Pro athletes cannot be bullied into better performances

Valuable notes from a book that explains the intricacies of coaching and captaincy without once mentioning either

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

November 9, 2014

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Coaches must remember that practice isn't an end in itself © Getty Images

I've just read a brilliant book about captaincy and coaching. It might be the best book ever written on leadership in sport. The author not only studied many of the greats at first hand, he also did the job himself. There is a surprise, however, and I'm not going to spoil it. So guess, by all means, but I'm not giving away his name until the end.

I've gone through the notes in my book, collecting his advice into several themes.

Mystery
"The better a captain is, the less you know why. You certainly can't get the qualities from a textbook, and they can't be faked by copying a great captain. But there is also a practical side: however much talent you're born with, there's a lot to learn. All the best captains and coaches work hard at their craft, developing their own individual ways. They all do it differently, so there can't be only one "right" way. To put all young leaders through a training course only means that a mass of mediocrity will be let loose on the world."

Instinct
Intuition rather than rationality often drives inspired decisions. "Some captains and coaches are totally instinctive and can't describe what they do. [After one game] I was so impressed that I complimented the captain on a detail. 'Oh! Did I do that?' he replied."

See the big picture
Being preoccupied with details can't be allowed to obscure what really matters. "Skilful captains and coaches can transform the way a team plays in a very short time, even though some of them wouldn't be able to tell you much about tactics or technique. Before modern video and analytics, there was far less emphasis on precision and more on capturing the overall mood of a team. Captains were listening for bigger and more important things. We've lost something in demanding total accuracy."

Show, don't tell
One great captain "could tell me what he wanted with his eyes," the author writes. "It's important to look at players as if you expect the best, not as if you fear the worst. Many inexperienced coaches seem to be "looking for trouble", a real turnoff for a team. When I look at players during a match, I'm trying to involve and communicate what I'm feeling rather than police them."

Authenticity
Waving your arms around and acting for the cameras doesn't fool anyone. The author advises captains to have the integrity to stay focused on the game situation rather than get side-tracked about the impression he's making. If the captain is "naturally flamboyant, then it's a natural expression of his feeling". But when his self-conscious gestures are just acted out, "and don't have a real relationship with the game… then it's just a circus."

Practice is not the real thing
"The most important thing about a practice session is that it's not an end in itself. Everything a coach does must aim at a good performance on match day. Take a chance and leave some things fluid. Don't cross every "t" and dot every "i". This may feel risky, but it keeps a team on its toes and gives the match day an "edge". Don't practise a team to death; I've never had much sympathy for coaches who "program" a team at practice and then just "run the programme" during the match. There is more to it than that."

Seek authority not power
"Captaincy and coaching are like riding a horse, not driving a car. A car will go off a cliff if you "tell" it to; a horse won't. A team has a life of its own, based largely on the players sensing what each other will do."

	Be true to your captaincy instincts © Getty Images  Enlarge

Some coaches have an "unfair" knack
"An assistant coach told a story about how he couldn't get the team to work together at practice sessions, despite giving crystal clear instructions. Some time later he attended a practice led by the brilliant head coach, who began with the same practice drill. The head coach gave his characteristically vague and wobbly advice, and the whole team played together perfectly. It's an unjust world."

Allow room for mavericks
However good you are, some players won't listen - and nor should they. "One of the greatest players in history said he never looked at captains in the field as he couldn't understand what any of them were doing."

****

It's a very good list. But here is a confession. The book, though real, is not about cricket. The words captaincy and coaching are not mentioned at all, not once. The book's real subject is classical music, the title is Inside Conducting and its author is conductor Christopher Seaman. In quoting from the book, each time the term "conductor" appeared, I changed it for the word "captain"/"coach".

First, I want to demonstrate that cricket is not a ghetto, a special case that cannot learn from other disciplines. The art of performance is largely universal. As I found out when I made a series for the BBC comparing the life of a cricketer with that of a classical musician, the differences are dwarfed by the similarities.

Secondly, given the evolved state of professional sport, we need to rethink the outdated assumption that the way to inspire better performances is to threaten, bully, intimidate and scream at players. It's not wrong because it is undignified (though there is that too), it's wrong because it doesn't work. As I've argued before here, instead of seeing sportsmen as a rabble of unmotivated shysters in search of a sergeant-major to whip them into shape, professional athletes have more in common with surgeons and musicians.

Above all, captaincy and coaching are collaborative. No one, no matter how brilliant, can lead without followers. So I'll leave my favourite anecdote from the book in its original form, "untranslated" into cricket-speak:

"A famous conductor was conducting a major work without the score. At one point in the concert his memory failed him, and he gave an enormous downbeat in a silent bar. Nobody played, of course, and he froze in horror. A voice at the back of the violas whispered, 'Aha! He doesn't sound so good on his own, does he?'"

