Dr. Farzana Hassan
----------
Also read
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
Monday, 6 April 2015
The art of (amateur) cricket captaincy
Charlie Campbell in The Guardian
No cricket captain needs an ECB survey to tell him what he already knows – that playing numbers in England are in decline. The last game of the season is always the most important one for the amateur skipper. By then, up to half of your players will be deciding whether to play next year, whether they’ll put up with the aches, strains and strife that a full summer of cricket brings. But a decent team performance can erase untold painful memories from earlier in the season and a good individual one will banish all winter’s doubts. You just have to coax enough runs or wickets from those players to ensure you have a full team next year.
This is not a problem that the professional captain faces. Those at the pinnacle of the game can choose from the country’s 844,000 active cricketers – though realistically only the last 4,000 are in the running. The remaining 840,000 of us are making up the numbers. And despite these numbers, many amateur captains will struggle to put out a full XI every weekend. Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy brilliantly describes the challenges that he faced on the cricket field when leading England to Ashes glory in 1981. But he never had to play with nine men.
That is just one of the problems the amateur captain faces. It is perfectly normal for players to drop out on the eve or morning of a game. If this happens in Saturday league cricket, the first team takes the seconds’ star all-rounder but will bat him at 10 and won’t bowl him. The seconds will plunder the thirds for their best batsman and probably won’t give him back. The thirds will reluctantly borrow someone from the fourths, hoping he won’t let them down too much. And the fourths will be short, again, and may have to find something else to do that afternoon.
But league cricket is a distant relation to the professional game. And Sunday cricket is something entirely separate again, and requires a different mindset. This version of the game, perfected over centuries in villages all round England, is the beating heart of cricket. It’s where players are born and die: where once-good cricketers are put out to pasture, fathers and sons play together and where the unselectable finally get a game.
As amateur captain you hope to keep all your players happy. Some will be competent cricketers, others won’t and at least one will not have played before. But you have to forge a team out of them. At this lower level of cricket you try to involve everyone in the game one way or another. Ideally you will have a pair of good batsmen, a competent keeper and a couple of decent bowlers. Hopefully they won’t be the same two people. Then it’s like a game of chess, in which you match up your strong pieces against the opposition’s queen and rooks, and let the pawns fight it out.
Not only do you have to husband your resources carefully, but you won’t always be playing to win. Match-fixing – or match management as we prefer to call it – may be the scourge of the professional game, but it is a key aspect of Sunday cricket and perhaps the only thing that amateurs do better than the professionals.
Although not every captain adheres to these principles, usually both sides want a good close game. A one-sided match is enjoyable for the dominant players, but when the outcome is so predictable, the rest lose heart and interest. They all know how the story ends and that they’re not the hero. So sometimes it pays to take the pressure off for an over or two and let the opposition regroup. After all, you don’t want the game to be over by tea.
How I came to own the sweater Wasim Akram wore at the 1992 World Cup final
Read more
There are various ways of doing this but, however you do it, discretion is key – just as it was for Hansie Cronje or Salman Butt. You shouldn’t be asking anyone to underperform, nor be doing so yourself. I’ve never deliberately bowled a full toss, wide or no-ball – there are many better ways to alter the balance of a game. You give a weaker bowler a couple of overs too many, with an attacking field. Your cannier teammates may guess what’s going on, but the rest won’t. They’ll be too busy thinking about their own game.
But this tends to happen after the opposition has lost five quick wickets and is a hundred runs short of a competitive total. What is rare is having to match manage from the outset. It has only happened to me once. I captain a team of writers and we tend to play teams that are a little bit stronger than us. After all, authorship usually comes in the later decades of life, and consequently, our squad is long on experience but short on speed and agility.
This particular day we were playing a team of a similar vintage. I walked out with their captain for the toss and we had the standard conversation about the respective strengths of our teams, and agreed a 20-over format. One of cricket’s great joys is that things are not always what they seem. I’ve seen septuagenarians bowl maiden after maiden, morbidly obese batsmen strike quick fifties, and small children throw the stumps down from 30 yards. But as I looked at the opposition, I was pretty sure that appearances didn’t mislead and that we were the stronger side. I called correctly and put them in, thinking that it would be easier to control the game that way. We had a decent team, with enough bowling and batting to cruise to a sporting win.
