What happens in a batting collapse

Ian O'Brien in Cricinfo


The mood inside the dressing room turns sour, and batsmen forget to play the way they normally do. It doesn't have to be like that


Nerves are on edge as wickets tumble and it's your turn to bat next © Getty Images



An old cricketing cliché is proffered flippantly, often in times of despair, a psychological pick-me-up for one team, a reinforcement of the seriousness or severity of the situation for the other: "One brings two, guys. One brings two"

While statistically this adage is flippant, quantitatively it is obvious. You really do need the "one" to have the "two". But it is no more likely that two wickets will fall within 10 to 20 of each other than that one will fall as a singular event.

What happens when one does bring two? And then two brings three. And then…

The ill-fated, most feared and dreaded batting collapse.

What defines a collapse? For me, a basis of three top- to middle-order wickets falling collectively for less than 40 runs, and then concurrent dismissals within 10 and 15 runs of each other from that point forward. A minimum of 40 for 3 to anywhere around 70 for 5 and onwards. A dramatic, game-changing period of play.

What happens in the changing room? What happens to the changing room? How do players and coaches react? Not react? How do you deal with a collapse to limit its effect?

Typically a collapse will happen during a session, not either side of a break. There is no time to pause and reflect, no time to regather and regroup. No opportunity to take a breather in the middle of it to stem the tide. There is no chance to take the moment out of the moment.

It smothers you. All of a sudden there is no oxygen in the changing room, no chat, no communication. All the vibe and positivity, the entire atmosphere gone. Empty. A void.

Like waking in the night to a noise downstairs. The changing room is on edge, anxiety-ridden. You hear everything as if on high alert. Every sound amplified. The empty coffee mug gets put down - it wobbles on its base before settling. It's the noisiest thing ever done. Every movement is stifled. Very little eye contact. Players know they are in the middle of a collapse. The changing room door keeps opening and closing. And opening and closing. The sound of Velcro pulled apart rips through silence. A bat is placed gently down next to your seat. A glove is thrown into a bag, a helmet rolls off a bench and rattles to the floor. Muffled swear words, outward frustrations for personal failures.

The batsmen draw ranks. "Hard luck, mate. That [delivery] was a good one."

The bowlers, waiting to bat, also draw together. "I'm going to have to bat soon. I just f****n bowled. I've just done my job. We've got our wickets. I'm going to have to go out and bat. Show these boys how to bat." Angry bowlers. Aggrieved bowlers. "We'll be bowing again, way too soon. F*** you batsmen." It shouldn't be personal. It's not, but it is. It always is. It always will be.

One of the most deflating things to see is a batsman failing meekly. Apprehension has taken over. They have gone away from their style, their game plan, and their grace. Visibly shaken by the situation. Noticeably nervous and jerky movements have replaced their typically measured and flowing nature. Twitchy. Feeling. Scratchy. Groping. Poking.

And that is the psychology of the situation. Firstly focusing on stopping the crash, the collapse, then the head focuses on avoiding mistakes, somehow preventing failure: what not to do, and not, as on a normal day, on creating a head space where success is consummated.



Captains and coaches can seek to arrest the collapse by talking to the remaining batsmen about their preparation and the importance of playing naturally © Getty Images





I have never been in a changing room that has ever challenged a collapse; a changing room that has found a way of negotiating it and found a way out of the mire.

Can it be done? I think yes. But some batsmen, I think, are not going to like it.

There are a few things you don't do, typically, in a changing room. One of the more important ones is to not talk to the batsman who's next in, unless he initiates the conversation. You leave him in his bubble. Whatever he might be doing, let him do it. Whatever is ticking over in his head, let him be. Preparing in his own way. Some batsmen like to chat, nervously, about anything. Some sit and stew, contemplate. Others, a crossword, newspaper quiz, anything to not watch, not concentrate. Some don't even watch the game.

