearly improved when they wore the +1.00 blurring lenses. This suggests that the batsmen's usage of the visual clues in the bowler's run-up and load-up is subconscious. "So when they were in the situation where they had to consciously think about [whether the ball would be a leg-side or off-side delivery] and… call out [which it would be], the +1.00 somehow made them better," says Mann. "It seems as though taking away that very clear, conscious information [that they get with 20/20 vision] may give them access to the [subconscious] information that they're more likely to rely on in a coupled scenario [that is, when they're asked to try hit the ball with their bat]."

Now, a sceptic might ask, scientific research in a laboratory is all well and good, but how does Chappell's theory fare today in the real world of first-class and Test cricket?

The Cricket Monthly spoke to six active professional Australian batsmen - all of whom have played Shield cricket and three of whom have played Test cricket - and one retired Australian Test batsman. Six of the seven batsmen - 27-year-old Chris Lynn, 35-year-old Ed Cowan, 24-year-old Kurtis Patterson, 20-year-old Will Pucovski, 46-year-old Greg Blewett, and 28-year-old Joe Burns - said that they naturally and independently developed a method for watching the ball that is either identical or very similar to Chappell's. The only one who didn't - 43-year-old Brad Hodge - had specific medical and environmental reasons for his divergence, as we will see.


Research suggests that even when their vision is obscured, batsmen can often correctly guess on which side the ball is going to land, based on clues they pick up from the bowler's run-up © Getty Images

Lynn, Cowan, Patterson, Pucovski and Blewett's methods are identical to Chappell's in that they do not watch the ball in the bowler's hand as he runs in to bowl and only start watching it when it appears in the window above and next to the bowler's head from where it will be released. Burns differs slightly in that he tries to visually "lock in" on the seam of the ball in the bowler's hand as soon as it comes up over the bowling shoulder just prior to release. Thus, he starts watching the ball a fraction earlier than the others and the window he looks at is larger than that used by the others, extending from the bowler's bowling shoulder all the way up to the estimated point of release.

This slight difference may stem from the fact that, unlike Lynn, Cowan, Patterson, Pucovski and Blewett, none of whom can recall ever using a method for watching the ball different from that which they use now, Burns clearly recalls using an entirely different method when he was a kid.

"I used to really focus on [the ball] in the bowler's hand [as he ran in]", says Burns, who has scored three Test hundreds in 13 Tests. One evening, when he was about 16, Burns felt "really rushed and hurried up by the ball" as he was batting under lights on a synthetic pitch while training at Northern Suburbs District Cricket Club in Brisbane's Shaw Park. The bowlers were getting faster, both in terms of ball- and arm speed, as he advanced through the ranks, and he realised there and then that watching the ball in the bowler's hand from the top of his mark just wasn't working. His reasoning was similar to that reached by Chappell and Blewett years earlier: his eyes were getting destabilised by the movement in the bowlers' hands as they ran in; he had insufficient time to react well to the ball being bowled; and there was a real risk that he could lose track of the ball, especially if the bowler had a whippy, slingy or heavily side-on action.

Thus, that evening in Shaw Park, Burns "naturally" switched to his present method. Like Chappell, Burns looks at the bowler - not the ball - as he runs in, keeping his eyes "relaxed", but whereas Chappell looked specifically at the bowler's face as he ran in, Burns looks at the bowler generally.

Blewett's point of focus is similar, although not identical to Burns'. He looks generally at the bowler's whole body as he's running in before focusing more on his top half as he gets closer to the crease. Lynn - an active coach who works with club mates and youngsters - and Patterson are identical to Chappell: they look at the bowler's face as he's running in. Cowan and Pucovski, a 20-year-old Victorian who has just scored his maiden first-class century in his second Shield game, do not consciously watch anything specific at all as the bowler's running in - Cowan refers to this almost meditative state of mind as "completely egoless and emotionless… indifference"; Pucovski calls it "trying to keep as clear a mind as possible" - but readily acknowledge that their subconscious is able to easily identify and process the visual predictive clues in the bowler's run-up and load-up.

Cowan does not consciously watch anything specific as the bowler is running in - he refers to this almost meditative state of mind as "completely egoless and emotionless… indifference"

"So much is picked up in those cues," observes Cowan, "and you can't underestimate" them, which is why, if he hasn't faced a bowler before, he will go watch them bowl from behind as they are warming up out in the middle and mentally "practise batting against them". That information is then safely stored in his mind, ready for his subconscious to access as the bowler runs in to bowl to him in the match. If a bowler runs in faster or grimaces, then that is picked up automatically by his subconscious mind without his conscious mind even realising it.