The rise of unreason

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

Some 300 years ago the age of reason lifted Europe from darkness, ushering in modern science together with modern scientific attitudes. These soon spread across the world. But now, running hot on its heels is the age of unreason. Reliance upon evidence, patient investigation, and careful logic is giving way to bald assertions, hyperbole, and blind faith.

----For an alternative perspective view
The day the Universe Changed
---

Listen to India’s superstar prime minister, the man who recently enthralled 20,000 of his countrymen in New York City with his promises to change India’s future using science and technology. Inaugurating the Reliance Foundation Hospital in Mumbai two Saturdays ago, he proclaimed that the people of ancient India had known all about cosmetic surgery and reproductive genetics for thousands of years. Here’s his proof:

“We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb.” Referring to the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha, Modi asserted that, “there must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who put an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery”.

Whether or not he actually believed his words, Modi knew it would go down well. In 1995, parts of India had gone hysterical after someone found Lord Ganesha would drink the milk if a spoon was held to his trunk. Until the cause was discovered to be straightforward capillary action (the natural tendency of liquids to buck gravity), the rush towards temples was so great that a traffic gridlock resulted in New Delhi and sales of milk jumped up by 30pc.

---

Once evidence becomes irrelevant, everything becomes possible.

---

Closer to home: a staggering number of Pakistanis — university science students included — believe that everything from quantum mechanics to black holes and genes were anticipated 1,400 years ago. Darwin’s theory of evolution is roundly rejected even by students and teachers in biology departments. Instead, the common belief is that all of modern science can be extracted by mastering Arabic and interpreting holy texts expertly enough. Forty years ago, when I joined Islamabad University, the chairman of the physics department, a pious man from the Tableeghi Jamaat, had just calculated the speed at which heaven is running away from earth — and found it to be one centimetre per second less than the speed of light. Today TV channels broadcast even more bizarre theories.

Once evidence becomes irrelevant, everything becomes possible. With only preformed notions as guide, outlandish conclusions, offensive to common sense, are frequent. The progress of science may suffer, but society and individuals take the brunt.

Take, for example, the question of whether Ram Janmabhoomi is actually the birthplace of Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu. Is this located precisely where Emperor Babar built the now-demolished Babri mosque? No conceivable archaeological evidence can adjudicate the matter. In fact it is impossible to establish on physical grounds the existence of Rama, much less the coordinates of his birthplace. But, the tragic events of Dec 6, 1992, owed to this belief. The scars of that terrible carnage have yet to heal.

Deliberately inflicted psychological scars may be even more unhealable. Terrifying life-after-death experiences are invented to create a passively accepting frame of mind. For decades, one of the most widely read books in Pakistan has been Maut ka manzar — marnay kay baad kya hoga (Scenes of life after death) with horrific episodes created by the author’s fertile imagination. Once considered as creative fiction, such life-after-death works are now becoming part of Pakistan’s mainstream education. Backed by university administrators, teachers and preachers are targeting the youth on campuses across the country.

On Oct 27, the Institute of Business Management in Karachi organised a major event, ‘The last moments — an exclusive insight on the death of a man’. The event’s black-and-white poster seems to be right out of some 1960s’ Hollywood horror movie with hooded, shrouded ghouls slouching across a graveyard. IoBM’s administration sent out official emails asking students to attend. A Saudi-certified professor would answer questions like: “Is life a mere game? Are you prepared for your death? Do you know what it feels at the moment you die? Is Allah pleased with your life?”

Such profound questions are surely best left up to God. A living, breathing, walking, talking professor cannot possibly adduce physical evidence about one’s dying moments. Nor claim to know whether Allah is pleased or angry with an individual. At best he can give his opinion.

I do not know what effect this particular professor had on his audience. But recently a colleague in Islamabad told me that his physics PhD student Mujeeb (not his real name) is behaving very strangely after viewing an after-death movie downloaded from some proselytizing website. Mujeeb now broods incessantly, worries more about death than life, and has almost stopped working.

It is not just South Asia where unreason is on the rise. The United States, the centre of high science, is now struggling with various crackpot anti-science movements. However, determined opposition has kept astrology, creationism, UFOs, magnetic therapy, etc. away from the mainstream.

In India, the battle against Vishwa Hindu Parishad and BJP ideology will be harder. But India has a strong Nehruvian past and Indian rationalists have strongly opposed so-called Vedic mathematics and cosmology, and revamping school curricula. The price has not been small. For example, Dr Narendra Achyut Dabholkar was murdered in Pune almost a year ago. He had helped draft the Anti-Jadu Tona Bill (Anti-Black Magic Bill) which political parties like the BJP and Shiv Sena opposed, claiming it would adversely affect Hindu culture, customs and traditions.

