Being Oneself

The master of being himself

Andrew Strauss doesn't pose, shout, or try to shove all his players into one mould. Being his own man may just be his greatest virtue

Ed Smith

August 15, 2012

Comments: 30 | Login via  | Text size: A | A

	Strauss' innate confidence and talent for letting his team-mates be themselves has allowed England to grow up © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Andrew Strauss | Kevin Pietersen Series/Tournaments: South Africa tour of England Teams: England

Andrew Strauss plays his 100th Test for England tomorrow. I was an exact contemporary of Strauss - at school, university and in county cricket. Few predicted he would play 100 Tests. Indeed, Strauss himself would have laughed at the idea when he was starting out as a cricketer. Owais Shah, not Strauss, was the teenage Middlesex prodigy. Not that Strauss minded not being the centre of attention. Waiting for the right moment, biding his time - that is the hallmark of his distinguished career.

Some sportsmen declare their hand at the outset. Graeme Smith always said he wanted to captain South Africa when he was still a kid. Strauss, in contrast, is not someone to reveal his hand so lightly. Did he always have deep ambitions that were hidden by his self-effacing English reserve? Or did he only realise by increments - as he gradually worked his way through the field - that he could go so far, as a player and a captain? I've never been sure of the answer. Perhaps he isn't either.

In one crucial respect, Strauss has never changed. He has always had the social and psychological confidence to be himself. As a player, he has never puffed out his chest in phony displays of patriotic guts and determination. As a captain, he is more interested in calmness and balance than show-off field placings or macho arm-waving.

Being yourself is the most underrated virtue in sport, as we've learnt once again during the London Olympics. Some sports psychologists have argued that athletes could unlock hidden potential if they adopted the same uber-relaxed, super-confident pre-race routine as Usain Bolt.

I take the opposite view. The lesson of Usain Bolt (apart from the obvious one: be more talented than everyone else) is the profound value of being yourself. Watch again the few seconds before the 200 metre final, as the sprinters are introduced to the crowd. Bolt, of course, does his usual showman act - clowning and gesturing, looking at once intimidating and relaxed.

The revealing thing is that all the other sprinters awkwardly followed his example, trying to project the aura of Bolt without the underlying conviction. The American sprinter Wallace Spearmon stared into the camera lens as he shouted with bristling machismo, "My time, my time!" - all of which did nothing to persuade anyone that it was his time, but merely reinforced the truth that it was Bolt's.

Like Bolt, a very few lucky cricketers - such as Sir Vivian Richards or Ian Chappell - are naturally ultimate alpha males. The rest have to reach an accommodation with the fact that they are extremely good performers without being kings of the jungle. The most common mistake is to copy the wrong example - to try to be something you're not - like the sprinters who try to act like Bolt without being Bolt.

During the period of Australian supremacy, England teams wasted too much energy trying to behave like Australians, as though the skills would follow naturally from the style. But it doesn't work like that. Being yourself is always the best policy.

Strauss has been the master of being himself. Like Mark Taylor, he has never tried to hide the fact that he is a courteous, measured and controlled person. He has never got sucked into behaving like an alpha male show-off. That innate confidence has allowed the England team to grow up.

The most effective captains do not impose their own personality on the group; they encourage the team to develop its own authentic voice. Strauss celebrates diversity rather trying to shoehorn all players into one model. "I wouldn't want to captain a team in which everyone is like me," he has said. It gets to the heart of his captaincy.

And yet, for all his achievements, Strauss takes to the field in his 100th Test under undeniable pressure. He has just endured one of the most difficult spells of his captaincy. On the field, England have suffered a poor 2012 in Tests. Whatever happens at Lord's, they have failed to win a home series against a great rival.

Off the pitch, the estrangement of Kevin Pietersen from the England management (more on this in a moment) has been an uncomfortable circus for everyone involved. And it would be only human, for a player about to win his 100th cap, to regret that the Pietersen issue has dominated the lead-up to such an important Test.

