The Patriarchy Paradox
Monday 30 November 2020
Saturday 28 November 2020
'Cleaning up Indian cricket is a lost cause' Ramachandra Guha
Social historian Ramachandra Guha can easily cast a spell on the listener with his deep knowledge and his spontaneity. Guha, who was briefly, in 2017, a member of the Committee of Administrators appointed by the Supreme Court of India to oversee reforms in the BCCI, has written a cricket memoir, The Commonwealth of Cricket that traces his relationship with the sport from the time he was four. He says it will be his last cricket book, but as he reveals in the following interview, he will continue his love affair with the game - despite the way it is administered in India. Courtesy Cricinfo
This is your first cricket book in nearly two decades, after A Corner of the Foreign Field was published in 2002. Why did you decide to write it now?
Two things. One, I wanted to pay tribute to my uncle Dorai, my first cricketing mentor and an exemplary coach and lover of the game, who is still active at the age of 84, running his club. I knew at some stage I would like to pay tribute to him.
Paying tribute to people I admire, respect, have been influenced by, is something I have done through my writing career. I have written about environmentalists, scholars, biographers, civil liberties activists. So I also wanted to write about this cricketer [Dorai] who had inspired me.
And I did my stint at the board. That kind of completed the journey from cricket-mad boy through player and writer and spectator to actually being inside the belly of the beast. So I thought that the arc is complete and maybe I should write a book.
In the book you have defined four types of superstars: 1. Crooks who consort with and pimp for bigger non-cricket-playing crooks. 2. Those who are willing and keen to practise conflict of interest explicitly. 3. Those who will try to be on the right side of the law but stay absolutely silent on […] those in categories 1 and 2. 4. Those who are themselves clean and also question those in categories 1 and 2." Bishan Bedi, you say, is the only one you can think of in that last category. Why is that?
Because he is a person of enormous character, integrity and principle. He never equivocates, he never makes excuses. And he calls it as it is. These kinds of people are rare in public life in India. They are rare in the film world, they are rare in the business world, and virtually invisible in politics. They are rare also in journalism, if you go by the ways in which editors in Delhi, for many years, have been intrigued with politicians, sought Rajya Sabha seats or favours, houses for themselves…
To find someone like Bishan Bedi, who is ramrod straight in his conduct, in any sphere of public life in India today is increasingly rare. He is also an incredibly generous man. When I first met him, at my uncle's house for dinner, he gave a cricket bat to my uncle - because he never wants to take freebies.
Bishan always has given back much more to youngsters he has nurtured. He is very blunt, he is abrasive, like me. He makes enemies because he sometimes says things in an indiscreet or impolite way. But it's really the quality and calibre of his character that compels admiration in me today. When I was young, it was the art and beauty of his spin bowling. Today, it's the kind of man he is.
You write that the superstar culture "that afflicts the BCCI means that the more famous the player (former or present) the more leeway he is allowed in violating norms and procedures". How does that start?
Your question compels me to reflect on a time when players had too little power. When Bedi once gave a television interview where he said some sarcastic things, he was banned for a [Test] match in Bangalore in 1974. Players had to get more power, they had to get organised, they had to be noticed, they had to be paid properly, which took a very long time. The generation of Bedi and [Sunil] Gavaskar was not really paid well till the fag end of their careers.
But now to elevate them into demigods and icons… one of the things I talk about is [Virat] Kohli and [Anil] Kumble and their rift [Kumble was forced to step down as coach after the 2017 Champions Trophy]. How essentially Kohli had a veto over who could be his coach, which is not the case in any sporting team anywhere.
[MS] Dhoni had decided: I'm not going to play Test cricket. He was only playing one-day cricket. And I said [in the CoA] that he should not get a [Grade] A contract. Simple. That contract is for people who play throughout the year. He has said, "I'm not playing Test cricket." Fine. That's his choice and he can be picked for the shorter form if he is good enough. [They said] "No, we are too scared to demote him from A to B." And more than the board, the CoA, appointed by the Supreme Court, chaired by a senior IAS officer, was too scared. I thought it was hugely, hugely problematic. So I protested about it while I was there. And when I got nowhere, I wrote about it.