Similarly, despite not consciously watching anything specific at all as the bowler is running in, Pucovski has no trouble seeing predictive clues in the bowler's run-up and load-up, such as fast bowlers who "drag their front shoulder off" when they're about to bowl a bouncer, and bowlers who "open up their action quite a bit more" for their inswinger or are "more side-on" for their outswinger.

Even someone like Burns, who at a conscious level watches the bowler generally, says: "I don't think I consciously notice [those visual clues]. It's not like a bowler runs in and I think, 'Yeah, he's bowling an inswinger' or 'He's bowling an outswinger' or 'He's bowling a bumper'. But there are times where… it almost feels like instinct that you know where a ball is going to be. I think that's just from the cues that you pick up subconsciously from all the information that the bowler's giving you as he runs in." Lynn even looks at "where [the bowler's] eyes are looking" as he's running in.

The importance of conserving scarce mental energy was another of Chappell's principles that met with universal approval from the seven batsmen interviewed. Each had his own mechanism for completely switching off between balls and overs. Lynn relaxes his mind by standing still in his crease and having a look around the field, picking up any available cues from the fielders - especially the captain - and the bowler. Between overs, unless the match situation - for example, a pitch that's playing up or a run chase - requires it, Lynn generally doesn't think or talk about cricket at all. "Especially if I'm batting with someone like [Brendon] McCullum," says Lynn, "we just talk about whatever." He admits, with a good-natured laugh, that sometimes he and his batting partner will look into the crowd to "try and find" some attractive members of the other sex.

To switch off, Burns strolls down the pitch, does some gardening, chats to his partner then walks back to his crease. "If I stand stationary at the crease," he explains, "I start to have different thoughts in my mind, which just taxes energy from what I'm trying to do. So I try and keep myself active and not be still for too long."

A similar method is employed by Patterson, a tall, lean New South Welshman who, with 2250 first-class runs at 45.91 over the last two years, is knocking on the door to Test selection. "I just walk away to square leg and think about whatever it is that I want to think about and don't fight it," he explains. "I think it's important, particularly in longer-form cricket… to let your mind go [between balls]."


The colour-blind Brad Hodge preferred to watch the ball from the bowler's hand so he could focus on the seam © Getty Images

Blewett was the most flexible in terms of his mental relaxation routine between balls, being happy to choose one or more from a full menu of options: a chat with his partner, gardening, a walk out to square leg, a look into the crowd (to see family and friends) or the TV and radio commentary boxes (to see who was commentating). The one constant element in his routine was the final stage: he took his right-handed batting stance by putting his right foot down before his left foot.

Hodge ends his between-balls relaxation routine the exact same way. "I would never go in left foot first." But before stepping into his stance, Hodge employs a bucolic relaxation tactic that none of the other interviewed batsmen use: he walks away from the crease, puts his head down and looks at the grass for around 20 seconds, "because grass is a calming colour".

Most batsmen interviewed found the notion of watching the ball in the bowler's hand from the top of his mark - which, anecdotally, is how a significant proportion of club batsmen interpret the cliché "watch the ball" - to be utterly alien. Cowan, who played his 13th summer as a Shield cricketer and only today announced his retirement from first-class cricket, has "never heard of anyone" doing it at first-class level.

But there exists at least one who did (and still does in the BBL): Brad Hodge, who looks for the ball in the bowler's hand as he is walking back to his mark (to try to identify the shiny and rough sides), and when the bowler reaches the top of his mark, visually locates the seam of the ball in the hand, which, from that point on, becomes the object of the focus of his central vision.

Hodge is quick to point out that there are two peculiar reasons why he developed this method. Firstly, he's colour-blind. It's easier for him to pick up the ball if he focuses on the seam, which is clearly a different colour from the rest of the ball.

Hodge can't remember how he watched the ball when he was a kid, but he knows when he became conscious of the importance of watching the seam. It was the summer of 1993-94. He had just broken into Victoria's Shield team as an 18-year-old. One day early that summer, for the first - and, as it later turned out, only - time in his life, Hodge heard a fellow batsman speak about how to watch the ball. "Don't just watch the ball," said Dean Jones, "watch the seam of the ball." Those words commanded respect - Jones was not only Victoria's captain and best batsman, a veteran of 52 Tests and 150 ODIs with an average above 45 in both formats, but Hodge's childhood hero and mentor in the Victorian team.

The second reason why Hodge developed his method for watching the ball is peculiar not just to him but to all Victorian Shield batsmen: their home ground, the MCG, has a dry, abrasive pitch that is conducive to reverse swing. That reasoning is consistent with that of Blewett, Burns and Patterson, all of whom said that reverse swing constitutes an exception to their general rule of not watching the ball in the bowler's hand as he is running in. However, Blewett and Patterson add, this exception is rarely used nowadays because, as Patterson says, "most bowlers… like to cover the ball" as they are running in.