	Strauss has been the master of being himself. Like Mark Taylor, he has never tried to hide the fact that he is a courteous, measured and controlled person

But paradoxically, when he looks back at his England career, Strauss may be grateful that he entered his 100th Test with so much riding on the result. Far from being an easy lap of honour, Strauss' 100th Test is exactly that - another test of character. And sport - as Strauss knows very well - is at its most rewarding when it is most challenging.

****

A fortnight ago I added a second, shorter item to my column to accommodate an instinct I had about Kevin Pietersen. It seemed to me, looking from the outside, that something big was about to happen. I had no evidence beyond a deep-seated hunch. Pietersen had been looking increasingly distant and hurt, and the England management seemed to be losing patience.

But I noticed years ago that Pietersen often plays at his scintillating best when he feels wronged. And he did just that once more. His 149 at Headingley was one of the great innings played for England in the modern era. When it is a case of "KP against the world", he is capable of almost anything.

Is there any way, I wonder, that Pietersen can access that strand of his personality - the resilient individualism and epic self-belief that defined his Headingley hundred - without actually orchestrating a situation where it really is "KP against the world"?

Can't he just imagine life is like that - that he has a giant score to settle with the world - while, in fact, behaving normally, just like everyone else?

I hope so. Because it seems a terrible curse if he must experience genuine turmoil to access his deepest talents.

Top tips for writing a strong female hero

Moira Young

The Costa award-winning author of Blood Red Road shares her top tips for creating fictional female heroes that live, breathe and fight on the page

• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 August 2012 11.15 BST

'Sacrifice is the hallmark of the best heroes': Moira Young, winner of the Costa children's book prize for Blood Red Road

The first female hero I ever met was six inches tall, lived inside our tiny black and white TV, and danced and sang her way along the yellow brick road with her friends. It was, of course, Dorothy in the movie of The Wizard of Oz. I was four years old. There it was, the hero's journey with its archetypal elements – the call to adventure, the road of trials with its allies and enemies, the ordeal, seizing the sword (in Dorothy's case, the broomstick of the Wicked Witch) and the hero's return – all to a catchy musical score. Little wonder that female heroes and the hero's journey sank deep into my psyche and that my first books star a strong teenage girl hero.

1. Rebel Heart (Dustlands)
2. by Moira Young
3. 
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

Search the Guardian bookshop

1. Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

Those are my credentials. So here it is, my Cut-Out-And-Keep Guide to Knitting Your Own Female Hero.

1. Make the stakes high

Give your hero a pressing dilemma, an important problem to solve, an urgent need that must be met. This will kick off the action and drive her through the story. It's her quest. We need to identify with her and root for her, page after page, so it should be a universal concern: success, love, death, survival, freedom, revenge, justice. At the same time, we need the quest to be deeply personal to the hero. We won't give a toss if she risks all to save the kidnapped uncle of her next-door neighbour's best friend. We might if it's her twin brother.

Not all heroes accept the high-stakes challenge willingly. A reluctant hero is fine, but if the story is to engage, they have to commit to the adventure sooner rather than later. Dorothy is a reluctant hero. She backs off from adventure, but it grabs her anyway and flings her into Oz. She's just a farm girl from Kansas, ordinary like most of us. But her desire to get back home is so great that, with the help of her friends, she overcomes her fears, conquers every obstacle in her path, kills the witch and is hailed a hero.

Oh, and if you want to make the stakes for your hero even higher, ratchet up the tension by setting the clock ticking. Trigger the timer on the bomb, either literally or metaphorically.

2. Keep her at the centre of the action

Remember, her need to succeed in her quest is what's powering the story. She makes the decisions, for good or ill, that move the story on. I write in scenes. For each scene, I ask myself the same series of questions, including: Is the main character at the centre of the action? Is it from her point of view? If the answer is no, I rewrite it. If there's some reason she can't be at the centre and there's a danger of her being sidelined, I ensure that I don't lose her for more than five or six lines. If it isn't appropriate for her to speak or act, I give her an inner reaction or thought.

