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The art and science of picking winning teams

In a world of performance data, human judgment is more vital than ever, says former England cricket selector Ed Smith in the FT

The fast bowler Jofra Archer, a brilliant talent new to cricket’s world stage, stands at the top of his run-up, flicking a white cricket ball nonchalantly in his hand. With 30,000 fans in the ground already drunk on drama, and 1.6bn watching around the world, Archer knows what’s coming. The next five minutes, his next six balls — a “Super Over”, the final way to determine a tied cricket match — will decide whether England or New Zealand win the 2019 World Cup. 

“It’s so on a young man,” the TV commentator sighs about the decision to give the 24-year-old Archer the final act. “It’s a big call.” About a hundred yards to Archer’s right, I am watching on with my fellow England selector, as helpless as everyone else in the ground. 

Just before the tournament, right at the eleventh hour, the decision had been made to add Archer to England’s World Cup squad. There had been plenty of public debate about the decision — England, already the top-ranked team without Archer, had been preparing for the World Cup for four years, and a popular player had been dropped to make way for him. Why take the risk? 

Because Archer was exceptional. And we knew with an unusual degree of confidence that he was exceptional. Archer’s early career was unique because he’d played so much cricket in the Indian Premier League (IPL), where every match is televised. And every action in televised cricket leaves a clear data footprint — the precise speed, trajectory, bounce and revolutions of every ball bowled. This is exactly the kind of information decision-makers love to have — an X-ray of the match. And the data from the IPL was unequivocal: Archer not only merited a place in England’s 15-man squad, but also in the best XI. In fact, the data implied he’d be England’s best fast bowler. And he was, taking 20 wickets (an England record) in the tournament. 

But the data only gets you so far. The moments before the Super Over proved that, too. England’s captain, Eoin Morgan, stood alongside Archer — chatting lightly, relaxed, open, a hint of mischief — a moment to enjoy. It was a masterclass in defusing pressure. So what might have been a “big call” turned into an obvious decision — thanks in part to the way Morgan handled things. Archer got his decisions spot on, and England won the World Cup. 

Selection and decision-making are often framed in terms of “art versus science”, with the assumption that, in our digital age, “science” is increasingly marginalising the human factor. But making decisions — and this applies in any area, not just sport — demands weighing and reconciling different kinds of information, and drawing on differing types of intelligence. In the age of data, the question remains: where does the human dimension fit in? 

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The role of England’s chief cricket selector — which I held from 2018 to 2021 — stretches back to 1899. It was once seen as sport’s ultimate establishment position. A sober, grey worsted suit was woven into the job — folded Telegraph in one hand, black umbrella in the other. Cricket persisted with selectors — where football, for example, centralised power in the manager or head coach — partly because formal coaching arrived relatively late in cricket (England’s first head coach was appointed in 1986). Since then, cricket has mostly retained shared responsibility between selectors, coach and captain. 

After all, who is on the field — and here sport is like all industries — has the greatest bearing on winning and losing. That’s why the richest and most advanced sports teams — in football and American sports — have invested heavily in data-informed recruitment, seeking an edge in identifying talent. 

I was 40 when I became England selector; my co-selector, James Taylor, was 28. Our combined age was about the same as some individual England selectors from earlier decades. The impertinence of youth was compounded by the perception that our new selection system leant heavily on data and algorithms. Cricket is a conservative sport. Far from being reassuringly old-fashioned, the new selection panel was often dubbed “left field”. Innovation and tradition rubbed shoulders. That is, of course, a tricky balancing act, with risks on all sides, and while I did not know it at the time, that was probably the attraction. 

Was England cricket now trying to “Moneyball” its selection strategy? Many people thought so. But the analogy is problematic. Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s classic book about the Oakland A’s baseball team, is only partly about data, and significantly about price. One way that Oakland punched above their weight was by buying undervalued players and selling over-valued ones. But for a national sports team, of course, there is no transfer market. You can’t pit your wits against other teams by trading players with, say, the old rival, Australia. England cricket has its talent pool, and that’s that. 

But selectors can — and this is close to the heart of the matter in all professions — diverge from conventional wisdom about where they perceive value. And here, of course, better data is extremely helpful. If you can measure player impact more accurately, then you are getting nearer to identifying “talent that whispers”, not just “talent that shouts” (in the excellent phrasing of Rasmus Ankersen, who was co-director of football at Brentford before moving to Southampton). 

This is not to suggest that data holds all the answers (the theme of many recent sports books) and that human judgment is on the road to oblivion. Yes, sport is in the midst of a data revolution, and you’d be insane not to seek better information to inform decisions. But rather than using data instead of human intelligence, the challenge is using data in tandem with the human dimension. 

And here decisions in sport reflect decisions in life. “What the data says” is too often a convenient way of passing the buck. Better to come out in plain sight: it’s a judgment. 