But nowhere in the world has unreason grown faster, and become more dangerous, than in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Polio workers here have shorter lives than soldiers in battle. More importantly, with schools, colleges, and universities actively working to crush young minds rather than enlighten them, this fight against unreason is surely going to be a much tougher one.

The British government is leading a gunpowder plot against democracy

This bill of corporate rights threatens to blow the sovereignty of parliament unless it can be stopped

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 4 November 2014 20.16 GMT

Illustration by Sébastien Thibault

On this day a year ago, I was in despair. A dark cloud was rising over the Atlantic, threatening to blot out some of the freedoms our ancestors lost their lives to secure. The ability of parliaments on both sides of the ocean to legislate on behalf of their people was at risk from an astonishing treaty that would grant corporations special powers to sue governments. I could not see a way of stopping it.

Almost no one had heard of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US, except those who were quietly negotiating it. And I suspected that almost no one ever would. Even the name seemed perfectly designed to repel public interest. I wrote about it for one reason: to be able to tell my children that I had not done nothing.

To my amazement, the article went viral. As a result of the public reaction and the involvement of remarkable campaigners, the European commission and the British government responded. The Stop TTIP petition now carries more than 750,000 signatures; the 38 Degrees petition has 910,000. Last month there were 450 protest actions across 24 member states. The commission was forced to hold a public consultation about the most controversial aspect, and 150,000 people responded. Never let it be said that people cannot engage with complex issues.

Nothing has yet been won. Corporations and governments – led by the UK – are mobilising to thwart this uprising. But their position slips a little every month. When the British minister responsible at the time, Ken Clarke, responded to my first articles, he insisted that “nothing could be more foolish” than making the European negotiating position public, as I’d proposed. But last month the commission was obliged to do just this. It’s beginning to look as if the fight against TTIP could become a historic victory for people against corporate power.

The central problem is what the negotiators call investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The treaty would allow corporations to sue governments before an arbitration panel composed of corporate lawyers, at which other people have no representation, and which is not subject to judicial review.

Already, thanks to the insertion of ISDS into much smaller trade treaties, big business is engaged in an orgy of litigation, whose purpose is to strike down any law that might impinge on its anticipated future profits. The tobacco firm Philip Morris is suing governments in Uruguay and Australia for trying to discourage people from smoking. The oil firm Occidental was awarded $2.3bn in compensation from Ecuador, which terminated the company’s drilling concession in the Amazon after finding that Occidental had broken Ecuadorean law. The Swedish company Vattenfall is suing the German government for shutting down nuclear power. An Australian firm is suing El Salvador’s government for $300m for refusing permission for a goldmine over concerns it would poison the drinking water.

The same mechanism, under TTIP, could be used to prevent UK governments from reversing the privatisation of the railways and the NHS, or from defending public health and the natural world against corporate greed. The corporate lawyers who sit on these panels are beholden only to the companies whose cases they adjudicate, who at other times are their employers.

As one of these people commented: “When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment arbitration at all … Three private individuals are entrusted with the power to review, without any restriction or appeal procedure, all actions of the government, all decisions of the courts, and all laws and regulations emanating from parliament.”

So outrageous is this arrangement that even the Economist, usually the champion of corporate power and trade treaties, has now come out against it. It calls investor-state dispute settlement “a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people”.

When David Cameron and the corporate press launched their campaign against the candidacy of Jean-Claude Juncker for president of the European commission, they claimed that he threatened British sovereignty. It was a perfect inversion of reality. Juncker, seeing the way the public debate was going, promised in his manifesto that “I will not sacrifice Europe’s safety, health, social and data protection standards … on the altar of free trade … Nor will I accept that the jurisdiction of courts in the EU member states is limited by special regimes for investor disputes.” Juncker’s crime was that he had pledged not to give away as much of our sovereignty to corporate lawyers as Cameron and the media barons demanded.

Juncker is now coming under extreme pressure. Last month 14 states wrote to him, privately and without consulting their parliaments, demanding the inclusion of ISDS (the letter was leaked a few days ago). And who is leading this campaign? The British government. It’s hard to get your head around the duplicity involved. While claiming to be so exercised about our sovereignty that it is prepared to leave the EU, our government is secretly insisting that the European commission slaughter our sovereignty on behalf of corporate profits. Cameron is leading a gunpowder plot against democracy.

He and his ministers have failed to answer the howlingly obvious question: what’s wrong with the courts? If corporations want to sue governments, they already have a right to do so, through the courts, like anyone else. It’s not as if, with their vast budgets, they are disadvantaged in this arena. Why should they be allowed to use a separate legal system, to which the rest of us have no access? What happened to the principle of equality before the law?

If our courts are fit to deprive citizens of their liberty, why are they unfit to deprive corporations of anticipated future profits? Let’s not hear another word from the defenders of TTIP until they have answered this question.