Is it the fans who create this culture?
Of course. They venerate cricketers. That's fine. Cricketers do things that they cannot do. It's the administrators who have to have a sense of balance and proportion. And not just with cricketing superstars who are active but also superstars who are retired. Again, to go back to one of the examples I talk about in my book: that [Rahul] Dravid could have an IPL contract, but other coaches in the NCA couldn't. Now, you can't have double standards like this. Cricket is supposed to be played with a straight bat.
It is not Dravid's fault. He just used the rules as they existed for him. It was the fault of the BCCI management that it created this kind of division and caste system within cricketers, within coaches, within umpires, within commentators. It offended my ethical sensibilities. So I protested.
You recently told Mid-Day that "N Srinivasan and Amit Shah are effectively running Indian cricket today".
It is true.
Are they really running the board?
Yeah, that's my sense. Along with their sons and daughters and sycophants. That's what it is. And [Sourav] Ganguly [the BCCI president] has capitulated. I mean, there are things he should not be doing, given his extraordinary playing record and his credibility, whether he should be practising this shocking conflict of interest. The kind of example it sets is abysmal. I say this with some sadness because I admired Ganguly as a cricketer and as a captain. I'm glad I'm out of it and I'm just a fan again. I can just enjoy the game and not bother about the murkiness within the administration.
Things were meant to change under Ganguly.
Again, I go back to what I said about Bedi: people of principle are rare in any walk of life. And in India, particularly, there is a temptation for fame, for glory, to cosy up to who's powerful. It's very, very, very sad, but it happens. Maybe it's something to do with a deep flaw in our national character, that we lack a backbone in these matters.
In the book, where you address the topic across two chapters, as well as during your tenure in the CoA, you say you were frustrated by how deep the roots of conflict of interest have grown, not just in the BCCI and state associations but also across the player fraternity. Why is it so difficult for both administrators and players, some of whom are former greats, to understand conflict?
Because it's ubiquitous and everybody is practising it. Woh bhi kar raha hai, main bhi karoonga. Kya hai usme? [He's doing it, so I'll also do it. What's the big deal?] It's hard to resist, you know, especially [when] the moral compass of people around you is so low that you just kind of go along with it.
Sunil Gavaskar is another person who said had multiple conflict of interests.
To Dravid's credit, he saw the point and gave up his Delhi Daredevils contract relatively quickly. He exploited the rules as they were and once I protested and it became public, he realised that he had probably erred and done a wrong thing. Maybe Ganguly could have learned from Dravid in what he's doing now. Cleaning up Indian cricket is a lost cause.
In 2018, the Supreme Court modified its original order of 2016, passed by Chief Justice TS Thakur concerning the Lodha reforms. In 2019, immediately after taking over, Ganguly's administration asked the court to relax key reforms, which would virtually wipe out the reforms. Is it now the responsibility of the court to decisively put the lid on the case?
I'm not losing any sleep. Cricket lovers have to live with a corrupt and nepotistic mode. We should just move on and enjoy the cricket.
In the book, you say you write on history for a living and on cricket to live. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
When I started writing this book, I had just finished the second volume of my Gandhi biography. It's a thousand pages long, inundated with millions of footnotes. And when you write a properly researched work of history, you have to have your sources at hand. So you compile a paragraph, which is based on material you gather, and then you have to scrupulously footnote that paragraph. One paragraph may be drawn from four different sources - a newspaper, an archival document, a book - and you have to put all that in.
Whereas I wanted to write this freely and spontaneously. I could only do that in the form of cricket memoir. So that's how it happened. I wanted a release from densely footnoted, closely argued, scrupulously researched scholarly work. And this came as a kind of liberation.
You call yourself a cricket fanatic. For me, on reading the book, it's the romantic in you that comes to life.
Yeah, I think I am more a romantic than a fanatic. I'm cricket-obsessed. I've been cricket-obsessed all my life, but more in a romantic way; "fanatic" may be slightly wrong because that assumes you always want your team to win. And that's certainly not the case with me anymore.