Risk is the job 

“Creative solutions, please — but nothing that’s too clever by half!” This is a recurrent framing of what people ask for from decision-makers. Wanted: upside outcomes without downside risk. That is impossible. As soon as decisions diverge from consensus, they inevitably come with the threat of a downside. The American investor and thinker Howard Marks has written a superb series of memos on this theme, “Dare to be Great”. 

“By definition, non-consensus ideas that are popular . . . are an oxymoron,” Marks writes. “And in the course of trying to be different and better, they [investors] have to bear the risk of being different and worse.” 

This is the challenge facing strategists in sport. Whenever your decisions diverge from conventional wisdom, you clearly discern value that most people don’t see. So a degree of intellectual loneliness is a necessity. 

One of the most unconventional decisions England cricket made during my time was selecting three spinners and three all-rounders for the 2018 Test series against Sri Lanka. We won the series 3-0. For the next Test match, we also picked an unconventional mix of players in the West Indies and got smashed. “Too clever by half!” 

Perhaps we became more risk-averse after that moment — which I think was a mistake. Because if you stop diverging from consensus, then what are you doing? Someone who makes decisions which merely reflect the average of opinion is not adding any value. 

David Swensen, who headed the Yale endowment fund, said superior decision-making demanded “uninstitutional behaviour from institutions”. The same challenge exists inside sport. Every leading sports organisation is now a huge machine, and that brings its own dangers — diluting a sense of mission, the temptation to keep everyone happy, watering down good ideas and the rush to compromise. 

How can the bureaucracy fight against the risk-averse tendencies of bureaucracies? Even when you’re on the inside, can you retain an outsider’s sense of independence and boldness, before all the compromise gets priced in? That’s central to the task — and inevitably comes with tension. 

 ‘Accepting a negative metric’ 

“Whenever someone innovates in business or in life,” argues the former poker player Caspar Berry, “they almost inevitably do so by accepting a negative metric that other people are unwilling to accept.” 

When the NBA’s Houston Rockets began taking a higher proportion of (long-range) three-point shots, they were accepting the negative metric that they would miss more often. The pay-off was that shots they did convert came with a built-in premium. The trend was initially ridiculed — before being folded into orthodoxy. In 2015-16, only six out of 30 NBA teams took three-pointers in at least a third of their attempts. By 2020-21, 28 teams were doing it. 

Spain’s triumphant football team of 2008-12 sometimes lined up without a striker. Neglecting to select a specialist goalscorer brings risks — as pundits regularly reminded us by imploring Spain to pick a big strong lad up front to bang in the goals. In 2012, Spain preferred the extra midfielder — expanding creative opportunities, while tolerating the negative metric of not selecting a player focused exclusively on scoring. Spain won the final of the 2012 Euros 4-0, their third major title inside four years — revealing a shrewd trade-off. 

In England’s T20 cricket team, we moved towards an ultra-aggressive batting order, with star batsman Jos Buttler moving from the middle order to opening batsman. But didn’t England need Buttler at the end, when the game was on the line? Ideally, yes. But not if it meant restricting Buttler’s ability to shape the contest by keeping him out of the action until it might be too late. 

All these decisions were initially controversial, before they shifted the consensus and became part of a new orthodoxy. That journey is never smooth. So while innovation can draw on data-informed insights, it stands or falls on courage and resilience. There will always be bumps in the road; can you hold the line? Data might illuminate the solution. But it’s going to take personal conviction to get it done. 

Look for ‘Lego’ players 

The NBA player Shane Battier was dubbed “Lego” by his manager because when he was on the court “all the pieces start to fit together”. Battier’s individual stats were moderate, but the team’s overall performance improved. 

Ranked by the team’s win-loss ratio for games in which they played, the three “winningest” England players in the five-day Test matches when I was selector (in order) were Keaton Jennings, Sam Curran and Adil Rashid. All three players faced frequent media pressure about their individual place in the Test team; their contribution to overall success was often overlooked. 

Team success, of course, doesn’t and shouldn’t guarantee an individual’s selection indefinitely, whatever their form and confidence. But collective output should always be part of the mix in assessing an individual. The “Lego” concept is a useful reminder that the ultimate goal is team success. 

 “Choose the best player for every position,” argued Johan Cruyff, “and you’ll end up not with a strong XI, but with XI strong I’s.” Teams that punch above their weight — such as the Premier League football club Brentford FC — consistently recruit players who are undervalued. That skill can be separated into two distinct parts — not only ranking players better (“how good is ‘X’ relative to ‘Y’?”), but also identifying the team’s needs and how to meet them. The way things fit together can be as important as the pieces themselves. 

In assembling the overall puzzle, it helps to have a point of difference. In cricket, left-arm bowlers, for example, outperform their right-arm counter-parts (on average) because they benefit from being unusual. And even the right-arm bowlers in the team benefit, because opposition batsmen have to switch constantly between different angles of attack, increasing the likelihood of being caught off-balance. 