I was already fretting after just two overs. Their score stood at two for no loss as the openers took a circumspect approach to batting. Chris Gayle often plays out a maiden before unleashing hell in the next over. But these two played more like Chris Tavaré and showed no signs of wanting to accelerate. At this rate we would be lucky to be chasing more than 50.
After four overs, I turned to spin, telling the surprised new bowler that I was keeping myself back for their No3, whom I knew to be their best player. (At our level, few spinners hit the stumps regularly. Each ball comes out of the hand differently. Then there’s the variation the bowler feels it necessary to add, having zealously watched clips of Warne in action. The result is always six very different deliveries, which will include a full toss, a wide and one that bounces twice. It is almost impossible not to score at least five an over off a bowler such as this, particularly if the field includes two slips and a couple of gullies as mine did. Full tosses can be hit to fielders and double bouncers sometimes pass under the bat onto the stumps.) And so the opposition’s score crept up but the wickets fell too. The No3 came and went without living up to the reputation I’d given him. But their No4 made a quick-fire 30 and they finished on a respectable 98 in their 20 overs. Meanwhile, our two occasional spinners recorded their best figures of the season.
Why do we play cricket?
Read more
Half the match had passed and while I hadn’t been actively trying to lose, nor had I been trying to win. I was giving players opportunities they didn’t always get and they were enjoying it. My competitive instinct would typically have returned now, with a total to chase, but I looked around at my team and I saw various players yet to make a decent score this season. This could be the day they did so, if the opposition’s bowling was anything like their batting. And so I put two of our tail-enders at 3 and 4.
Both were clean bowled, making five runs between them, but our spin duo played their best innings of the summer, taking us from 30 for 3 after nine overs to a position where we needed 24 from the last 18 balls. Our youngest batsman, the teenage son of one of our players, hit a few boundaries but couldn’t get the four needed from the last delivery. And so we lost. It felt strange losing like that to a weaker side but I felt we had salvaged something from what could have otherwise been an awful day’s cricket.
Even supposing the captain succeeds in getting 11 players on the field, against that ideal opposition, there still remain infinite ways in which things can go wrong. At least one player will get lost driving to an away game – and home matches are no better, since those who turn up early have to prepare the ground, put out boundary flags and sightscreens. Another player will have forgotten his whites. And pity the skipper who discovered that his first slip had taken ecstasy during the tea interval. Brearley never had to deal with that either.
No cricket captain needs an ECB survey to tell him what he already knows – that playing numbers in England are in decline. The last game of the season is always the most important one for the amateur skipper. By then, up to half of your players will be deciding whether to play next year, whether they’ll put up with the aches, strains and strife that a full summer of cricket brings. But a decent team performance can erase untold painful memories from earlier in the season and a good individual one will banish all winter’s doubts. You just have to coax enough runs or wickets from those players to ensure you have a full team next year.
This is not a problem that the professional captain faces. Those at the pinnacle of the game can choose from the country’s 844,000 active cricketers – though realistically only the last 4,000 are in the running. The remaining 840,000 of us are making up the numbers. And despite these numbers, many amateur captains will struggle to put out a full XI every weekend. Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy brilliantly describes the challenges that he faced on the cricket field when leading England to Ashes glory in 1981. But he never had to play with nine men.
That is just one of the problems the amateur captain faces. It is perfectly normal for players to drop out on the eve or morning of a game. If this happens in Saturday league cricket, the first team takes the seconds’ star all-rounder but will bat him at 10 and won’t bowl him. The seconds will plunder the thirds for their best batsman and probably won’t give him back. The thirds will reluctantly borrow someone from the fourths, hoping he won’t let them down too much. And the fourths will be short, again, and may have to find something else to do that afternoon.
But league cricket is a distant relation to the professional game. And Sunday cricket is something entirely separate again, and requires a different mindset. This version of the game, perfected over centuries in villages all round England, is the beating heart of cricket. It’s where players are born and die: where once-good cricketers are put out to pasture, fathers and sons play together and where the unselectable finally get a game.
As amateur captain you hope to keep all your players happy. Some will be competent cricketers, others won’t and at least one will not have played before. But you have to forge a team out of them. At this lower level of cricket you try to involve everyone in the game one way or another. Ideally you will have a pair of good batsmen, a competent keeper and a couple of decent bowlers. Hopefully they won’t be the same two people. Then it’s like a game of chess, in which you match up your strong pieces against the opposition’s queen and rooks, and let the pawns fight it out.