3. Put your hero in extremis

Have your plot choices push her to the edge and beyond. She needs to be tested and challenged, psychologically, emotionally and physically, over and over again as her story progresses. Her true heroic character – determined, resourceful, courageous and self-sacrificing – will be revealed by the choices she makes under pressure. Sacrifice is the hallmark of the best heroes. They're willing to give up something of value for the greater good, up to and including their own life.

4. Make her multi-layered

You want your readers to sympathise and identify with your hero. So, like a real person, she should be a complex personality. She needs to be an entire symphony, not just one note. Give her some interesting flaws: fears, weaknesses, internal contradictions and quirks. Set up conflicts in her character that will be impediments to her achieving her goal.

5. Look for real female heroes, past and present

A hero is someone we admire for their courage or outstanding achievements. They don't have to be warriors like Ripley, battling aliens in outer space, or my own character, Saba, fighting to save her brother in the future world of Blood Red Road. They're in your own family and community. Browse the biographies, autobiographies, newspapers and magazines at the library. Listen to the radio, watch the news. We live in a world where women and girls are heroes every day, in big ways and small ways. Write their stories down. You'll be inspired.

Moira Young is the author of the Dust Land trilogy, a dystopian series set in a post-apocalyptic world. The first in the trilogy, Blood Red Road, won the Costa children's book award. The second, Rebel Heart, picks up exactly where the Blood Red Road ended, with the colourful and opinionated main character, Saba, crossing a barren land, keeping her family safe from the Tonton and hoping to be reunited with Jack. The film rights for the series have been optioned by Ridley Scott's production company.

Olympics: the key to our success can rebuild Britain's economy

We need politicians who understand why we were so successful at the 2012 Games. Cameron and Osborne do not

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 12 August 2012

Chris Hoy's victory was the product of a finely tuned system of financial and technical support. Photograph: Tom Jenkins

Everyone has marvelled at the success of Team GB, but the best haul of medals in 104 years is no accident. It is the result of rejecting the world of public disengagement and laissez faire that delivered one paltry gold medal in Atlanta just 16 years ago. Instead, British sport embraced a new framework of sustained public investment and organised purpose, developing a new ecosystem to support individual sports with superb coaching at its heart. No stone was left unturned to achieve competitive excellence.

The lesson is simple. If we could do the same for economy and society, rejecting the principles that have made us economic also-rans and which the coalition has put at the centre of its economic policy, Britain could be at the top of the economic league table within 20 years.

The turnaround began in the run-up to Sydney in 2000 as the first substantial proceeds from the lottery began to flow into sport. There was investment in infrastructure – tracks, swimming pools, velodromes – but crucially also in the structures supporting individual sportsmen and women. There were funds for world-class coaches, such as Jim Saltonstall in sailing and Dave Brailsford in cycling, and for nutritionists and sports psychologists. Also for science and technology where appropriate, ensuring we had the best bikes and boats.

Crucially, the money was not distributed through one statist institution pursuing a centrally determined strategy, but through the varying intermediate bodies, from theRoyal Yachting Association to British Cycling. They knew their sport well, could direct the spending where it was most needed, but still had to show – through results – that they deserved the cash. Last but not least was a ruthless approach to picking potential winners and grooming them for success in a world of intensely global competition, all dramatised by the reality that Britain would host the Olympics.

Everything was underpinned not by a raucous jingoism but by a determined pride in what our country now is and to show that we can be the best, a patriotism that allows us to be open to the cream of the world but also to use it for our own purposes. The alchemy is, as we have seen, extraordinarily powerful.

Not only do we need to sustain these principles so they become structurally and culturally embedded for continuing Olympic success, but they should also be applied elsewhere. The problem is that they are born of an ideological hybrid that wrong-foots our political class. They are mostly rooted in liberal social democratic values that understand the importance of public investment, public organisation and institution-building. But they also involve an unashamed recognition that in the end individual application, resolve and will to win are indispensable.