You’re going to have to think, not just compute 

On one level, there is nothing new to be said about the boundaries of rational decision-making. In 1936, the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott co-wrote a book about a systematic approach for betting on the Derby, A Guide to the Classics. (The title was a very Cambridge in-joke.) There is a limit, as Oakeshott wrote in another piece, “beyond which there are no precise rules for picking the winner, and . . . some intelligence (not supplied by the rules themselves) [is] necessary”. You’re going to have to think, not just compute. 

Nearly a century later, even after the explosion of a lucrative sports analytics industry, that is loosely the position of Daryl Morey, former general manager of the Houston Rockets, whose innovations have transformed the NBA (and who called Shane Battier “Lego”). “You have to figure out what the model is good and bad at,” Morey argues, “and what humans are good and bad at.” 

No system, in other words, is so good that it can survive without good judgment. You can’t box off a perfect process. Understanding the data can embolden better risk-taking, but it can’t absolve decision-makers from responsibility. 

In the best decision-makers I’ve observed, I’ve sensed they could live with uncertainty and yet still make good (or above-average) decisions. Conversely, an opposite type finds it hard to cope unless they “know for sure”. And yet this second group never can know — so their thinking gets sucked into trying to reduce anxiety rather than searching for better solutions. 

In most interesting aspects of life, there usually is no perfect or complete answer. And yet there is still better and worse. Wise people know this. But admitting it is in danger of falling victim to the craving for convenient certainty — including the expedient use of “what the data says”. Rationality should allow for healthy scepticism about how much can ever be completely known and understood. 

When I started as selector, the optimist in me wanted to believe we could harness data towards “optimising” England selection. In retrospect, I see more clearly that it will always be a highly human challenge founded, above all, on the primacy of judgment. Just as well, too. Because human value lies where things are most unquantifiable and most uncertain.

What makes a great cricket captain?

 

The diabolical ploy in China to print currency notes with duplicate serial numbers I Elmer Yuen

 

What's behind team spirit?

Martin Crowe in Cricinfo

New Zealand gelled as a team int he 1992 World Cup but splintered thereafter © Getty Images

Teamwork, team spirit, team culture, team dynamics - all buzzwords that point to the same thing. Yet in truth it is the team "functionability" that must work if success is to be achieved and a legacy created. Sports teams are no different to business teams, except sport is played out in public and each individual player is under scrutiny, as much as the team's performance is.

In reality, most teams fail, if winning a championship or event or being ranked No. 1 is the measure they are judged by. Those few fortunate enough to hold the trophy aloft, let alone do it often and frequently, like the once all-conquering Manchester United, or the Australian cricket team of yesteryear, they are the ones that come together as one. As d'Artagnan famously said, "All for one and one for all."

There are thousands of opinions, hundreds of books, case studies and manuals on the subject worldwide. There are many ways to skin a cat. Yet really, when all is said and done, it is the simple methods of how people function best in everyday life that need to be executed in a sporting team environment. It comes down to how our relationships work in any form of life, and this points always to the ability to love, to talk, to listen and to commit. In short, to relate.

In my years of experiencing the good and the bad in relationships and teams, studying others, reading lots, and hearing grand and sad stories in all kinds of endeavour, the one thing that stands out more than anything is building and maintaining trust.

Trust stems from a willingness to openly share anything and everything. It is about not being afraid to show vulnerability, admitting mistakes and weaknesses, and generally and genuinely sharing the truth outwardly and honestly among the group. Trust rules the lot.

When it is not built, or is broken, then the essence of the team's functionality is lost. Great leaders and captains have been able to rely on this trust, once established, as the cornerstone to team success.

	Australia have always had the ability to work together even if one or two of the personalities clashed

Ian Chappell, the great Australian captain, would easily speak his mind, using his open-door policy style, by buying his team-mates a beer and sitting them down at the bar, loosening them up a little and getting a natural flow of conversation bedded in. He was famous for building that trust within his all-conquering team of the '70s by simply using straight honest talking and listening. In this he helped create the environment to challenge and debate with each other.

This is incredibly healthy, the key being that the trust generated leads to open challenging discussions and passionate debate based on respect. It doesn't mean you have to hold hands when doing so, just simply to speak your truth "out in the open", be heard, and take time to listen in turn. The worst thing is to speak your truth behind the backs of the team, in particular to the media and opposition. This kills trust, and it kills the desire to continue to share. Once trust and openness are broken, there is no chance going forward.

If the first two are working well, it will go a long way to solving any commitment issues. Committing or buying into the team's work is about the desire to go to great lengths to perform your specialist role for your team's benefit. When team members are allowed to share the truth, there is a natural tendency to buy in to committing wholeheartedly to the decisions made by the team's leaders.