In the middle of a collapse the batsman next in doesn't get the opportunity to do any of those things. And this is where a coach or captain can step in. Once two wickets have fallen together quickly, things are a bit panicky, rushed. A coach or captain can (they currently usually don't) have a word with the batsmen, remind them of their processes, their preparation, their thought patterns. A good coach or captain should know how each player prepares.

A calming of the situation. Remove the apprehension. "Go and do your thing. Think about your things, your processes. Don't rush. Breathe."

This requires coaches and captains knowing their players and team-mates probably better than they currently do. It means having care and consideration, on both sides, and knowing that individual and team success may have to take a back seat to the player's "normal" preparation. Doing things differently. Teams talk about collapses, but only after they have happened.

Slow things down, add as much time to the preparation time a player has. Take the moment out of the moment.

'Yasir Shah is the best bowler in the world, he's ranked no. 2 in the ICC rankings'.

by Girish Menon

There is no better friend than an England Test match when you are lying in bed unable to get out of it physically but mentally still alive. The recently concluded test match was such a friend as I recovered from an ailment. But this piece is about cricket and not my ailments and here are some of the things that I noticed in the radio commentary:

1. Ramiz Raja is the family's favourite commentator. He was critical of Shoaib Malik and his use of a leg slip, "Why is Shoaib using a leg slip, he should attack more on the onside, maybe he should bring a silly mid-off".

He also said the following in the same breath, 'Yasir Shah is the best bowler in the world, he's ranked no. 2 in the ICC rankings'.

2. They were extra harsh on the English spinners viz. Ali, Rashid and Patel while similar harshness was visited on English batsmen who collapsed for the 18th time in 25. Joe Root's failure to deliver was never mentioned.

3. The name of KP was not discussed.

4. The statistician Andrew Sampson was awesome with his brilliant comparisons, especially the possibility that Hafeez might break Bannerman's record of the highest contribution by a player to the team total.

5. Tuffers was awesome with his take on National Cliche day. That's when I realised that all language is cliche and Britons seem to revel in it.

Intolerance has always existed in India: Niti Aayog’s Bibek Debroy

Niti Aayog's member Bibek Debroy is a renowned economist who is known for speaking his mind. In an interview to TOI, Debroy reflects on the issue of intolerance and cites examples to show the need for multiple views. Excerpts:

Q: A debate has been raging on the issue of intolerance in the country. What has been your experience?

A: What is generally not known is that Jagdish Bhagwati was essentially made to leave Delhi School of Economics and had to go abroad because his life was made very uncomfortable. He left DSE because there is a certain prevailing climate of opinion and if you buck that, your life is made uncomfortable.

In the course of the second five-year plan, a committee of economists was set up to examine it. Dr B.R. Shenoy was the only one who opposed it. Do you find Dr Shenoy's name mentioned in the history of union policymaking? No. He was completely ostracized. He could not get a job in India and he ended up in Ceylon.

The third is a book called 'Heart of India', written by Alexander Campbell who was a journalist. A patronizing book for that day and time but it is still banned in India because it says frivolous things about Jawaharlal Nehru, socialism in India, and the Planning Commission. People who say there should not be bans, why don't they ever mention 'Heart of India'.

I cited these three examples to drive home the point that intolerance has always existed and we will be stupid if we haven't recognized it.

Q: At a personal level, did you ever experience intolerance in the academic arena?

A: I studied at Presidency College in Kolkata and in a real sense my first job was there at its Centre for Research. Then it was time for me to apply for a proper job, meaning Department of Economics. The head of the department was Dipak Banerjee, who told me you are not going to get a job, just forget it. Remember it was the Left. All the experts are Left-wing. So, I went off to Pune.

Q: How do you view the Rajiv Gandhi Institute, which you once headed, holding this conference on the issue of intolerance?

A: I was there for eight years and during that period we consciously distanced ourselves from the Congress. In 2002, I decided to organize a conference on what India was supposed to be, what its society be like, what the idea of India would be? I invited Seshadri Chari who was the editor of Organiser. Several people from the Left also came.