David Cameron and London mayor Boris Johnson are happy to celebrate the element that is rooted in competition, elitism and individual effort. But they flounder the instant the conversation moves to the role of public investment and the necessity of understanding and sustaining our unique sport ecosystem, just as nearly every Labour politician flounders the other way round.

The number of British politicians who understand this hybridity – and will argue for it – is tiny. Michael Heseltine always has and Peter Mandelson finally got there in the dying days of the New Labour government, a government that should have been all about such hybridity but was racked by the desire to show its "business friendliness" and warmth to the City.

In today's government, only Vince Cable consistently argues for it and is thus nicknamed the "anti-business" secretary by many on the right whose understanding of what drives success in modern economies and societies is close to zero. The big point is that success depends on recognising that both elements count.

So what to do economically? The first part of the alchemy is for the state to trigger substantial public investment in everything that supports enterprise – communications, science, knowledge generation and transfer, housing and education. And to do so with purpose and consistency. It should be running at least £30bn a year higher than the Treasury currently spends, financed either by taxation or borrowing, depending on the particular economic conjuncture. Currently, it should be financed by borrowing at the lowest interest rates for 300 years. A plan B should begin immediately with such an ambition.

But that is only the start. The next step is to reproduce sector by sector the kind of ecosystem that sport has developed. There needs to be specialist knowledge, commitment, long-term finance and coaching for business and a new web of intermediate institutions that can do for companies in life sciences, robotics and new materials what the RYA, British Gymnastics and British Cycling have done for sportsmen and women. For example, the fledgling network of "catapults" designed to transfer technology into varying sectors must become centres of open innovation, coaching and support and scaled up quickly so they can reproduce the Olympic effect for business.

But for any of that to work, engaged owners have to be committed to their companies over time and banks need to behave more as business coaches – not sellers of credit and of useless financial products. They need to become organisations that attempt to co-grow the companies in an active partnership, not organisations that opt for money-laundering, Libor manipulation or mis-selling. This will demand a wholesale recasting of Britain's system of business ownership and finance, informed by the same pride and ambition for Britain as our athletes and Olympic crowds have shown.

There then has to be a commitment to management and performance – a world where achievement is genuinely rewarded and poor performance penalised. The principles are common sense. Wherever applied – from Team GB to the success of the German car industry or American IT industry – they work. Mr Osborne assures us of his complete focus on growth and jobs even as the UK economy remains locked in depression and an escalating balance of payments crisis. But such focus is meaningless unless informed by an understanding of what to do and a determination to do it.

Osborne and Cameron believe in the same ideas – public disengagement, free markets and laissez faire – that brought Olympic failure. Either they change or political leaders who do understand what to do must take their place. Britain could so easily be a world success. But first it has to find politicians who understand the necessity of hybridity. They are not Osborne and Cameron.

The Waste Management Crisis in Kerala

by Mohamed Nazeer in The Hindu

There is hardly any informed person in Kerala who does not have an opinion about waste being generated in the process of urbanisation, but nobody knows how exactly to manage it.

There is a serious crisis in urban waste management that has manifested itself in the form of deadlocked garbage disposal plans in some municipalities and Corporations in the State. It highlights the gap between accepted standards in solid waste management and their achievement.

Caught in the struggle are the civic bodies, the people and the government. The impasse in garbage disposal and treatment is acutely felt in the Corporations of Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Kozhikode, Thrissur and Kollam, and the municipalities of Kannur and Thalassery.

With an urban population share of nearly 48 per cent, Kerala comes close to the global rate. The hotspots of garbage management crisis in the State are a reflection of the collective failure to devise an appropriate strategy and technology. The crisis has turned local panchayats against municipalities and Corporations on the one hand and the civic bodies against the government on the other.

Transportation of waste to the landfills triggers protests by local residents, who raise the issue of their right to live in a clean environment. The waste disposal systems of the civic bodies are naturally left in a mess, with mounds of rotting garbage in parts of towns and cities.