Without commitment there is no accountability. When all are in, it becomes easier to call team members on actions and behaviours that will assist the team cause. When accountability becomes understood, then so too is the need to focus attention to the goals and results of the team. Accountability removes the individual needs, like personal recognition and ego, from the equation.

Australia had a great handle on this with their dominance through most of the 1990s and much of the following decade. They have always had that ability to work together even if one or two of the personalities clashed. This was the open positive conflict working well. West Indies, under Clive Lloyd, showed a real theme to their togetherness, small nations becoming one, and they displayed a spirit unrivalled for 15 long years.

Through the '80s, New Zealand had a mixture of good and bad, but mainly positive functionality. Sometimes there was a lack of attention to team results and accountability, but overall there was an enduring trust, openness and commitment.

	West Indies, under Clive Lloyd, showed a real theme to their togetherness - small nations becoming one © PA Photos  Enlarge

In my term as a Test captain, I didn't allow for enough open debate and sharing, and so we had little trust to start with, and the rest of the dysfunctions followed. My failure was in not generating enough open conflict to ensure everyone had a say, bought in, and truly committed. However, it did come slowly, so by the time of the 1992 World Cup, we had nearly all five functions working smoothly.

Sadly, rather than building on that success, we splintered dramatically, the catalyst being the bomb blast outside our hotel in Colombo in late 1992, an incident that split the team in two when six players and the coach, with families at home, left the tour. From then, as a team, we were damaged goods. Administrators got involved, wrongly, and developed hideous resentment. Over just a few months all the trust we had garnered started to evaporate.

By February 1993, factions were everywhere and our team dynamic was dead. The coach, Wally Lees was sacked for very little reason. Mark Greatbatch was inexplicably replaced as vice-captain, and therefore I lost my trusted lieutenant, and before long, after just one more Test in charge, my tenure as skipper was over too. The team spirit suffered.

My last seven Tests, as a mere batsman not knowing how to retire, were the saddest of all that I played, as I watched a team pretend it existed. There wasn't one ounce of trust. That positive team dynamic never rose again for New Zealand until Stephen Fleming began his own team-building with a young bunch of mates and an experienced and inspirational management, from 1998 to 2003.

The point is, anything can disrupt the dynamic, and so it's vital that whatever happens, or whoever comes into the group, the five functions must be quickly and often referred to: Motivation for maintaining the flow of attention to results; accountability; commitment; open, honest and respectful conflict; and sharing truths - these make the lifeblood of a team's fulfilment and longevity.

The power of good team culture

Teams that encourage individualism along with a sense of belonging to the larger group are likelier to succeed

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

Does team spirit exist? To its critics it is "an illusion glimpsed only in victory", as the footballer Steve Archibald famously argued. To outright cynics, it is worse than that: a convenient excuse for captains and managers to justify getting rid of good players on spurious grounds.

The problem is partly one of language. Many uses of "team spirit" are misleading, even meaningless. If team spirit is defined as untroubled laughter and bonhomie, then I'm afraid all teams - even the most spirited ones - suffer huge fluctuations in mood and temper. A team, like a family, cannot be elated all the time.

Another flawed use of the phrase congratulates players on their "team-spiritedness" for kindly but showy irrelevances. This is also a mistake. One day soon a football defence will concede a goal at a corner because they are too busy congratulating each other for heading away the last corner - and, in attending to "team spirit", forgetting to do their jobs.

I'm all for encouragement and support, but I am suspicious of the cricketing fad for tapping team-mates on the back when they "stop" a ball trickling along the infield at 3mph, or the now mandatory dressing-room standing ovation and overhead clapping that greets every on-field milestone. All this has little to with the "supported" player and a lot to do with the "supporting" one. Look at me, he is saying, what a good team man I am! It is usually just mannered behaviour. When a dressing-room standing ovation is awarded to even the most routine hundred, it logically follows that a new celebration is required to mark the really special centuries - perhaps a shirts-off, punching-the-air, post-goal pile-up on the balcony? This, however, will only be a temporary solution until it, too, becomes routine.

Nor can team spirit conjure short-term miracles. In that sense of the phrase, team spirit is indeed overrated. Ask any great captain how much team spirit helps when the opposition is 500 for 2 and his bowling attack is on its knees. Answer: not much use at all. As with great captaincy, we expect too much of team spirit. It is not about pulling rabbits out of hats.

But rather than throw out the idea of team spirit, we should take more care to define it properly. Instead of giddiness, it is about respect. In place of superficial and irrelevant kindness, it is about tough love. Rather than a short-term panacea, it is a long-term strategy.

A better term is culture. If we started using "team culture" instead of "team spirit", then a lot of misunderstandings would be avoided.

	Good culture does not uphold the silly pretence that elite sportsmen have no self-interest at stake. Within a very strong team culture, it is possible to talk openly about the inevitable transition from one generation to the next

Let me give you an example of bad team culture. In county cricket, players mostly travel around the country in individual cars rather than a single team bus, two or three team-mates in each car. One other piece of background information is that after about ten years playing for one team, county pros are awarded a "benefit year" - an archaic system sponsored by the clubs - that entitles them to raise extra money, over and above their salaries, through private fundraising. It is very time-consuming and tiring - a benefit year is almost like having another job - but it can be lucrative.