Not only do you have to husband your resources carefully, but you won’t always be playing to win. Match-fixing – or match management as we prefer to call it – may be the scourge of the professional game, but it is a key aspect of Sunday cricket and perhaps the only thing that amateurs do better than the professionals.
Although not every captain adheres to these principles, usually both sides want a good close game. A one-sided match is enjoyable for the dominant players, but when the outcome is so predictable, the rest lose heart and interest. They all know how the story ends and that they’re not the hero. So sometimes it pays to take the pressure off for an over or two and let the opposition regroup. After all, you don’t want the game to be over by tea.
How I came to own the sweater Wasim Akram wore at the 1992 World Cup final
Read more
There are various ways of doing this but, however you do it, discretion is key – just as it was for Hansie Cronje or Salman Butt. You shouldn’t be asking anyone to underperform, nor be doing so yourself. I’ve never deliberately bowled a full toss, wide or no-ball – there are many better ways to alter the balance of a game. You give a weaker bowler a couple of overs too many, with an attacking field. Your cannier teammates may guess what’s going on, but the rest won’t. They’ll be too busy thinking about their own game.
But this tends to happen after the opposition has lost five quick wickets and is a hundred runs short of a competitive total. What is rare is having to match manage from the outset. It has only happened to me once. I captain a team of writers and we tend to play teams that are a little bit stronger than us. After all, authorship usually comes in the later decades of life, and consequently, our squad is long on experience but short on speed and agility.
This particular day we were playing a team of a similar vintage. I walked out with their captain for the toss and we had the standard conversation about the respective strengths of our teams, and agreed a 20-over format. One of cricket’s great joys is that things are not always what they seem. I’ve seen septuagenarians bowl maiden after maiden, morbidly obese batsmen strike quick fifties, and small children throw the stumps down from 30 yards. But as I looked at the opposition, I was pretty sure that appearances didn’t mislead and that we were the stronger side. I called correctly and put them in, thinking that it would be easier to control the game that way. We had a decent team, with enough bowling and batting to cruise to a sporting win.
I was already fretting after just two overs. Their score stood at two for no loss as the openers took a circumspect approach to batting. Chris Gayle often plays out a maiden before unleashing hell in the next over. But these two played more like Chris Tavaré and showed no signs of wanting to accelerate. At this rate we would be lucky to be chasing more than 50.
After four overs, I turned to spin, telling the surprised new bowler that I was keeping myself back for their No3, whom I knew to be their best player. (At our level, few spinners hit the stumps regularly. Each ball comes out of the hand differently. Then there’s the variation the bowler feels it necessary to add, having zealously watched clips of Warne in action. The result is always six very different deliveries, which will include a full toss, a wide and one that bounces twice. It is almost impossible not to score at least five an over off a bowler such as this, particularly if the field includes two slips and a couple of gullies as mine did. Full tosses can be hit to fielders and double bouncers sometimes pass under the bat onto the stumps.) And so the opposition’s score crept up but the wickets fell too. The No3 came and went without living up to the reputation I’d given him. But their No4 made a quick-fire 30 and they finished on a respectable 98 in their 20 overs. Meanwhile, our two occasional spinners recorded their best figures of the season.
Why do we play cricket?
Read more
Half the match had passed and while I hadn’t been actively trying to lose, nor had I been trying to win. I was giving players opportunities they didn’t always get and they were enjoying it. My competitive instinct would typically have returned now, with a total to chase, but I looked around at my team and I saw various players yet to make a decent score this season. This could be the day they did so, if the opposition’s bowling was anything like their batting. And so I put two of our tail-enders at 3 and 4.
Both were clean bowled, making five runs between them, but our spin duo played their best innings of the summer, taking us from 30 for 3 after nine overs to a position where we needed 24 from the last 18 balls. Our youngest batsman, the teenage son of one of our players, hit a few boundaries but couldn’t get the four needed from the last delivery. And so we lost. It felt strange losing like that to a weaker side but I felt we had salvaged something from what could have otherwise been an awful day’s cricket.
Even supposing the captain succeeds in getting 11 players on the field, against that ideal opposition, there still remain infinite ways in which things can go wrong. At least one player will get lost driving to an away game – and home matches are no better, since those who turn up early have to prepare the ground, put out boundary flags and sightscreens. Another player will have forgotten his whites. And pity the skipper who discovered that his first slip had taken ecstasy during the tea interval. Brearley never had to deal with that either.