The no-holds-barred battle between the Vilappil panchayat and the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation over a solid waste treatment plant set up there continues with no solution in sight. Even a decade after the plant started functioning, the Corporation is unable to put in place a leachate treatment plant. In spite of favourable High Court pronouncements, the district administration had to abandon two attempts to bring the plant-related equipment and clay to the Vilappil plant in the face of local protests.

C.P. John, member, Kerala State Planning Board, says if the Vilappilsala plant set up with private participation for processing biodegradable waste into manure had not failed because of a dispute over the pricing of the manure, it would have been a perfect model for solid waste management for the entire State. Much of the urban garbage woes in the State, he says, expose the absence of proper urban space planning. Such planning would have come about if urbanisation had occurred as part of industrialisation. But it is the service sector that accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the State’s economy, he says, and some of the service sector activities are waste-generating.

The Kochi Corporation, which faced the wrath of the people at the Vadavukode, Puthenkurishu and Kunnathunadu panchayats protesting against the Brahmapuram garbage treatment plant, appears to have learnt the lessons from Vilappilsala.

The Corporation has engaged a private agency for clearing the garbage that has piled up at its plant site.

The agency can also take the manure produced. As the government is in the process of identifying an agency for a new plant at Brahmapuram, the Corporation is planning to have a tie-up with a Pune-based private firm to set up a plant for treating plastic waste.

The previous Left Democratic Front government issued an order on implementation of Lalur Model Project for Solid Waste Management (LAMPS), a decentralised initiative, but the Thrissur Corporation has not implemented it. Garbage removal in the city has been hit for seven months because of protests by Lalur residents. The situation is no different in Kollam as the Corporation’s modernised garbage treatment plant at Kureepuzha is unable to become operational in the face of protest by residents against the erection of a leachate plant. Six biogas plants set up by the Corporation have mitigated the garbage problem.

The dumping ground of the Kozhikode Corporation at Njeliyambra, located previously in the Nallalam-Cheruvannur grama panchayat, (now merged with the Corporation), has also drawn protests. The demand is for the corporation to upgrade the garbage treatment plant, construct a leachate collection unit and get a new landfill site. Waste disposal of the Kannur and Thalassery municipalities has been hit for months owing to protests by residents living in the vicinity of landfills at Chelora and Pettippalam respectively.

The waste management crisis in the State has already emerged as its single major development issue.

Profit and PR are the real enemies of innovation

From drugs to computers, the big rewards are now in tweaking existing products and presenting them as ground-breaking

• 
• • Peter Wilby
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 August 2012 22.00 BST

Bryony Finn of the Science Museum inspects the Pilot ACE, the fastest computer in the world in the 1950s and fundamentally designed by Alan Turing. Photograph: Geoff Caddick/PA

For more than a decade, we have been told that the pharmaceutical industry faces a crisis: it finds it more and more difficult to develop new drugs. The returns on research and development, company executives plead, are dismal. In the US particularly they have therefore lobbied for longer periods of patent protection, more government subsidies and less regulation of new drugs. The growing costs of research, they argue, justify the high prices. But this week a widely reported paper for the British Medical Journal, by two North American professors, Donald Light and Joel Lexchin, points out that the annual licensing of new drugs is much the same as it has been for 50 years. Unfortunately, 85-90% are minor variations on existing drugs (often introduced when patents are near expiry) and provide "few or no clinical advantages for patients".

The US drugs industry, say Light and Lexchin, spends only 1.3% of revenues (excluding taxpayer subsidies) on basic research to discover molecules that could lead to genuinely new medicines. It spends far more on maintaining profits – among the highest of any industry, after tax – and on PR, marketing and lobbying. There is an innovation crisis, but largely of the companies' own making.

For years nearly all original drugs brought to market have been based on research either at taxpayer-funded institutions, mainly universities, or in small biotechnology companies. Big companies, such as Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (recently fined $3bn by US regulators for aggressive and misleading marketing), are essentially rent-seekers. They do not create wealth and add social benefit, but enrich themselves through control of resources, as landowners have done for generations. And what has happened in "big pharma" – long marked down by the left, and some on the right, as an unacceptable face of capitalism – mirrors what has happened across the British and US economies. The innovation crisis is not confined to the drugs industry.

Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, co-founders of PayPal, said last year that innovation in the US was "somewhere between dire straits and dead". In his book Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Richard Florida of Toronto University argued that, while a time traveller from 1900 arriving in 1950 would be astonished by phones, planes, cars, electricity, fridges, radio, TV, penicillin and so on, a traveller from 1950 to the present would find little to amaze beyond the internet, PCs, mobile phones and, perhaps, how old technologies had become infinitely more reliable. The US economist Tyler Cowen made a similar point last year in The Great Stagnation: innovation slowed after the 1970s, he argued, and failed to create jobs. No development of the past 50 years, he could have added, bestowed benefits comparable to what washing machines and vacuum cleaners did to liberate women from drudgery.

Green energy technologies have not developed for large-scale use as was widely expected. Nor have electric cars, still less flying cars. The promise of gene therapy is unfulfilled. The development of MEMs (miniaturised pumps, levers or sensors on silicon chips) and nanotechnology – predicted as long ago as 1959 – has been agonisingly slow. In some respects, we have gone backwards: since the retirement of Concorde, the speed of air travel has slowed.

The desirability of some of these technologies is contested, but their spread has not been inhibited on social or ethical grounds. So what stops their development? Excessive government regulation and high taxes, stifling animal spirits among innovators and entrepreneurs, are commonly blamed. I see it differently. Invention and development of genuinely new, beneficial products are being stifled, as in the pharmaceutical industry, by big, established companies, not government. Just as drug companies tweak existing products, and deploy large marketing budgets to present them as new, so do other companies tweak and sometimes incrementally improve technologies that were familiar to our grandparents.

Supermarkets are full of things that claim to be "new and improved". Technologists tweak vegetables and fruits to make them last longer, look better and travel more easily, without regard to flavour. Bankers develop new trading "products" that, however you cut it, are still about borrowing and lending. We have digital radio and high-definition TV, though not everybody thinks either improves on what existed before. For many companies, skilful marketing of products that aren't significantly different from what preceded them has replaced innovation. It's cheaper and less risky to convince customers that something is ground-breaking, even when it isn't, than develop something truly innovatory.

In short, rent-seeking is now far more lucrative than innovation that delivers social benefits. The big rewards go to directors and executives of large companies – and financial traders, the ultimate rent-seekers who impose an unproductive tax on invention, investment and hard work across the world. Like the inventors of lasers and transistors, Alan Turing – without whom the modern computer wouldn't exist – and Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, did not become rich. Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs did.

Gates and Jobs recognised the possibilities of what others invented, risked money to develop them, and through marketing and design made them accessible to millions. Nobody suggests they should go unrewarded. But as Joseph Stiglitz points out in The Price of Inequality, Microsoft "did not develop the first widely used word processor, the first spreadsheet, the first browser, the first media player, or the first dominant search engine". Gates became rich because he established a near-monopoly in PC operating systems. When innovations such as the web browser appeared, he saw off their initial developers and other potential competitors by launching his own versions at below-cost prices or none at all.

Innovation always entails risk. But the bar is set higher because those who innovate or support innovation must overcome the entrenched interests of monopolistic rent-seekers, who usually have the ear of governments and regulators. Knowing this, many scientists and mathematicians put their innovatory talents at the well-rewarded service of financial companies rather than struggle in research labs. Light and Lexchin argue for better regulation of the drugs industry. We need better regulation of rent-seekers across the board if the British and US economies are to be steered towards creating genuinely new, marketable technologies that are both job-creating and socially beneficial.

I is the most important letter in a cricket team

By Girish Menon

In a recent article in The Telegraph, Geoffrey Boycott mentioned, there is no I in a cricket team and hence implying that Kevin Pietersen should kowtow to the diktats of the team's leaders. In this piece I will argue that I believe the individual, I, is the elephant in a cricket team's dressing room and by ignoring it won't we be behaving like an ostrich burying its head in the sand?