One day, I picked up a colleague before the first match of the season. We were both senior players and got on pretty well. "How are you?" I asked, as he got into the car. "To be honest, I could do with an injury so I can miss some cricket and work on my benefit year." If only two of us had been in the car, the comment would have been selfish but harmless. Sitting in the back seat, however, was an 18-year-old who had only played a handful of county matches. So the cynical comment undermined the younger player's healthy excitement about the match and the new season. It sent the message: my own bank balance is more important than the team winning. Sadly, this was the culture the senior player had inherited from his mentors, and they from theirs. The money-first culture was passed on from one generation to the next.

If you don't believe in team culture, try imagining an All Black rugby player saying that comment within earshot of a young player, or envisage a similar scene within Steve Waugh's Australian team. I can't imagine it.

So what does a good culture look like? Sport relies on necessary personal ambition and individualism. But that can exist alongside a sense of tradition and institutional respect. The result is a kind of individualism-plus.

Good culture does not uphold the silly pretence that elite sportsmen have no self-interest at stake. Indeed, within a very strong team culture, it is possible to talk openly - even affectionately - about the inevitable transition from one generation to the next.

Here is a story about three similar players - now aged 43, 34 and 29 - who had overlapping careers at the same football club. Twenty-five years ago, a midfield player emerged who ran the game with his precise, attacking passing. Fifteen years ago, a junior came along who was even better - and the two men played alongside each other, sharing insights and tactical wisdom. Five years after that, a third playmaker, a tiny teenager, pitched up to train with the team. The oldest midfielder watched the new boy. "You've seen that?" he said to the middle "brother". "You'll push me towards the exit, but that guy will send us both into retirement!"

Only, he didn't, not completely. The older player turned to coaching, where he harnessed the brilliance of the other two. The team? Barcelona. Their names? Pep Guardiola, Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta.

The culture of Barcelona begins at La Masia, their youth academy. When the football writer Simon Kuper visited La Masia, the director explained how it remained home to the players even when they were superstars: "Messi and Iniesta drop by to eat. They come to us with their problems, as they would to their mother and father. We know their glories, we know their miseries."

In sport, business or education, culture is always central to long-term institutional excellence. But it is subtle and often scarcely visible: a sense of belonging, trust and continuity; knowledge being shared and challenged; competitiveness developing alongside mutual respect; the reinforcement of fun as well as toughness.

Good culture in a school does not mean that every pupil is deliriously happy every minute of the day. But it does mean that bullying is rare and respect develops across different activities. Good culture is always partly self-regulating. In the 18th century, the precursors of the London Stock Exchange were the informal exchanges in coffee shops. They developed their own systems of rules and enforcement. Those who didn't settle their accounts were "named and shamed" by their peers and labelled "lame duck". It is the same with teams. In a strong team culture, senior players should feel empowered to challenge colleagues who are undermining the group ethic.

Here is the difficult part. Culture is hard to build, easy to undermine. It often begins with difficult, unpopular decisions. The power of good culture will often be mocked. But it is real, all right. That's how Barcelona develop so many of their own stars, and how the All Blacks - despite New Zealand's tiny talent pool - always stay at the top.

Why is it always about the team?

Insiders consider Kevin Pietersen's lack of "teamliness" his biggest flaw but spectators love to watch him play. So who matters more?

Christian Ryan in Cricinfo

February 12, 2014

 

	KP: often turned spectators into pogo sticks © Getty Images  Enlarge

Cricket is not maths. Also, no wooden ruler exists that can be lined upright beside cricketers and the adjudication handed down to chop this brat, but this other brat's a brat who can bat, so he stays. And the far-sighted correspondents of several nations' newspapers have had their says while trying to convey the gist of the wishes of the England XI, of whom Kevin Pietersen is no longer one. That makes ten. And I get that Pietersen was ego-burdened, money-fixated, ungrateful, unruly, unEnglish and that reflecting ponds were for him a serious life hazard. But they're still only ten. People like me, who like cricket, we number billions.

Not all the billion-odd liked Pietersen. Of those that didn't, many gutturally and vehemently didn't. Few were indifferent to him. The usual blindfolded detective work has since gone into guessing the where, how, why and who of his sacking. Particularly foggy is the "who". Of the "who", we know only this: the billion-odd were not among them. The feelings of the billion-odd went unmentioned in the backroom manoeuvrings and were put on no table for consideration. The ten mattered totally, and none thought to think of the billion. If we twist "who" round to mean who of the ten wished Pietersen out, we are not actually sure it was ten. It could have been seven, and three abstainers; it may, for all that the detective work has so far taught us, have been one. And in a soundproof room, there rails a billion.

