Shane Watson: On Winning the Inner Battle

 

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.

Don’t date anybody if you only want positive results! Life is poker not chess

Abridged and adapted from Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Suppose someone says, “I flipped a coin and it landed heads four times in a row. How likely is that to occur?”

It feels that should be a pretty easy question to answer. Once we do the maths on the probability of heads on four consecutive 50-50 flips, we can determine that would happen 6.25% of the time (0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0,.5).

The problem is that we came to this answer without knowing anything about the coin or the person flipping it. Is it a two-sided coin or three-sided or four? If it is two-sided, is it a two-headed coin? Even if the coin is two sided, is the coin weighted to land on heads more often than tails? Is the coin flipper a magician who is capable of influencing how the coin lands? This information is all incomplete, yet we answered the question as if we had examined the coin and knew everything about it.

Now if that person flipped the coin 10,000 times, giving us a sufficiently large sample size, we could figure out, with some certainty, whether the coin is fair. Four flips simply isn’t enough to determine much about the coin

We make this same mistake when we look for lessons in life’s results. Our lives are too short to collect enough data from our own experience to make it easy to dig down into decision quality from the small set of results we experience. If we buy a house, fix it up a little, and sell it three years later for 50% more than we paid. Does that mean we are smart at buying and selling property, or at fixing up houses? It could, but it could also mean there was a big upward trend in the market and buying almost any piece of property would have made just as much money. Bitcoin buyers may now wonder about the wisdom of their decisions.

The hazards of resulting

Take a moment to imagine your best decision or your worst decision. I’m willing to bet that your best decision preceded a good result and the worst decision preceded a bad result. This is a safe bet for me because we deduce an overly tight relationship between our decisions and the consequent results. 

There is an imperfect relationship between results and decision quality. I never seem to come across anyone who identifies a bad decision when they got lucky with the result, or a well reasoned decision that didn’t work out. We are uncomfortable with the idea that luck plays a significant role in our lives. We assume causation when there is only a correlation and tend to cherry-pick data to confirm the narrative we prefer.

Poker and decisions

Poker is a game that mimics human decision making. Every poker hand requires making at least one decision (to fold or to stay) and some hands can require up to twenty decisions. During a poker game players get in about thirty hands per hour. This means a poker player makes hundreds of decisions at breakneck speed with every hand having immediate financial consequences. 

It is a game of decision making with incomplete information. Valuable information remains hidden. There is also an element of luck in any outcome. You could make the best possible decision at every point and still lose the hand, because you don’t know what new cards will be dealt and revealed.

In addition, once the game is over, poker players must learn from that jumbled mass of decisions and outcomes, separating the luck from the skill, and guarding against using results to justify/criticise decisions made,

The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck. Poker is a mirror to life and helps us recognise the mistakes we never spot because we win the hand anyway or the leeway to do everything right, still lose, and treat the losing result as proof that we made a mistake,

Decisions are bets on the future

Decisions aren’t ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ based on whether they turn out well on any particular iteration. An unwanted result doesn’t make our decision wrong if we had thought about the alternatives and probabilities in advance and made our decisions accordingly. 

Our world is structured to give us lots of opportunities to feel bad about being wrong if we want to measure ourselves by outcomes. Don’t fall in love or even date anybody if you want only positive results.

No surprise Leeds lost to Manchester United, just look at the wage bills

Although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult

Manchester United’s Fred celebrates celebrates after completing Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds. Photograph: Jon Super/AP
 

Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian

The easy thing is to blame the manager. It has become football’s default response to any crisis. A team hits a poor run or loses a big game: get rid of the manager. As Alex Ferguson said as many as 14 years ago, we live in “a mocking culture” and reality television has fostered the idea people should be voted off with great regularity (that he was trying to defend Steve McClaren’s reign as England manager should not undermine the wider point).

Managers are expendable. Rejigging squads takes time and money and huge amounts of effort in terms of research and recruitment, whereas anybody can look at who is doing well in Portugal or Greece or the Championship and spy a potential messiah. Then there are the structural factors, the underlying economic issues it is often preferable to ignore because to acknowledge them is to accept how little agency the people we shout about every week really have in football. 

That point reared its head after Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds on Saturday. There was plenty to discuss: are Leeds overreliant on Kalvin Phillips, who was absent? Why does Marcelo Bielsa’s version of pressing so often lead to heavy defeats? Can Mason Greenwood’s movement allow Ole Gunnar Solskjær to field Paul Pogba and Bruno Fernandes without sacrificing a holding midfielder and, if it does, what does that mean for Marcus Rashford?