You write in the book about a fanboy moment you had: "On this evening I did something I almost never do - take a selfie, with Bishan Bedi and the coach of the Indian team, Anil Kumble." Can you recount that incident?
It was the BCCI's annual function. One of the few things I was able to do in my brief tenure at the board was accomplished on that day: to have [Padmakar] Shivalkar and [Rajinder] Goel, two great left-arm spinners, get the CK Nayudu [Lifetime Achievement] Award - the first time a non-Test cricketer had been honoured. And also to have Shanta Rangaswamy get the first Lifetime Achievement Award for Women.
So it was a happy occasion. It was in my home town [Bengaluru]. Bishan had come from Delhi. Kumble was then the coach of the [Indian] team. I know Bishan well and Anil a little bit. I don't know that many cricketers, actually. All these years running about the game, my only friend is really Bishan Bedi, apart from Arun Lal, who was my college captain.
Kumble, of course, would admire Bishan as a kind of sardar [chief] of Indian spin bowling. I saw them and I said I'll take a selfie. What I don't mention is that the selfie was taken by Anil, because he is technologically much more sophisticated than either Bishan or me. He took that selfie very artfully, which I would not have been able to do. It came out nicely. It is the only photograph in the book.
I am a partisan of bowlers and of spin bowlers. For me, Kumble has always been underappreciated as a cricketer. To win a Test match you need to take 20 wickets. And, arguably, Kumble has therefore won more Test matches than Sachin Tendulkar. As I again say in the book, in 1999, when Tendulkar was about to be replaced as captain, they should really have had Kumble - he is a masterful cricketing mind, but there is a prejudice against bowlers. So in a sense, [the photo was with] someone who was a generation older than me, Bedi, and someone of a generation younger than me, Kumble - both cricketers I admire, both with big hearts, and both spin bowlers, as I was myself.
That's why the caption says: "two great spin bowlers and another" - kind of implying I was a spin bowler, but a rather ordinary one.
Is it true that this possibly could be your last cricket book?
Almost certainly. It would be, because I really have nothing else to say. This is a kind of cricketing autobiography and it has covered a lot. This is my fourth cricket book. I will watch the game. I will appreciate it.
Why don't more Indian cricketers write books?
I think Dravid has a great book in him because he is a thinking cricketer. So might Kumble. But my suspicion is, Kumble will not write a book. Dravid just might. He could write a book called The Art of Batsmanship. Bedi could have written a book because he is an intelligent person. He writes interesting articles, including on politics and public life. By the way, books don't sell. That's another reason. Occasionally, cricketers have thought, I will write a book and I will make Rs 30-40 lakhs (about US$50,000) on it. But cricket books don't really make that much money.
Friday 27 November 2020
Thursday 26 November 2020
Wednesday 25 November 2020
Tuesday 24 November 2020
Remdesivir: the rise and fall of a Covid wonder drug
Gilead’s antiviral drew praise from the White House and a scramble for orders. But does it work? asks Donato Paolo Mancini in London, Hannah Kuchler in New York and Michael Peel in Brussels in The Financial Times
In May, when President Donald Trump announced the emergency approval of remdesivir, the first antiviral to treat Covid-19, he hailed its developer Gilead as a “great American company” with “the hot thing”.
Six months later, Mr Trump is on his way out, shares in the California biotech are down 29 per cent from their April highs, and remdesivir is being compared to Tamiflu: a wonder drug that wasn’t.
On Friday an independent World Health Organization expert panel advised doctors not to use the drug in hospitalised Covid-19 patients, concluding, on the basis of four randomised trials, that it had “no meaningful effect” on mortality, need for mechanical ventilation or time in hospital.
“This isn’t a battle of the scientific publications; it’s not a battle of drugs; it’s not a battle between drug companies,” said Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO's health emergencies programme. “This is about getting the best possible information into the clinical teams who save lives on wards.”