On the day of the seminar, a paper front-paged a report 'Congress think tank invites editor of Organiser." I get a phone call from 10, Janpath. Not Mrs Gandhi. "Madam has asked me to speak to you. Please withdraw this invitation to Seshadri Chari." I said I have issued the invitation and if Madam wants to talk to me, let her talk to me. Ten minutes later the phone rings again. "Will you please ask Seshadri Chari to give in writing what he is going to speak?" I said I am not going to do that. "No, Madam wants to see it."

Again the phone rings. "What happens if Seshadri Chari goes ahead and speaks about Godhra?" Meanwhile, all hell broke loose and some noted Congress people dropped out because Seshadri Chari was invited. I held the conference.

In 2004, Loveesh Bhandari and I did a study on economic freedom rating of states. Gujarat was number one. In 2005, municipal elections were being held in Gujarat and a newspaper carried a front page story, 'Congress think tank ranks Modi's Gujarat as number one', and all hell broke loose. I got a note from Mrs Gandhi saying anything that the Rajiv Gandhi Institute publishes henceforth be politically vetted. I said this is not acceptable to me. I resigned.




There was an Arjun Sengupta Commission. Next day, I was thrown out of there. I was on two task forces of Planning Commission, I was thrown out of there. Did anyone complain? I only remember two people. One is Loveesh, he was biased because he was the co-author, and the other was a journalist, Seetha Parthasarathy. All these people who are complaining about different points of view, none of them raised their voices.

The intellectual discourse has been captured by a certain kind of people, with certain kinds of views. It is a bit like a monopoly and that monopoly does not like outsiders and that monopoly survives on the basis of networks.

Q: A section of academics has raised the issue of growing intolerance. Do you think they have a point or is it because they are politically aligned?

A: If you tell me intolerance is increasing, it is purely anecdotal and is purely a subjective perception, there is no point in arguing with you because you will say it is increasing and I will say there is no evidence of it increasing. The only way I can measure something is that if I have got some quantitative indicator. If I look at any quantitative indictor, communal violence incidents, internet freedom, these are objective indicators, and I don't think it is increasing. In the intellectual circuit there has always been that intolerance. Let's not pretend otherwise.

Junior doctors are victims of an NHS that’s broken beyond repair

The rest of the world has more sensible healthcare funding – so the medical brain drain will get worse

Allister Heath in The Telegraph

Hospital doctors are right: they are not paid enough. This is one of the few issues on which I agree with Jeremy Corbyn and his socialist comrades. But the doctors are wrong to blame the Tories and must resist the urge to back a strike, a cruel and selfish act that would hurt our society’s most vulnerable in the run-up to Christmas.

What the Left and some of the younger doctors, sadly, do not grasp is that the problem is the National Health Service itself: it is broken beyond repair, short of cash and talent, an obsolete monopoly that works neither for its consumers (as yet another OECD report has confirmed) nor for its staff. It is unable to provide us with the level of personalised, responsive care we increasingly require and expect, and it is incapable of paying its staff enough.

The crisis is structural and inevitable with a “free” service. There is too much demand and too little supply; and no mechanism other than rationing, queuing, reduced quality and artifical cost suppression to reconcile the two. The UK’s hospital doctors have fallen victim of the latter force: they earn far less than the global rate, an unsustainable situation in an increasingly international medical marketplace.

Specialists in the UK make just over half what they do in America, and less than their counterparts in Australia, Canada, France and Germany, according to the seminal study on the subject by David M Cutler and Dan P Ly of Harvard University, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The two academics conclude that “the one major country that appears to be paying its physicians too little is the United Kingdom”, a remarkable statement given the thoroughness of their research. One consequence of Britain’s excessively low medical wages, they argue, is that the UK is losing much of its homegrown talent and has had to import 28 per cent of its doctors from abroad to compensate.