"I know when I'm in form and whacking the ball, I'm watching the ball literally hit the base of the bat" CHRIS LYNN

Hodge is in step with the other batsmen interviewed in that although his central vision is focused on the seam as the bowler is running in, he is "definitely" still able to pick up predictive clues in the bowler's run-up and load-up with his peripheral vision. Moreover, he observes that when he's in good form, his focus is "more broad", meaning that he's "not [consciously] looking for the seam" of the ball at all, "because, for some reason, his computer [that is, mind] will just do that naturally."

Lynn describes the state of being in good form in very similar terms: the ball "looks like it's coming down [in] slow motion and … it's like [your mind is] in auto-pilot. I've had games where I think 'F***, what happened there?' And you've done well and you can't really remember it because it's just on auto-pilot and it just does it itself basically."

All seven batsmen interviewed can see the seam of the ball and the shiny and rough sides as it travels towards them. Blewett, who batted in the top three for the bulk of his first-class and Test career, vividly recalls seeing "the gold writing" on the sides of new balls as they travelled towards him. When a spinner is bowling, all seven batsmen can see the ball spinning in the air as it travels towards them. Cowan points out that being able to see "how many revolutions" the ball has as it travels towards him is necessary for him to survive as a first-class batsman, because many spinners - for example, Fawad Ahmed - bowl with a scrambled seam, making it futile to watch the seam of the ball once they release it.

Even when the seam isn't scrambled, modern spinners bowl balls that are so well disguised that they can only be reliably picked by watching the rotations of the ball in the air. Fingerspinners, for example: Rangana Herath, R Ashwin and Steve O'Keefe, bowl a skidding straight ball that, for all intents and purposes, looks like their stock ball - identical seam position, almost identical bowling action - but is bowled with underspin rather than the overspin and/or sidespin that characterises their stock ball. Cowan picks that delivery - which, in Australia, is generally referred to as a "square ball" - by watching the ball spin backwards in the air as it travels towards him.

Bradman was unequivocal on this point. "A batsman," he wrote, "should be able to see the ball turning in the air as it comes down the pitch towards him when the bowler is a slow spinner. This is necessary against a class googly bowler like Arthur Mailey. Even if he disguises his googly you still have the added insurance of watching the spin of the ball to make sure which way it will turn on pitching."

This quality of vision is clearly the norm for batsmen at first-class and Test level, so much so that Blewett is genuinely taken aback when this writer - a bog-standard club cricketer - informs him that he has never been able to see the ball spinning in the air as it travels towards him. "That surprises me," he says in a politely bewildered tone, "because I just think that everyone's eyes are pretty similar and that you'd just be able to see that."

Most of the seven batsmen interviewed said that they could - in line with the scientific research conducted by Mann, Spratford, Abernethy and Sarpeshkar - recall seeing their bat hit the ball. "I know when I'm in form and whacking the ball, I'm watching the ball literally hit the base of the bat," says Lynn. The only two who could not recall seeing their bat hitting the ball were Blewett and Pucovski, but they could recall seeing it till late in its trajectory - roughly a metre before contact.

What does watching the ball mean exactly? It is a question most batsmen grapple with their entire careers © Getty Images

If a batsman has a well-honed method for watching the ball efficiently - like all Test and first-class batsmen do - then a substantial body of anecdotal evidence indicates that he will be able to see the ball well enough to smash it even if he doesn't have 20/20 eyesight. Bradman had less than 20/20 eyesight. Neil Harvey discovered early in his Test career that he was short-sighted and chose to keep playing without corrective lenses. Barry Richards made the same discovery much later in his career. He tried corrective lenses, but the 20/20 vision freaked him out - he saw too much. So he kept batting (successfully) without them.

More recently, Cowan only discovered that he was minus 1.50 short-sighted in his third year of university, when he sat at the back of some lecture theatres and struggled to see the whiteboard. He had been crowned the player of the national U-17s carnival, represented Australia in the U-19 World Cup, scored Sydney first-grade hundreds and broken into the NSW Shield squad while (unwittingly) being short-sighted enough to not be allowed to legally drive without corrective lenses. Even looking back on it now with 20/20 eyesight courtesy of laser surgery, Cowan says that he had no issues playing pace when he was short-sighted. The only thing that troubled him was playing spin, because he "couldn't really see the ball spin" in the air as it travelled towards him. "The joy of playing in Australia," he says with a chuckle, is that he just "assumed it wasn't going to turn".