Yet there was a weird strand of coverage that insisted Solskjær had somehow outwitted Bielsa, even in some quarters that Bielsa needed to be replaced if Leeds are to kick on. (They finished ninth last season with 59 points, the highest points total by a promoted club for two decades). A Bielsa meltdown is possible; they do happen and he has never managed a fourth season at a club. There should be some concern that, like last season, Leeds lost by four goals at Old Trafford, insufficient lessons were learned, even if Bielsa said this was a better performance. But fundamentally, Manchester United’s wage bill is five times that of Leeds. 

Everton, who finished a place below Leeds last season, had a wage bill three times bigger. Of last season’s Premier League, only West Brom and Sheffield United had wage bills lower than that of Leeds. To have finished ninth is an extraordinary achievement and nobody should think to slip back three or four places this season would be a failure. Modern football is starkly stratified and although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult.

There is still a tendency to talk of a Big Six in English football and while it is true six clubs last season had a weekly wage bill in excess of £2.5m, it is also true that within that grouping there are three with clear advantages: Manchester City (who had kept their wage bill relatively low, although if they do add Harry Kane to Jack Grealish that would clearly change) and Chelsea because their funding is not reliant on footballing success, and Manchester United because of the legacy that has allowed them to attach their name to a preposterous range of products across the globe.
Mikel Arteta is struggling to revive Arsenal. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Liverpool can perhaps challenge for the title this season, but their wage spending is 74% of that of United. That they were as good as they were in the two seasons before last was remarkable, but last season showed how vulnerable a team like Liverpool can be to a couple of injuries. Similarly, Leicester’s two fifth-place finishes with the eighth-highest wage bill are a striking achievement, their decline towards the end of the past two seasons less the result of them bottling it or any sort of psychological failure than of the limitations of their squad being exposed.

Which brings us to the other two members of the Big Six: Arsenal and Tottenham. Spurs’ last game at White Hart Lane, in 2017, brought a 2-1 win over Manchester United that guaranteed they finished second. Since when Spurs have bought Davinson Sánchez, Lucas Moura, Serge Aurier, Fernando Llorente, Juan Foyth, Tanguy Ndombele, Steven Bergwijn, Ryan Sessegnon, Giovani Lo Celso, Cristian Romero and Bryan Gil, while United have bought, among others, Alexis Sánchez, Victor Lindelöf, Nemanja Matic, Romelu Lukaku, Fred, Daniel James, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire, Donny van de Beek, Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho. Money may not be everything in football, but it does help.

The irony of the situation is that it was investment in the infrastructure that should allow Spurs to generate additional revenues and better develop their own talent (much cheaper than buying it) that led to the lack of investment in players largely responsible for the staleness resulting in Mauricio Pochettino’s departure. That Daniel Levy compounded the problem by appointing José Mourinho – acting like a big club as though to jolt them to the next level – should not obscure the fact that until that point he had pursued a ruthless and successful economic logic.

Arsenal had gone through a similar process the previous decade, investing heavily in a new stadium at the expense of the squad, only to discover that by the time it was ready the financial environment had changed and the petro-fuelled era had begun. It was easy after the timid performance against Brentford on Friday to blame Mikel Arteta and ask why he gets such an easy ride. For all that Arsenal have finished the past two seasons relatively well, that criticism will only increase if there are not signs the tanker is being turned round. But the gulf to the top of the table is vast and a desperation to bridge that has contributed to a bizarre transfer policy.

That does not mean managers are beyond reproach and limp displays like Arsenal’s deserve criticism. But equally we should probably remember that where a side finishes in the league has far more to do with economic strata than any of the individuals involved.

Sixth-formers able to haggle for top UK universities under new grading system

Experts warn ‘sharp-elbowed’ middle classes more likely to talk their way into places as institutions look to expand writes Anna Fazackerley in The Guardian

A-level results day at Rochdale sixth form a year ago. This year, experts say, students will have much more power to negotiate their university places. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer 

School leavers may feel that, with A-level exams cancelled, they have lost control over their future. But experts say they have never had more power to talk their way into their first-choice university, even if they miss their grades.

As sixth-formers nervously await next month’s teacher-assessed results from the exams regulator, Ofqual, research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that in the aftermath of coronavirus, the UK higher education sector is facing losses of between £3bn and £19bn in the new academic year, depending on how many students enrol.

Many universities expect to lose 50-100% of their lucrative international student intake, a blow that will hit the most selective institutions hardest. While they have agreed to a government cap on student numbers to maintain stability, it was set with enough room for successful universities to increase UK student numbers to make up some of the shortfall.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank, says: “The way they are grading A-levels this year gives [young people] much more room to negotiate. You can easily ring and make a case for being let in based on your grades being wrong.”
He says that if universities have lots of empty seats this year they will be “in compulsory redundancy territory”.