To propose that the cricket-watching public's interests should have been taken into account in all of this would be reckoned the zenith of stupidity, were anyone stupid enough to utter such a thing. Call me stupid but is it not striking how neatly this Pietersen business folds into the current governing crisis - the tripartite Indo-Anglo-Bozo hijacking of the International Cricket Council? At the root of that is a scrambling for TV money. And is it not the cricket-watching public's eyeballs that watch the cricket that spurs the ratings that attract the TV dollars that put the fuel inside the cricket administrators' flash cars?

	Pietersen was something stranger and rarer, too, than a player of great innings - a player of great shots. He'd dream up a shot, think wouldn't that be cool?, then try to get away with it

From there it may follow that if this billion-strong public, which brings in the bacon, likes to see a particular batsman bat - perhaps because he is entertaining and takes risks and bats with a certain free spirit - then the matter of them liking him should be a factor in any conversations held before that batsman is gotten rid of. But there are insiders. There are outsiders. The gap is wide. The insiders say the team's interests and team ethic is everything, always has been, which they are wrong about. Cricket for a lot of its existence was chiefly an entertainment. Were a player entertaining to watch, that could help get him a game. Not until much later did the winning and the losing take precedence over the entertaining. And only very recently did the making of money shout down all else, relegating entertainment to a distant third priority, with the entertainees voiceless.

The insiders believe a lack of teamliness in an individual's make-up to be the biggest and least overlookable flaw. I am not sure that's right either. Nor do the fixations alluded to earlier - with money, with self, with tasty biltong - seem so grave, on paper. Being a bully: that has to be worse. And I've read some history books and skimmed some player memoirs, and now my eyes are running down the all-time runs and wickets tables and although the bullies don't quite outnumber the goodies, the bullies are certainly not short of company. Of course, there is only so far one can go in separating these broader principles from the specific individual at hand: Pietersen.

"International cricket is where legacies are made," writes the Telegraph's Derek Pringle, "and Pietersen leaves with his only half realised as a player of great innings but not a great batsman."

Well, I know which kind of great I'd usually rather watch. And I worry that the maths is getting in theTelegraph correspondent's eyes. I don't watch batting averages ticking. I don't even watch cricket hoping a particular team will win. I watch to be moved and entertained. I can think of many a "great batsman" of my home country who moved me not nearly as much as a handful of "players of great innings" did.

Pietersen was something stranger and rarer, too, than a player of great innings - a player of great shots. He'd dream up a shot, think wouldn't that be cool?, then try to get away with it. Such a batsman's a high-value spectator attraction. A by-product is that his value to spectators can run in inverse proportion to the team. But why is it always about the team, never the spectator?

	Pietersen's relationship with South Africa was often a prickly one © PA Photos  Enlarge

Not only that. Pietersen, having hatched this shot out of the blue sky once and escaped, would reattempt it. At Edgbaston in 2006 medium-pacer Farveez Maharoof was bowling to a loaded off-side field. Before the next ball left Maharoof's hand, Pietersen was leaning across, softly wandering, culminating in a giant step forward, and though the ball landed a foot and a half outside off stump, angling further away, Pietersen's hands followed it, his wrists uncoiling, and he dispatched the ball miraculously cross-careening past mid-on to where no fielders were stationed. By then Pietersen was perching lopsided and one-legged, his back foot curled in the air. The shot acquired a name - "the flamingo" - and when he tried something similar off Dwayne Bravo at Headingley a year later he made Mike Atherton splutter into his microphone. "Unbelievable shot. It's the length that enables him to play the stroke. Anything a bit short and it's a more difficult shot to play… " - which rang true of the Bravo ball. But the Maharoof ball pitched barely halfway up. The wrist strength required of Pietersen was verging on uncomputable. He was 70 not out. On 79 he did it again: same bowler and field setting, near-replica delivery, four runs. And this - the reattempting of it - was what tipped the crowd over the edge, turned individual spectators into pogo sticks. That Pietersen passage burns in the memory alongside a 51 he made in Melbourne when I counted how many times he let the ball go, 14, each leave so tumultuous that the bat's stickers were pointing sky-side up.

He had another quality - what Sir Viv Richards was sort of referring to last year when he claimed "the comparison I'm drawing is with Muhammad Ali… you want to see KP get knocked over, but he goes out there and bang, bang, bang!", except an online commentator underneath a Guardian post put it better last week:

Since I started watching cricket as a 10 year old in 1991, I have seen no England batsman so talented and so exciting to watch … You don't really need more than that, but here's why I loved him more: his attitude, his demeanour, his style of play thoroughly pissed off the English cricketing establishment and I bloody loved it. These are the people who dropped Gower … who ruined Hick and Ramprakash.

I make no apology for quoting a member of the public, one of the billion-odd.