In cricket there are three principal activities viz. batting, bowling and fielding and in each activity the individual player is the most important actor. Let me try to explain this idea by contrasting it with football. In football, a defender can ask for help from another teammate to police and control a forward from the opposite team. Other players can pass the ball, run into open spaces etc to help a team mate come out of a sticky situation. The goalkeeper appears to be the only individual in this team sport.

In cricket, while batting no team mate can help a batter combat the aggression of a Morkel or the wiles of a Murali. The individual has to face the ball delivered by a bowler. A team mate may take a single of the last ball of each over and shield his partner, but there is no way he can face the ball for his partner should he find himself at the receiving end. In contrast, defenders in football can act in pairs to ward of an  attack by an opposing forward.

It gets even more individual when it gets to bowling. The bowler has to run up and deliver the ball on his own accord. The rest of his teammates enter the game only subsequently after the batter has reacted to the delivery. In football, a forward can pass the ball to a team mate thereby beating the goalkeeper and creating an open goal situation for his teammate to score.

Similarly whilst fielding too it is the individual who is responsible for delivering the goods and any discussion of individualism in cricket will not be complete without a discussion of the role of the most important individual in a cricket team viz. the captain. The captain's individual idiosyncrasies affect not only the fortune of the team but also the careers of the other team members in the squad.

In the book, One More Over, Erapalli Prasanna talked about how under Bishen Bedi's captaincy he was brought on to bowl only after the batsmen were well established at the crease. I'm sure that cricket watchers and players will have innumerable stories about the decisions of captains that have affected a game as well as individual careers.

In a recent article Ed Smith talked about TheBresnan Effect on the English team's outcomes in recent cricket matches due to the inclusion of Tim Bresnan in the team. While admitting the difficulty of measuring Bresnan's impact on England or more famously that of Shane Battier on the Houston Rockets; Smith implicitly recognises the individual's role in the fortunes of a team. My thesis therefore is that the absence of an adequate tool to evaluate an individual's performance should not therefore lead us to conclude erroneously like Boycott that there is no 'I' in a cricket team.

After all if there is no 'I' in a cricket team; then why are some individuals from a losing team retained while the less fortunate ones dropped. If there is collective responsibility then like the voting out of a political party all members of a cricket team should be dropped in case of failure. Since that does not happen it would be  foolish for anybody, and especially Boycott, to argue against individualism in cricket.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future

By Tom Chivers Science Last updated: August 10th, 2012

Tomorrow's weather: changeable, with a 66 per cent chance of extinction events

Yesterday I read a startling-ish statistic. A Twitter account calledUberFacts, which has around two and a half million followers, solemnly informed us that there is a 95 per cent chance that humans will be extinct in the next 9,000 years. Now, it's from Twitter, it's probably nonsense. But it got me thinking. What does it even mean?

Obviously, it means that we have a one in 20 chance of surviving to the 2,280th Olympiad, held on RoboColony 46 in the balmy Europan summer of 11012AD. But how can they possibly know that? Have they perhaps got access to other universes and a time machine, and gone forward to a thousand 11012ADs in a thousand alternate realities, and noted with sadness that only 50 such timelines contained humans?

One imagines not, or someone would have said. What they're doing is offering a prediction: if we were to run the universe 20 times, we'd probably survive once. So how might they arrive at that figure? More generally, what does it mean when sports commentators say "Sunderland have a 65 per cent chance of beating Swansea", or financial journalists say "There's an 80 per cent chance that Greece will leave the euro by the start of 2013"?

I don't have any idea how UberFacts arrived at their 95 per cent figure, because they didn't give a source. Someone else suggested it came from the Stern Review into the economic effect of climate change: I had a look around, and Stern in fact assumed a 10 per cent chance of human extinction in the next century. If we extrapolate that to a 9,000-year timescale, that's 90 centuries: 0.9 (the likelihood of not going extinct per century) to the power 90 = 0.00008, or a mere 0.008 per cent chance of survival. UberFacts were being extremely optimistic.