Test and first-class batsmen naturally (and subconsciously) develop their methods of watching the ball efficiently by playing cricket against real bowlers from a young age. Interestingly, it appears that becoming aware of what exactly one's method is can dramatically improve a batsman's performance by allowing him to use that method more consistently. Chappell's epiphany in Hobart at the age of 23 is the most obvious example, but there are others.

In late March 2000, after playing 46 Tests over the preceding five years, 28-year-old Blewett was axed from the Australian Test team to make way for Matthew Hayden. Blewett went back to playing Shield cricket. Later that year, as he was batting in the nets at Adelaide Oval, South Australia's then coach, Greg Chappell, asked him, "Are you watching the ball closely?"

"Yeah, of course I am," replied Blewett.

"No, no," said Chappell, "are you really watching the ball out of the bowler's hand?"

Blewett went away and thought about it. For the first time in his life he became fully conscious of the fact that he had a precise method of watching the ball, just like Chappell had nearly three decades earlier. From that point on, Blewett stopped thinking about all the little technical things that he, like so many out-of-form batsmen, had been constantly tinkering with and said to himself: right, just watch the ball closely out of the window of release. "That," he recalls, "took out all my other thoughts and all I was doing was just watching the ball and reacting to the ball. Everything then just happened naturally for me, which was brilliant."

Armed with that self-awareness, Blewett embarked on the most productive period of his career, scoring 3055 first-class runs and ten hundreds, at an average of 57.64 over the next three Australian summers.

Elite batsmen know where the ball is going to be before it gets there and saccade their vision to that point. That's how they appear to have such quick reflexes

Perhaps surprisingly, it appears that the subject of how to watch the ball is not something that is generally spoken about in Australian dressing rooms. Six of the seven 21st-century Australian batsmen interviewed could not recall the subject being a topic of discussion in the dressing rooms that they have been a part of. In his 24 years (and counting) as a professional cricketer, Hodge says that the subject of watching the ball and how to best watch the ball has "never come up in [conversation with] any cricketer that I know, apart from Deano".

According to Mann, the science tells us that explicitly telling a player (in any ball-hitting sport) to perform the two saccades doesn't work, which is why sports scientists instead design exercises to naturally encourage players to perform those saccades. For example, Mann explains that they asked tennis players "to call out which half of the racquet the ball hit when they hit it" and found that "that was quite successful in improving hitting performance".

However, at present, the science doesn't tell us whether one ought to have explicit conversations with batsmen about how to best watch the ball. "It's a big question about whether we should talk about it," says Mann. "It's something that's so implicit, is it something that we want to raise conscious awareness of with batters?"

None of the seven batsmen interviewed objected to the notion of starting conversations with batsmen about how to best watch the ball, provided that batsmen aren't being compelled to adopt a particular method. "You've got to be a little bit careful about it," acknowledges Blewett. "It depends on who you're coaching and what time of the season it is and all that sort of stuff." That said, he firmly believes that the subject of watching the ball and howto best watch it is "one of the most important things there is" for batsmen and, as a coach, he starts conversations with them about it all the time, typically by saying something along the lines of, "Right, c'mon, let's make sure you're watching the ball closely."

"The best form of coaching," observes Patterson, "would be to just have a conversation… [that] gets someone to think about it themselves."

Bradman would approve. The greatest batsman of them all wrote that "the two most important pieces of advice" that he gave young batsmen were '(a) concentrate and (b) watch the ball.'"

How to do those two things is a question that every batsman must answer for himself.

The case for sledging

Sam Perry in Cricinfo

Around a decade ago a 20-year-old man walked to a suburban wicket with his team in a precarious position. The previous week they had conceded a glut of runs to a rampaging opposition that included a recently discarded international player. In a message to selectors and anyone else who wanted to listen, the deposed veteran made a score that dropped jaws.

And so the 20-year-old strode to the crease, his team 40 for 4 in reply. Two overs remained before lunch. Slightly shaking but presenting the bravest face possible, he asked for centre. In an attempt at familiarity, he addressed the umpire by name. It was a disastrous overcompensation, seized upon gleefully.

"Do you know him, mate?" offered the point fieldsman. Chuckles ensued from those in earshot. The batsman glanced behind him to see four slips waiting. Each stared, stony-faced, directly back. Two had arms folded, two had hands behind their backs, like policemen strolling their beat. Robocop wraparound sunglasses were the day's fashion, as was the gnashing of chewing gum. The batsman probably shouldn't have addressed the umpire by name. It played on his mind.