I do not want a reality TV-type scenario where people can text-vote "KP In/Out". I'd prefer to trust wise men to make the call and for one of their criteria to be the good that a player gives to cricket - and I'm not confident that happened here or ever does anymore.

And I accept what the journalist Peter Oborne writes of Don Bradman, Frank Worrell, Abdul Hafeez Kardar and a cricket world where "it was axiomatic that the individual should subordinate himself and his talents to the team". I see the nobleness in this, and it was an ingredient always missing in Pietersen, and had it been there he'd have been even better to watch, pure pleasure.

Oborne continues: "In so far as Pietersen has any nationality, he seems to be South African… He emerged as a cricketer in the most wonderful moment in South African history, when apartheid had gone and the country was building a multi-racial national team. Pietersen wanted no part in this new world. He got out as soon as he could, claiming that the positive discrimination necessary to help black cricketers stood in his way."

They are words that damn, as were Rachel Cooke's in an Observer profile of Pietersen years ago - "When he smiles it's only his mouth that softens, not his eyes." I know without meeting him that's right. I've seen the cold-eyes smile. It was even there at Edgbaston, in Melbourne. And when I reread something Pietersen said to Cooke - "I've never once criticised South Africa. I love the country. The people are fantastic. The exchange rate is magnificent" - what I think is: tosshead.

But there are high-stakes questions here, e.g. why does cricket exist? And for who? All I'm sure of is that two plus two is seven, and Pietersen equals the cricketer who cricket could least afford to lose.

Do team-mates have to get along?

October 27, 2013

Cricket players or comrades in arms?

Samir Chopra

 

Dressing room or office cubicles?  © Getty Images

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Jonathan Wilson's analysis, here on the Cordon, of cricket's workplace and the "unrealistic" expectations of player relationships it seems to generate among fans made for some very interesting reading.

Fans, of course, expect player relationships to be far more cordial and chummy than they actually are, or even could be, because - among other things - they view cricket through an imaginative and hopeful lens, one that refracts and distorts and magnifies and colours in all sorts of ways. We view cricket not as a series of prosaic encounters of bat and ball wielded by salaried men, but rather as the stage and setting for a variety of noble encounters that resolve archetypal conflicts. We populate this stage with a variety of stock characters: heroes (our side), villains (their side), damsels in distress (the nations the players represent, which need rescuing from all manner of insults), scapegoats (those on our side who fail us and must be blamed for the defeats that could not possibly be our just fate), traitors (see:scapegoat), village idiots (sometimes umpires, sometimes opponents, sometimes selectors, sometimes our own team), magicians, gnomes and wise men (the captains, and now increasingly the coaches, all capable of changing the fortunes of nations and groups of men with mysterious incantations and potions). And so on. 

The vision of cricket afforded by these lenses is one that cricket writers, going back to the game's earliest days, and television producers and commentators in more recent times, have drawn on and embellished. It is one whose moral universe is relatively unambiguous, whose human relationships follow smooth, predictable trajectories; its decision-makers experience little cognitive dissonance, whether ethical, strategic or tactical; where rough edges are miraculously smoothed out by good intentions and ceaseless striving. The only reward our heroes expect is adulation and fame and the gratitude of adoring nations.

I do not mean to suggest that such is the fan's consciously distorted view of a game; rather it is that every fan's experience and interpretation of the game is not without its component of unconscious or subconscious fantasy imposed on its visible proceedings.

One set of prominent stock characters that populate this stage for the fan are drawn from stories of adventure and war, where "bands of brothers" or "comrades in arms" face adversity and the enemy as a united front and ultimately emerge triumphant. A magical brew of togetherness is stewed, one made more potent by mutual respect and affection and something called "team spirit"; it overcomes all opponents. Among this band of brothers, there is fraternity and camaraderie; there is much backslapping and shoulder-to-shoulder support; there are handshakes and there is mateship; everyone has someone's back. This a bunch of soldiers, united together, perhaps like the "pal battalions" of Kitchener's Army, going off to fight the good battle.

The modern team knows of this image and it draws on it in its public-relations exercises and its team-building manoeuvres; there is talk of visiting war memorials and cemeteries; "boot camps" are conducted, sometimes in jungles, sometimes in mountains; team members speak glowingly of the dressing-room "atmosphere", one made especially salubrious for some by long hours of drinking together; players speak glowingly of their trench buddies and their "partnerships".

In this understanding of the game, the workplace picture of men and their trades, engaged in work for wages, possibly drawn into all manners of conflict, on or off the field, with their co-workers or "management", is a jarring disruption. It is not one that sits comfortably with our imagined conceptions of what takes place on a cricket field. It is not how we "enjoy" the game. It is not how the game functions for us, or how we make sense of, and ascribe meaning to, the "hallowed 22 yards" far away, dimly glimpsed, out there in the middle.

-------OCTOBER 21, 2013
Do team-mates have to get along?