But we've just pushed our question back a stage. We know how we got to our 95 per cent figure (sort of). But how did we get that 0.9 in the first place?

Presumably we assess the ways we could get killed, or kill ourselves. In the journal Risk Analysis, Jason Matheny put forward a few possibilities:, including nuclear war, asteroid strikes, rogue microbes, climate change, or a physics experiment that goes wrong, "creating a 'true vacuum' or strangelets that destroy the planet".

Some of them are semi-predictable. It's not impossible to put a figure on the possibility of a fatal impact with a stellar object. If you know how many large objects are wandering around the relevant bits of solar system, you could put an estimate on the likelihood of one hitting us: a Nasa scientist put it at roughly one impact per 100 million years. You can build a predictive physical model, with known uncertainties, and come up with a figure of probability which is not meaningless. Climate models are an attempt to do something similar, but the sheer number of variables involved means that even the IPCC are unwilling to go past statements such as it is "likely" that, for instance, sea levels will rise, or "very likely" that temperatures will continue to go up: the odds of "total extinction" are not given. And as for the odds of nuclear war or accidentally creating a black hole, there's no model that can even pretend to be helpful.

That 0.9-chance-of-survival-per-century is not a mathematically arrived-at probability, but a guess (and, as a commenter has pointed out, rather a high one, since we've survived 500 centuries or so without trouble so far). You can call it something more flattering – a working assumption; an estimate – but it's a guess. And, obviously, the same applies to all the others: financial journalists aren't laboriously working through all the possible universes in which Greece does and doesn't leave the euro; sports commentators haven't created mathematical models of the Sunderland and Swansea players and run them through a simulation, with carefully defined error bars. They're expressing a guess, based on their own knowledge, and giving it a percentage figure to put a label on how confident they feel.

Is that the death knell for all percentage-expressed figures? No: there is a way of finding out whether a pundit's prediction is meaningful. You can look at an expert's predictions over time, and see whether her "70 per cent likelies" come out 70 per cent of the time, and whether her "definites" come up every time. Luckily, someone's done this: Philip Tetlock, a researcher at the University of California's business school. He has dedicated 25 years to doing precisely that, examining 284 expert commentators in dozens of fields, assessing their predictions over decades. You can read about Tetlock's work in Dan Gardner's fantastic book Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe them Anyway, but here's the top line: the experts he looked at would, on average, have been beaten by (in Tetlock's words) "a dart-throwing chimpanzee" – ie they were worse than random guesses.

What he also found, however, was that not all experts were the same. The ones who did worse than the imaginary chimp tended to be the Big Idea thinkers: the ones who have a clear theory about how the world works, and apply it to all situations. Those thinkers tended, paradoxically, to be the most confident. The ones who did (slightly) better than average were the ones who had no clear template, no grand theoretical vision; who accepted the world as complex and uncertain and doubted the ability of anyone, including themselves, to be able to predict it. It's a strange thing to learn: the people who are most certain of the rightness of their predictions are very likely to be wrong; the people who are most likely to be right are the ones who will tell you they probably aren't. This applied equally whether or not someone was Right-wing or Left-wing, a journalist or an academic, a doomsayer or an optimist. When it comes to predicting the future, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

So what does this tell us about UberFacts's supremely confident but infuriatingly unsourced "95 per cent" claim? Essentially: it's nonsense. It might be possible to make a reasonable guess at the chance of extinction per century, if it's done cautiously. But extending it to 9,000 years is simply taking the (considerable) likelihood that it's wrong and raising it to the power 90. It is a guess, and a meaningless one: in 11012AD there will either be humans, or there won't, and our spacefaring descendants won't know whether they've been lucky or not any more than we do.

But there is a wider lesson to learn than that you probably shouldn't trust huge sweeping predictions on Twitter. It's that you shouldn't trust sweeping predictions at all. Anyone who says that the euro is definitely going to collapse, or that climate change is definitely going to cause wars, or that humanity is 95 per cent doomed, is no doubt utterly sure of themselves, but is also, very probably, guessing.