"Rod, do you know this bloke?" came the follow-up from first slip. It was the veteran record-breaker, speaking to the umpire, capitalising on the moment. All heads turned to the man in white, now a central character in the contrived pantomime. Rod chuckled. "Nope!" he replied, followed by more laughter. A ball hadn't yet been bowled.

The veteran continued, "Mate, what's going on with your socks?" Now we had a problem. Unbeknown to the batsman, he had tucked his socks into his pants before affixing his pads. "Is this Under-12s? Rod, am I playing Under-12s?" Guffaws followed from all but the already humiliated batsman. He was out for 5, caught at gully off the last ball before lunch.

Sledging has utility and that's primarily why it exists. While few of us ever will, were we to step into the private confines of a professional dressing room, we would likely find believers. You won't hear this publicly, though, as the word itself has become villainous to cricketing morality. Very few are willing to openly defend sledging, though many privately believe in its value. Pragmatism often trumps principle.

So in this Trumpian world, perhaps it's time to air the views of a silent majority. Maybe sledging is effective. Maybe sledging makes a difference. Maybe sledging helps teams win.

We accept that cricket is a mental game, and let's face it, the majority of us cannot control ourselves very well mentally

Contrary to popular conception, sledging is rarely a series of witty one-liners of the sort found in internet listicles. Nor is it often outright verbal abuse. In large part it's merely a stream of hushed expletives, passive-aggressive body language, conversations between team-mates, and assorted noises, the worst of which is laughter.

We accept that cricket is a mental game, and let's face it, the majority of us cannot control ourselves very well mentally. We are not purveyors of unadulterated Zen and focused positivity. We are mostly flawed individuals, who carry our nerves, insecurities and awareness of weakness into most of life's important moments. We all learned at an early age that humiliation, embarrassment, and feelings of not belonging compromise our confidence. Ergo, if you accept that confidence is critical to cricketing success, then isn't it the opposition's imperative to weaken it?

Which brings us to sledging's ethical considerations. Among the many and overlapping guiding principles for a player's behaviour, particularly at the professional level, standing as tall as any is this: "What will help us win?" It's here that we confront sledging's mythical line. For most, the line is simply about what you can get away with. Or as Nathan Lyon described it, "We try to head-butt the line." If there is an upside or edge to be exploited in pursuit of victory, aren't players arguably justified in doing so? When it comes to sledging, for many the question is less "Is this right?", more "Will this work?"

Of course, it doesn't always work. Some personalities thrive under sledging, while others are immune. But these are rare birds. It's more likely than not that sledging hurts us. If we succeed, we do so in spite of it and not because of it. And so in our new, Trump-led world, where the prevailing doctrines seem to be less about honour and more about winning, it is fitting to view sledging as a viable tool in the arsenals of fielding sides. No one will say so, mind.
Beyond its capacity to mentally disrupt the opposition, in some countries sledging seemingly has a cultural allure too. You don't have to travel far on YouTube to witness the bipartisan adoration for former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, whose ability to deliver withering verbal takedowns and comebacks is arguably without peer. He is adored for his capacity to verbally undermine his opposition, and it's understandable that many may seek to emulate that when it comes to facing opponents of their own.

This potent yet fragile tool for psychological disruption remains as alive as ever. Ask any batsman whether they'd prefer to be sledged when they bat or not, and the honest answer will be no. And it is for this reason that they will engage in sledging themselves when fielding. While many might express a glib, deep-voiced indifference to "chat", we would all much prefer friendly, welcoming, encouraging environs when out in the middle. The reality, however sad or unethical, is that sledging usually makes one's innings more difficult. So long as professional pragmatism and the doctrine of winning prevails, so will sledging, whether publicly acknowledged or not.

How do batsmen cope with the intensity of their lonely skill?

Digging the pitch, repetitive body movements, talking to themselves, superstitious behaviour, visualisation - different ways that batsmen deal with the pressure of their profession


Michael Bond in Cricinfo


All sportspeople like to imagine that their discipline is the most mentally challenging, that winning or losing comes from within. But batsmen have a stronger claim than most. What other sport demands such intense concentration, affords participants so little control over their situation and penalises mistakes so cruelly and with such dramatic ritual?

Batting is a game of life and death like no other. Success - a century, a match-saving last stand - can live with you forever. But getting out feels like the end of everything: you are dismissed not just from the field of play, but from your own dreams of hopefulness and redemption.

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THE MASKS WE WEAR

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Dismissed batsmen are like mourners at their own funerals. The dressing room falls silent as they return, "in respect for the dead", as Mike Brearley puts it in The Art of Captaincy (1985).