Thursday, 2 April 2015
The man who's always on the bus
2 April 2015 Damian Zane in BBC Magazine
Heathrow airport is pretty empty at 2am. One of the few people around is a man waiting for a bus.
It's part of his nightly ritual as he seeks shelter on London's network of night buses.
This is Ahmed, not his real name, a 44-year-old failed asylum seeker from India. He's wrapped in a large cream, canvas coat, with a thick brush of grey hair combed to one side.
Ahmed starts his journey at about 11pm in Leicester Square, in the heart of tourist London, packed full of people throughout most of the night.
It's a perfect place to remain invisible.
"With all these people going to the pubs and clubs, you can stay here until four o'clock in the morning," he says.
But Ahmed's typical nightly route starts with the number 24 to Hampstead Heath. Then he gets off, and gets the bus straight back where he came.
By the time he reaches central London again, the night buses have started and he can pick one of the longest routes to allow for the most rest.
"Sometimes I think about ending my life," he says, while contemplating the possibility of being arrested and forced to return to India.
Ahmed is a Muslim who grew up on a farm in rural Gujarat. Fearing for his life in the communal riots there in 2002, he fled to London. During an earlier bout of violence he'd witnessed his uncle being stabbed to death.
Traumatised by that experience and concerned that he could be targeted, he was persuaded by his parents to leave and find a better life outside India.
"They said 'you should go, don't worry about us'. That day was a very heavy day for me because I [was] leaving my parents alone," he says.
With a visitor's visa in his passport he flew into Heathrow and applied for asylum. It was rejected. India is considered to be a generally safe country, and certainly big enough for the possibility of restarting a life away from Gujarat.
Ahmed's appeal was also refused and he was told to return to India. But instead he chose to silently drop out of the system, fearing the consequences of returning home.
Not being allowed to work, he had no income and soon began sleeping rough - in doorways and behind bins, occasionally a bed in a shelter. Eventually he heard about the bus option, and has since spent much of the past three-and-a-half years sleeping on night buses.
And during that time, he's picked up certain techniques to remain undetected.
But Ahmed has also learned other methods to improve his chances of a good sleep.
He rushes to the front of the queue, he says, because there are others like him and everyone clamours for the seats on the lower deck, above the engine at the back, where it's warmest.
A Hindu mob confronts a Muslim one in Gujarat, 2002Ahmed says it's easy to spot others in a similar situation. Many are dressed in jeans and layers of hooded sweatshirts to keep out the cold, often avoiding eye contact in an effort not to be noticed.
At one stop, he points out migrants who he's travelled on the buses with before. It's a fleeting glimpse of some sort of camaraderie between these night travellers, but they all have their own individual struggles to contend with, which can hamper the development of strong friendships.
Ahmed is one of thousands of failed asylum seekers, as well as people awaiting the outcome of appeals, drifting through London, often unrealistically hoping their circumstances will suddenly change.
No accurate count of their numbers exists. It's inherently difficult to count people who have dropped off the radar. A report last year said that the Home Office is unaware how many of the 175,000 people who have no right to be in the UK still remain.
On the bus, Ahmed grabs some rest whenever he can.
He says he has a recurring dream. "It's like somebody's after me, they're going to hit me or stab me." Ahmed says that some people in the same situation can be hostile, pushing and shouting at him.
But his constant fear is of being discovered by authorities. So he adopts a common survival strategy - never cause trouble and never be where trouble is happening.
On the busy Friday and Saturday night buses, things can get rowdy, he says, making it difficult to sleep. But if ever that rowdiness escalates into violence, Ahmed is off at the next stop, keen to avoid being there if police are called.
He's not entirely alone in his struggle to survive in London. A mosaic of organisations exists in the city to help migrants and asylum seekers. They can provide piecemeal help in the form of small cash hand-outs, legal advice, a hot meal and a shower.
Three times a week Ahmed visits a centre in east London where he can wash himself and his clothes. He also stores two plastic bags holding his possessions there. At another of these charities, Ahmed cooks in return for travel money to ride his buses. After the meal, Ahmed plays table tennis and Scrabble with other migrants.
A free meal and the chance of companionship is a big draw.