Adams cartoon, 5 November

Other research backs this up. The most up to date figures from the OECD show that specialist doctors in the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Israel, Finland and even Turkey earn more than their British counterparts, once adjusting for the purchasing power of their wages. As to junior doctors, Canadian starting salaries are between 14 per cent (in Quebec) and 49 per cent (in Alberta) higher than those in the UK when adjusted in the same way. It costs much less to live in (say) Texas that it does anywhere in the UK, so even in those cases when cash salaries don’t look that much higher abroad they often generate a much better quality of life.

The Left, as ever, is gunning for the Tories. That is silly: the global pay gap was pretty much identical under Labour. Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state for health, is being unfairly demonised for trying his best to paper over the NHS’s inherent contradictions: there’s not much more he can do given the dire state of the public finances, the need to improve its appalling out of hours service and the debilitating public and political consensus against any meaningful reform of the way healthcare is delivered and paid for.

Nothing will ever be enough when it comes to the NHS: it will always need more resources than any government can ever afford. The government is actually being disproportionately generous to health, forcing dramatically deeper cuts elsewhere. Forget also about the delusional Corbynite view that the rich or the corporate sector could easily be tapped to the tune of tens of billions of pounds, with no negative side-effect, to “save our NHS”: Britain's tax base is already being sucked dry. Nothing more of substance can be wrung out. The fiscal goose is bald and needs a good break, not another plucking.

The only way to spend more on health as a share of GDP - on fresh technologies and medicines for an ageing population, and to retain top talent - is to allow and encourage consumers to dip their hands into their own pockets, while making sure that the poor are protected, as happens in most other countries. Instead of relying exclusively on the state, we need to embrace a much greater use of insurance schemes and cash payments; most individuals must become co-payers. We also need to shake up the provision of healthcare: in Germany and France, a third of hospital beds are provided by the private (including not for profit) sectors, entirely uncontroversially. Until we are able to introduce these sorts of reforms, the gap between what we can afford to pay our medical professionals and what they would earn overseas in more sensible health systems is likely to grow - and our brain drain will intensify.

The number of UK-trained doctors working in the US shot up by 22 per cent over the most recent five years for which data is available, according to the OECD; numbers have risen by a similar percentage in New Zealand. At last count, 13 per cent of all GPs in Australia and 22 per cent of all specialists came from the UK, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Doctors going to work abroad may need to show their future employers a Certificate of Good Standing from the General Medical Council; the number of British medics applying has risen every year since 2009.

Yes, the NHS’s deckchairs could be rearranged yet again, eking out the odd improvement and buying another couple of years before the next great crisis. Or we could simply accept that thousands more UK medics will up sticks, and launch another overseas medical recruitment drive. At some point, however, even physicians from poorer nations won’t want to come here: their own countries are becoming richer, and other medical systems will become ever more attractive.

The angst of Britain’s doctors is merely the latest reminder that Nye Bevan’s NHS, far from being the envy of the world, is slowly dying. We need to stop deluding ourselves, and begin to debate openly what a world-class British health system fit for the 21st century would look like. My own vote would be for a cross between the Swiss and Singaporean systems. What isn’t in doubt is that time is running out: when the public eventually realises that it has been misled, its lust for revenge on the political class will be unquenchable.

Nhs in NUMBERS

NHS deficits in England

£930 million

The combined deficit for NHS trusts in England for April-June 2015

4 in 5 NHS trusts

in England reported a deficit for April-June 2015

31 mental health trusts

were in deficit, as were 10 specialist trusts, nine community trusts and eight ambulance trusts

42% increase

The number of patients at foundation hospitals waiting longer than six weeks for diagnostic tests is up by almost a half (42%) on this time last year, to 10,800

56% of foundation trusts

The number of trusts not meeting the 62-day target for cancer referrals from GPs is up over a half (56%) on this time last year

29,000 people

at foundation hospitals waited on a trolley for more than four hours between the decision to admit them to A&E and their arrival on a ward. This was over a third (35%) higher than the same period last year