"There aren't many situations in sport where you have this challenge of one tiny mistake and that's it, finished, the rest of the day you're watching from the sidelines," says sports psychologist Steve Bull, who worked with the England cricket team for 17 years. "It creates a particular type of pressure which I don't think other athletes experience."

Given the intensity of the mental drama, it is little wonder that a batsman's struggles are with himself as much as with the bowler he faces, and that a lack of confidence can invite negative thinking and a fear of failure. For top-level batsmen with near-perfect technical skills, protecting themselves from such tendencies is critical. The methods they use to reduce anxiety, stay positive and maintain focus are idiosyncratic, often eccentric and tell us as much about the quirks of the human mind as the nuances of cricket.

If you watched England's three-match Test series against Sri Lanka this summer, you will have spotted a graphic example of one of these methods. Before each ball, the Sri Lankan opener Kaushal Silva performs what psychologists call a "pre-performance routine". He adjusts the velcro on his gloves, moves his bat from his left to his right hand and holds it up in front of him, moves his left elbow back and forth eight times (fewer if he's facing a spinner) as if pulling on an imaginary rope, then, gripping his bat with both hands, arches his back before settling into his crease.

The repetition looks neurotic, but Silva has developed it to help him feel settled. "I don't really count the exact number of times I do it, it just comes from my body," he says. "I do it until I have calmed my nerves and I feel OK and I'm really focused. These small things help me to be myself and to just concentrate on the next ball."

It seems to be working. Sri Lanka lost 0-2, but Silva won his team's Player-of-the-Series award for his 193 runs.

Most batsmen have pre-performance routines, though few as elaborate as Silva's. They might wander a few steps towards square leg, tap the bat on the ground a particular way or pull at their shirt. What psychological purpose does this serve? Brearley thinks it's "a way of clearing the mind of the last ball, getting on with the next one, making clear to oneself that a line needs to be drawn under the last one".

In Jonathan Trott's case this is literally true. He marks his guard with a shallow trench, which he reinforces before each delivery, as if to bury everything that's gone before, a habit he repeats whether he's batting in the nets or in a county or international game.

Such repetition is critical to why routines work, says Bull. "It has to be 100% consistent, every ball always the same. You need to get your routines habitualised to the point where you don't think about them, to practise them so that when you're in the middle you go into automatic pilot."

In other words, batsmen should tune their mental routines alongside their physical ones so that the two coalesce. Consider Kevin Pietersen's advice to a 12-year-old budding cricketer who asked him on Twitter how to stop "second-guessing" himself when playing a shot, a common mental error among cricketers still developing their technique. "Practise, practise, practise, and trust your practise," Pietersen replied. "Hardest thing to do but when you do it changes your game."

Perhaps the most tangible function of routines is that they give the batsman a sense of control over a situation which, for the most part, is out of their hands. The state of the wicket, the weather, the path of the ball through the air and off the pitch are beyond his reckoning; his pre-ball ritual is all his own. This need for control amid so much uncertainty may explain why batsmen are particularly prone to superstitions. Unlike a pre-performance routine, a superstition - essentially an irrational belief in implausible causality - is unlikely to improve performance. Yet cricket is full of them.

The Glamorgan opener Steve James avoided eating duck meat until he retired, and he wouldn't allow his daughter to have plastic ducks in her bath. Mike Atherton had to be first on to the field at the start of an innings, even if it meant barging past his opening partner on the way down the pavilion steps. The South African batsman Neil McKenzie used to tape his bat to the dressing-room ceiling because his team-mates had once done this as a practical joke prior to him scoring a century. Steve Waugh batted with a red rag in his pocket for similar reasons.

Derek Randall, like many batsmen, hated being on 13. "I couldn't wait to get off it," he says. "Sometimes I'd get out because I was trying too hard to get off the blooming thing."

Ed Smith, one of the most notoriously superstitious cricketers, had a habit of asking the umpire, mid-over, how many balls were left. For the first part of his career he did this always after the fourth ball, then switched to asking after the third ball. Since he batted for around 15,000 overs in his career, he must have asked this question of the umpire around 15,000 times.

"It was silly and I knew it," he writes in Luck: A Fresh Look at Fortune (2012). "It was unintelligent and I knew it. It was a source of mirth and I knew it. But I did it anyway. Superstition was a dependency I found hard to give up."

Many batsmens' superstitions revolve around an obsession with their kit. Trott is scrupulous about how he arranges his bats. Atherton always followed the same padding-up routine: box, chest guard, inside thigh-pad, outside thigh-pad, left pad, right pad, arm guard, gloves, helmet. This kind of fastidiousness is not too surprising since batting is much about organisation, repetition and structure.