It cannot be ducked for much longer. Unlike previous treaties, this one is being dragged by campaigners into the open, where its justifications shrivel on exposure to the light. There’s a tough struggle to come, and the outcome is by no means certain, but my sense is that we will win.

Nehru and Indira laid down principles of secularism and nationalism that today’s politicians can’t ignore

Vinod Mehta in The Times of India

It is open season on Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. No opportunity is lost to demonise and denigrate father and daughter. Even October 31, the day the lady was assassinated, became a day-long festival for celebrating her wickedness, besides proclaiming she was no martyr but a case of self-destruction. Fortunately, we are told, a set of rulers, or shall i say ruler, is at hand, with the wisdom and vision to repair the damage.

We need to talk about Jawaharlal and Indira. That’s for sure. But we also need to keep some touch with historical veracity. For their lifelong opponents truth lies in the eye of the beholder. Consequently, 2014 onwards provides an excellent window to demolish once and for all the myth about their contribution to nation-building. What they built, so the argument goes, is their family dynasty.

Party politics can and is used to float falsehoods with the help of state power. Witness how the fable concerning our glorious Vedic past is being represented triumphantly (in which allegedly plastic surgery and stem cell research flourished) without a murmur of incredulity, or a titter of mirth. If truth is the first casualty in war, it is the second casualty in times when, as Lawrence Durrell puts it, “truth is what contradicts itself”.

The systematic and organised campaign to vilify the Nehru legacy and replace it with the more ‘muscular and patriotic’ legacy of Sardar Patel is top of the agenda. The exercise is ludicrous and an insult to the great Sardar. But let us leave that falsehood alone for the moment.

At the heart of the demolition project is the announcement that a new Idea of India, contrary to the one proposed by Nehru, is available, and in need of urgent execution. It is an abiding irony that the sole politician in the current pantheon of saffron leaders the present prime minister pays obeisance to is Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who ruled the country with Nehru as his lodestar.

What is this new Idea of India? I think we should be told. Alas, its architects have provided no blueprint except to declare it exists. If i were say Mani Shankar Aiyar, i would argue it consists of one part jingoism and one part xenophobia. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration. More accurately, it rejects the legendary poet Raghupati Sahay aka Firaq Gorakhpuri’s thesis, “Sar zamiin-e hind par aqwaam-e alam ke Firaq/ Kaafile baste gae, Hindustan bantaa gayaa”. (In the sacred land of Hind, caravans of the world Firaq went on settling, and Hindustan kept on being formed.)

If one takes the short view of history, Nehru is an easy target, and Indira even easier. To compile a list of ‘sins’ the duo committed would be superfluous since the compilation has already been lovingly done by the Sangh Parivar. Many of the sins are not without basis but they are not black and white either, except the Emergency. They were committed at a specific moment in history. Happily, we have access to material which provides us with full, balanced assessments – warts and all. We are therefore neither astonished nor shocked when these transgressions are presented. No verdict on Nehru or Indira is possible without its share of criticism.

Perhaps this is the right time to ask the hunters looking for two prized scalps some questions. Where did Narayana Murthy and the entire information technology industry come from? Where did Indra Nooyi come from? Where did Warren Buffett’s financial wizard, Ajit Jain, come from? They all came from the IITs, IIMs and other world-class education centres Nehru had the foresight to set up.

If India has the ‘bomb’ and internationally renowned research labs, the credit must go to the same man. At a time when the republic struggled, he insisted a newly independent, backward nation be fully engaged with the contemporary first world through advanced learning and progressive thinking. Nehru ensured a society steeped in superstition, ritual, religious dogma and belief in kismet embraced a scientific temper so that the temptation to wallow in a mythical ‘glorious’ past could be resisted. The modern nation state – outward-looking, open, rational, argumentative, sceptical – armed with universal adult franchise, is the creation of Jawaharlal Nehru. Rubbish that if you like.

I yield to no one in my abhorrence for aspects of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership. Because i entered journalism in 1974, i experienced the full horrors of civilian dictatorship. That she wrecked critical democratic institutions is undeniable. But we must also remember she dismembered Pakistan and made sure it could never pose a threat. There is a good Indira and a bad Indira.

Incidentally, when i read opinion polls reveal she is easily the most popular prime minister the country has produced, when i see long queues outside her Safdarjung Memorial, I wonder if our Iron Lady needs more than one yardstick (Emergency) to assess her term in office.

If Nehru’s legacy is the real obstacle holding India back, why don’t its adversaries throw it into the wastepaper basket? And govern on the majoritarian doctrine? Not a chance. When it comes to self-preservation, the new rulers are wise. They know they would soon be out of a job, if they abandoned the idea (secularism) which has held the country together.