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford University, agrees school leavers have “an unusual level of power this time”. In ordinary years universities, particularly the elite ones, have been wary of letting in too many applicants with lower grades for fear it could affect their position in the all-important league tables.

Marginson predicts this year could be different. “No one loses competitive position if everyone shifts the same way at the same time, as seems likely. The name of the game is organisational survival and everyone knows that.”

However, many academics are concerned that more disadvantaged candidates might be less likely to negotiate offers and hunt down good places in clearing.

Barnaby Lenon, former head of Harrow public school and chair of the Independent Schools Council, has urged university admission authorities to look beyond “dodgy” A-level grades, which “could be wrong”, when deciding who to admit.

Everyone has heard tales of middle-class parents picking up the phone to Oxford or Cambridge to argue for their child’s place. Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, says: “Never underestimate the adeptness of the sharp-elbowed middle classes at exploiting opportunities. And no opportunity is more prized than a place at a prestigious university.”

Elliot Major worries that next month’s frantic last-minute market for places may further skew the playing field against poorer young people. “There is a genuine fear that many disadvantaged pupils who would have excelled in their A-levels this year will be penalised with lower scores by the system of calculated grades, which estimates grades on the basis of historical averages of schools,” he says.

Some believe Ucas, the admissions service, is not helping. Mark Corver, former director of analysis and research at Ucas and now founder of dataHE consultancy, has warned the government there is not enough detailed data publicly available to allow students and teachers to prove if the Ofqual grading process has gone wrong for them.

“We’ve asked Ucas repeatedly to release some simple tables showing the typical exam grades that applicants with different predicted grades get in a normal year. They have steadfastly refused,” he says. “We’ve found them reluctant and obstructive. Given they are a charity and not a commercial organisation, it’s very disappointing.”

However, Richard O’Kelly, head of analytical data at Ucas, denies the organisation is being obstructive. He says it cannot publish the data set, which breaks down results by factors including gender, ethnicity and social background, because it creates an “unacceptable risk” of individual applicants being identifiable. He adds: “We have published more data during this year than ever before to promote confidence amongst students and universities.”

Sophie Hatton, an 18-year-old school leaver from Birmingham, says she is feeling “increasingly anxious” waiting for her A-level grades. “At first I thought it was great having all my exams cancelled. Then it hit me how terrifying it is that two years of work could account for nothing as I have no full way of showing my potential.”

Hatton is hoping to study sociology at Nottingham Trent University, but she says that if she doesn’t get the grades she needs she will get on the phone and try to negotiate, “to prove I am a determined, hard-working student”.

Kate Spalding, another 18-year-old waiting for her results, in Southampton, says she was upset for days after hearing she could not sit her exams: “I felt all my work had gone to waste.” Now, she says, she has decided to trust her teachers and is feeling more confident.

She is planning a gap year, but if she does not get the grades she needs to study drama at Manchester or Leeds, she intends to retake her A-levels later in the year.

Despite the government’s cap on student numbers this year, with financial penalties for those that exceed it, many selective institutions are planning for expansion, within the boundary of an extra 5% on last year’s enrolment forecasts.

Prof Colin Riordan, vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, a member of the Russell Group, says his university is anticipating a 2% growth in UK student numbers this year. “Given the way the cap has been set, it is conceivable that quite a few selective universities will take marginally more students than last year, and altogether that could be quite a lot,” he says.

Yet Riordan admits that for institutions such as his, international students and not UK ones make the real financial difference – and their numbers will be unclear until October or November. “Really we won’t know how many international students we will get until they actually turn up – or don’t,” he says.

Vice-chancellors say the way A-levels are being calculated this year is making them nervous. Another Russell Group head, who asked not to be named, says: “We have thousands of students who have put us as first choice and accepted our offer. Usually we can be pretty accurate on what percentage will achieve the grades. But this year if there is even 10% inflation on that, that’s a big difference.”

The government has confirmed, in new guidance issued earlier this month, that it will not penalise universities for going over their cap because a larger number of students than expected meet their offer grades. But the vice-chancellor says that, in a Covid-19 world, a big increase would put pressure on facilities. “There are two nightmares: one where no one turns up, and one where everyone turns up while we are trying to do social distancing,” he says.

If prestigious institutions expand, they could suck up some students who might have chosen mid-ranking universities, leaving some of those institutions without enough undergraduates – and their £9,250 a year fees. Marginson says this would leave universities at the bottom of the sector “facing very difficult times”.

Dean Machin, head of policy at the University of Portsmouth, agrees. “We have potentially got the worst of both worlds. For sector stability we enabled government to control the number of people who go to university – and unfortunately it is unlikely to provide all universities the protection they were seeking.”

The Office for Students regulator is consulting on new powers to intervene faster to protect students in case any universities or colleges are at risk of closure.