Yet rigorously adhering to a ritual is unlikely to put you in the runs and could make things worse. "If the superstition is something you might not have control over, like wearing your lucky socks, what happens when you lose your lucky socks or they fall apart," says sports psychologist Stewart Cotterill. "It will have the opposite effect: you'll feel you're not ready."

Once all the fussing and the rituals and the routines are done and the batsman is settled at the crease, he can then focus on the bowling. This is where the real test begins. Unless you are an expert meditator, paying close sustained attention to something for long periods can be mentally draining. To deal with this, coaches encourage batsmen to "dial up" their focus when the bowler is running in and "dial down" between balls.

Atherton says switching on and off like this is "absolutely vital" and came easily to him, a naturally relaxed character. "All studies show you can't concentrate for lengthy periods without a break. The ball is 'live' for maybe six to ten seconds, so that is all you have to concentrate for."

Silva pares down the window of concentration even further, to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. He calculates that this way, if he sets out to score a century in, say, 180 to 200 balls, he will have to concentrate deeply for just ten to 15 minutes. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier. You don't worry about the long term, you just focus on the particular ball."

"Mental skills are like physical skills. You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives"

STEVE BULL, SPORTS PSYCHOLOGIST

The thought of surviving hours at the crease can seem overwhelming if you don't break it down.

Tammy Beaumont, who this summer became the first woman to hit back-to-back ODI centuriesfor England, during the series against Pakistan, worries only about the next five runs. "I'll tell myself: get to five, once I get to five get to ten, keep it like that, keep it all about the next ball."

Another approach is to segment time. Brearley and Randall did this during the Centenary Testbetween England and Australia in Melbourne in 1977. Needing 463 to win with a wicket down, they decided to take it in 15-minute sections. "Stick at it, Skip. In ten minutes there'll only be 15 minutes to tea," Brearley recalls Randall saying, in The Art of Captaincy. They lost by 45 runs; Randall scored 174.

You don't have to be an international or even a professional cricketer to benefit from these mental heuristics. Bull says the key difference between elite and "Sunday afternoon batsmen" is that "Sunday afternoon batsmen tend to overcomplicate things. They're standing there tapping the ground as the bowler runs in, thinking about where the fields are, thinking about their left-hand grip, where their shoulders are. The best players in the world are just standing there saying: watch the ball."

Mental routines are a way to simplify things, to shut out technical thoughts, memories of mistimed shots and other internal distractions, and to help the batsman settle into a state of readiness that Bull calls "relaxed alertness". But routines alone may not be enough, especially in international games where the pressures can be immense. To settle nerves and maintain confidence through an innings, many batsmen engage in what used to be considered a symptom of mental illness but is now recognised as fully functional: talking to yourself.

In a 2013 study at an English first-class cricket club, psychologists at Cardiff Metropolitan University found that batsmen used self-talk regularly, either to motivate themselves in challenging situations - when walking out to bat, for example, or after a poor shot - or to deliver instructional cues that focus attention, such as "Watch the ball!"

In fact, "Watch the ball" seems to be the default cue for most batsmen. Ricky Ponting used it. You can sometimes see Eoin Morgan mouthing it before a ball. Beaumont, after watching one of Ponting's masterclasses, adopted it then adapted it - her current cue is "Time the ball, play straight". Easy if you know how.

One of the most notorious self-talkers in cricket history is Randall. He did it constantly and out loud. "It was spontaneous, it was a natural thing to do. When I'm nervous I start talking. It would help me concentrate. It annoyed everybody, including the people who played with me."

During the fourth Test of the 1978-79 Ashes, when Randall scored 150 during the second innings and turned the series in England's favour, his monologue continued throughout the nine hours and 42 minutes he spent at the crease. Here's a snatch of it, as related to Sunday Times journalist Dudley Doust by his opponents and team-mates: "Come on, Rags," he says. "Get stuck in. Don't take any chances. Get forward, get forward. Get behind the ball. Take your time, slow and easy. You idiot, Rags. Come on, come. Come on, England."

Younis Khan, who averages 53.72 in Test cricket and is Pakistan's highest-ever run scorer, also talks to himself all the time when he's at the wicket. But he has a slightly different approach to most, conducting his conversations with an alter ego that he conjures up as he goes out to bat.

"I imagine there is a guy standing in front of me and he is Younis Khan, and just talk with him. It's like there are two Younis Khans standing face to face like a boxer, and they are talking and looking each other in the eyes. Come on, Younis Khan, you can do this, you can do that."