"I love cooking, I'm happy if the people are eating and bless me," he says. "It means more to me than getting my papers to stay. It's by people's blessing that things will get sorted out."
But these moments of pleasure and purpose are just short punctuations in long stretches of loneliness. And once the centre closes for the day Ahmed is back on the buses.
"Last night my leg was paining me, my whole body was aching, and now the weather's getting cold," he says. "Two winters I passed on the buses and it was quite difficult. It's very difficult to survive in the winter time."
We board the night bus to Heathrow Airport. At 80 minutes, it's one of the longest routes on the network.
But arriving at an airport raises the nagging question about what is so wrong with returning to India. In the UK he has no job, no place to live and no security. It is hard to imagine what could be worse than this.
Yet Ahmed is adamant. "I can't go. Back home I have a more dangerous situation and persecution. So I'm not ready to go back to India.
"If my situation is getting worse then there may be no alternative for me [but to kill myself]. I always pray that I never get caught and sent back to India."
But how much longer can he continue?
Another couple of years, Ahmed says. He clings to the hope that once he's been in the UK for 12 years he'll be allowed to stay officially. But that optimism is not backed up by the law.
Such a provision - after 14 years, not 12 - did exist until 2012. People living in the UK - either legally or illegally - for that time could then apply for leave to remain. That period has now been lengthened to 20 years.
And unless Ahmed decides to return to India, or gets caught, that means many more hours of waiting, and many more night buses.
How to improve your luck and win the lottery twice (possibly)
Richard Wiseman in The Guardian
A British couple have just won £1m in the EuroMillions lottery for a remarkable second time. In doing so, they have beaten odds of more than 283 billion-to-one. So are they exceptionally lucky, and is there anything we can all do to increase the chances of experiencing such good fortune?
A few years ago I conducted a large-scale investigation into luck. I studied the lives of more than 400 people who considered themselves exceptionally lucky or unlucky. There was remarkable similarity among the volunteers, with the lucky people always being in the right place at the right time, while the unlucky volunteers experienced one disaster after another.
I asked everyone to keep diaries, complete personality tests and take part in experiments. The results revealed that luck is not a magical ability or the result of random chance. Nor are people born lucky or unlucky.
Instead, lucky and unlucky people create much of their good and bad luck by the way they think and behave. For example, in one study we asked our volunteers to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs in it. However, we didn’t tell them that we had placed two lucky opportunities in the newspaper. The first opportunity was a half-page advert clearly stating: “STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.” While a second advert later on said: “TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU’VE SEEN THIS AND WIN £150.”
The lucky people tended to be very relaxed, more likely to see the bigger picture, and so quickly spotted these opportunities. In contrast, the unlucky people tended to be very anxious, more focused on detail, and so missed the advertisments. Without realising it, both groups had created their own good and bad fortune.
Eventually we uncovered four key psychological principles at work in lucky people:
1. They create and notice opportunities by building a strong social network, developing a relaxed attitude to life, and being open to change.
2. They tend to often listen to their intuition and act quickly. In contrast, unlucky people tend to overanalyse situations and are afraid to act.
3. They are confident that the future will be bright, and these expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies because they help motivate lucky people to try even when the odds are against them. Unlucky people are sure that they will fail and so often give up before they have begun.
4. They are highly resilient, and keep going in the face of failure and learn from past mistakes. Unlucky people get dragged down by the smallest of problems and take responsibility for events outside of their control.
In a second phase of the project, I wanted to discover whether it was possible to change people’s luck. I asked a group of 200 volunteers to incorporate the four key principles into their lives by thinking and behaving like a lucky person. The results were remarkable. Within a few months around two-thirds of the group became happier, healthier and more successful in their careers.
But is it possible to use these techniques to win the lottery? Unfortunately not. Lotteries are purely chance events, and no amount of wishful thinking will influence your chances of success. However, the good news is that being lucky in your personal life and career is far more important than winning the lottery.
Oh, and one last tip. If you are feeling bad about never hitting the jackpot, spare a thought for Maureen Wilcox who, in 1980, bought tickets for both the Massachusetts lottery and the Rhode Island lottery. Incredibly Maureen managed to choose the winning numbers for both lotteries. Unfortunately her Massachusetts numbers won the Rhode Island lottery and her Rhode Island numbers won the Massachusetts lottery. She didn’t win a penny.
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