Jonathan Wilson in Cricinfo

Not quite Michael Clarke's scene, if Ricky Ponting's book is to be believed  © Getty Images

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There is often an assumption among fans that team-mates are all great friends. After all, whenever we see them, they are forever hugging each other or high-fiving, and most of them are incapable of getting through a post-match interview without talking collectively of "the lads" or "the boys", and insisting that "the spirit" has never been better.

Our own experience of sport, whether it's a frenetic five-a-side on a Thursday night or a leisurely 35-over game on a Sunday, tells us that the people you play with, while there might be the odd niggle - "Why will Mike not stop hitting it long?", "When did Tom last buy a round?", "Will Steve ever stop banging on about that trial he had with Leicestershire in 1972?" - are essentially people you quite enjoy having a drink with afterwards. 

Ricky Ponting's comments in his autobiography on Michael Clarke come as a reminder that among professionals those niggles are often far more serious. "Away from cricket, he moved in a different world to the rest of us," Ponting wrote. "It never worried me if a bloke didn't want a drink in the dressing-room, but I did wonder about blokes who didn't see the value in sticking around for a chat and a laugh and a post-mortem on the day's play. This was the time when we could revel in our success, pick up the blokes who were struggling, and acknowledge the guys who were at the peak of their powers. Pup hardly bought into this tradition for a couple of years and the team noticed."

The tone is reasonably diplomatic, and Ponting goes out of his way to stress that Clarke wasn't ever "disruptive" and that there was no suggestion he was slacking or not putting in the effort in training, but the episodes with Simon Katich and Mike Hussey suggest just how deep that frustration ran. Clarke was not, for want of a better term, one of them, and reading between the lines, the more traditional players wondered whether he felt himself better than them.

Jarrod Kimber wrote in the first issue of the Nightwatchman about how Clarke is representative of a shift in Australian masculinity from hairy-chested beer-swilling to manicured cocktail-sipping, and that probably didn't help, but the truth is that in any team there's a player or two who has to shoot off immediately after play, whether because they are too busy or because they have promised their wife or just because they don't much like sitting around having a beer. When things are going well, that's not a problem; when things are going badly, you can guarantee they are the ones who'll be slagged off in the clubhouse afterwards.

The issue then is chicken-and-egg: do they not hang around because they are self-centred in how they approach the game, or do they become self-centred because the rest of the team regards them with suspicion?

Of course, in this regard the major difference between professionals and happy weekend amateurs is the stakes. We grumble about a team-mate who never passes or scores too slowly because it might cost us the game and because we want to be involved as much as possible. A Test cricketer fumes about it because he is playing for his nation in front of an audience of millions and because defeats can cost contracts.

Yet does it really matter if team-mates get on? The great Dutch football coach Rinus Michels, architect of Total Football, pioneers what he termed the Conflict Principle: he felt if his players became too comfortable they would lose their edge. Look at most workplaces. While you will get groups of friends, most people just rub along and wouldn't dream of socialising with their workmates once they had moved on to a different job.

Dressing rooms, it's easy for fans and amateurs to forget, are just workplaces. Everybody is fighting under one banner, and yet at the same time they are fighting for preferment with each other. If you do lose the game and the pressure comes for changes, you don't want to be the one whose match figures were 0 for 185, just as when cutbacks come in an office, you don't want to be the one whose sales figures dropped by 10% over the previous year. Football club dressing rooms are probably even worse, given the frequency with which players move on: why stick up for the idiot winger who never tracks back when the chances are you'll be playing for different teams next year anyway? It comes as no great surprise when the combative Roy Keane says he made no friends in football, but it's rather more startling when the genial Niall Quinn, seemingly the epitome of the tough but easy-going, hard-drinking Irishman, admits he didn't either.

So long as players aren't wilfully undermining each other - as the crowd favourite Len Shackleton did when Sunderland broke the world transfer record to sign Trevor Ford and, fearing for his status, began delivering crosses so loaded with spin they were impossible to control, before turning to the fans and shrugging - it doesn't seem much to matter. If you don't deliberately run them out or start texting details of technical flaws to the opposition, it doesn't much matter whether you'd go to their wedding - so long as things are going well. Under stress, fault lines will always be exposed.

So what is team spirit? Does it exist and is it important? It's clearly true that certain players for certain countries - and particularly nations that are in the process of rebuilding after revolution or war: Croatia in 1996 and 1998 or Bosnia today in football - do at times seem inspired by notions of patriotic duty, but for the most part team spirit seems something of a myth, a nebulous togetherness generated when things are going well. As the former Tottenham and Barcelona striker Steve Archibald once noted in a moment of unusual eloquence, perhaps aided by a wistful translation into Spanish and out again, "Team spirit is a chimera glimpsed in the moment of victory."

The Haal Of Pakistan

• 11Mar 2013
•  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You could tell that day in Durban?

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

But how have Pakistan been so good at doing this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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