Self-talk can keep you focused, and it can also help maintain confidence, without which batting can feel like Russian roulette. Mark Ramprakash, the England men's batting coach, says confidence and self-belief are "absolutely paramount. They can work wonders: they can make up for a less-than-perfect technique. The thing with cricket is that you have a lot of bad days. You make one wrong decision, or someone takes a great catch. The best players, like Alastair Cook, are incredibly resilient to those bad days. They maintain a belief in their own ability."

Ramprakash himself suffered a crisis of belief early on in his England career when he failed to make a big score and began to question whether he belonged at Test level. Then in 1998 he started working with Bull, brought in by England as team psychologist.

"He gave me a very simple framework of coping with all the scrambled thoughts that were going on in my head," says Ramprakash.

Silva pares down the window of concentration to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier"

It proved pivotal. Soon after meeting Bull he scored 154 against West Indies in Barbados - his first Test century - and then topped the averages the following winter in Australia. His team-mate Atherton, writing in his autobiography, said he sensed at the time that Ramprakash was "a totally different person, and consequently, player".

Today the mental side of batting and the pressures that come with playing at international level are taken very seriously by England's management, due in no small part to Ramprakash's influence. Yet confidence is a fickle trait. Sometimes it's necessary to fake it to make it, so to speak. Psychologists have known for decades that feelings and emotions stem from changes in the body, rather than the other way round - a phenomenon known as embodied cognition - which means it's possible to generate confidence simply by acting it out.

"Shadow batting" - practising sublime strokes between balls - or walking out to bat with head held high, can have a positive effect on the way you play. The sports psychologist Jamie Barker, who works with Nottinghamshire Cricket Club and the ECB's performance programme, makes a point of getting players to focus on their body language as they leave the pavilion, to appear confident even if they don't feel it: "If you're assertive, your brain will pick up on that."

Another way of "faking" confidence is to visualise the way you want to play in your mind's eye before the game begins. In 1974, early in his career, Randall suffered four first-class innings in a row without scoring a run. "It was a nightmare," he says. "The pressure just builds on you." So on the morning of his fifth innings he got up early and arrived at the ground while it was still deserted, strapped on his pads, walked out to the middle, played a cover drive and took a run, "just to remember what it was like". He scored 93 that day.

Ramprakash encourages England's batsmen to use this kind of visualisation, which serves as a cognitive rehearsal for the main event. There is much evidence that it works. One problem with all these approaches is that worrying too much about your own performance can easily make things worse. Steven Sylvester, Middlesex's psychologist and author of the recent book Detox Your Ego(2016), thinks that for players at the top of their game what really matters is "where your heart is, why am I here?"

The important thing, he says, is to believe at an emotional level that you are playing not for yourself but for your team or your country, or some other ideal that transcends you. "When players start to think about their performance as serving the group it increases their self-esteem, their belief goes up and they become a bit freer in their skills. It gives them a little bit extra."

In 2013, Sylvester helped Australia and Middlesex batsman Chris Rogers after he was called up to the Ashes squad more than five years after his previous Test. "It became blindingly obvious that his fear of representing his country in the Ashes as an opening batsman was stopping him from moving forward," he says. "Through a deep discussion of how to serve his country he came up with a more compelling reason to doing well than if it was just about him."

Sylvester coached Moeen Ali through a similar process, helping him put his cricket in the context of his faith and his desire to be a role model. The Pakistan batsman Asad Shafiq, who has scored eight Test centuries at No. 6 - a world record - gives an equally compelling reason for his own success: "To bat at No. 6 you have to be patient, as most of the time the tailenders are with you. You have to give them confidence and support."

Shafiq is batting not just for himself, but for Nos. 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 as well. He epitomises CLR James' portrait in his classic Beyond a Boundary (1963) of the batsman as the ultimate team player. When facing the ball, writes James, he "does not merely represent his side. For that moment, to all intents and purposes, he is his side."

Without doubt, all batsmen can improve their confidence, resilience and other mental attributes if they're willing to practise. "Mental skills are like physical skills," says Bull. "You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives."

Yet it also seems clear that some people are inherently better at this than others. In 2005, Bull carried out a psychological analysis of 12 English cricketers from the previous two decades whom county coaches had identified as the toughest mentally in the country. Among them were Atherton, Graham Gooch and Alec Stewart. Bull found them all to be highly competitive and motivated, full of self-confidence and with a never-say-die attitude, some of which derived from their upbringing, some from the teams they had played with and some from their personality.

For the rest of us, it is comforting to know that we can learn such skills - and that even the greats can struggle at times. Even Don Bradman called batting "a nerve-racking business". In The Art of Cricket (1958), he implores us to give a thought to the batsman's travails as he wends his way to the wicket: "He is human like you, and desperately anxious to do well."