The WHO guidance snuffs out early hopes that the drug — which is designed to stop viruses from replicating — could transform patient care. Almost a year into the pandemic, vaccines are close to being rolled out, but doctors still lack good options for treating millions of patients.
Experts are now divided on whether remdesivir has a role at all. In one corner are the WHO and some national regulators in Europe that are weighing removing the drug from doctors’ treatment guidelines.
In the other are Gilead and the US National Institutes of Health, which maintain that the drug works based on their own trials.
Gilead said it was “inaccurate” to say the drug has no benefit to hospitalised patients. The company has criticised the WHO’s study of its drug, saying that “data gaps have been characterised as conclusive findings that should override the results of a gold standard, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial”. The WHO has rejected the criticism.
“There are two smart groups of people with the same data interpreting it different ways,” said Roy Gulick, chief of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
An expensive reputation
Many pharmaceutical companies hope the pandemic will burnish reputations that have sometimes been tarred with criticism over drug pricing. Activists and politicians have sometimes accused Gilead of preventing poorer patients from accessing blockbuster drugs for preventing HIV and curing Hepatitis C.
Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering, said Gilead had often prioritised “revenue, market share and pricing power” and so it was not a surprise that the company has chosen to dismiss the WHO trial of remdesivir. “It’s a distillate of the worst form of the industry not caring about public health at all,” he said.
Gilead rejects this, saying its contributions to public health have been transformative over the last 30 years, including for HIV and Hepatitis C patients. It pointed to donations of remdesivir, licensing it royalty free to generics manufacturers for the developing world during the pandemic, and setting a single government price for richer countries that is “significantly below the value that the medicine delivers”.
Buyers’ remorse?
Andrew Hill, a senior visiting research fellow in pharmacology at the University of Liverpool, said remdesivir may be joining the ranks of other drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine, that the pandemic has seen “rise and fall”.
Before the WHO announced its negative data, European countries were anxious to get their hands on enough remdesivir, as the US bought up nearly all supplies, leaving them short. Now, some may be having second thoughts.
Gilead was told of the initial negative results by the WHO while it was negotiating a €1bn remdesivir supply deal with the European Commission, finalised in October, but the Commission told the FT it was not informed before the study was published.
Gilead said it behaved appropriately. It said the Commission appeared to already know about the preliminary WHO results as it raised them with the drugmaker on October 9. The Commission declined to comment further.
Gilead added that many countries had agreed to buy more remdesivir since the study’s publication.
The Commission stresses that no money was committed up front but some European countries did strike separate deals before the study’s release. Italy paid €51m for an order of remdesivir when cases were increasing and its supplies were running low, according to two senior health officials.
Italy’s health ministry directed questions to the national drug regulator, whose chief, Nicola Magrini, told the FT the agency was reviewing remdesivir’s use in country’s healthcare system.
Remdesivir reminds some of Tamiflu, a drug co-developed by Gilead and Roche. Fearing avian and swine flu pandemics, many governments stockpiled it — but in the end, its effect was found to be modest and not worth the expense. Like Tamiflu, it may be that remdesivir only has a small window early in the disease to make a real impact against the virus, which doctors say is not practical for a pricey drug given intravenously.
There are also questions about safety. Dr Hill said the WHO’s database of adverse events had reported “a higher than expected rate of liver and kidney-related adverse events” for people taking the drug.
Gilead said the drug label tells doctors to monitor for these events but so far there is no proof remdesivir is causing problems, noting that kidney injury can also be caused by Covid-19 itself.
The sales impact
Gilead has warned that sales of remdesivir will be hard to predict. In the third quarter, hospitals stockpiled at a lower rate than expected, generating sales of $873m. That is a significant haul for a drug that was not even on investors’ horizons last year, but it fell short of the $1bn consensus forecast.
The WHO study is not stopping US doctors from prescribing the drug. Sudha Narayanaswamy, vice-president of pharmacy at Premier, a group-buying organisation that represents more than 4,000 health systems, said US hospitals were “seeing increased use in the last two weeks in response to the spikes in cases”.
However, while some healthcare providers may throw everything at a problem — such as Mr Trump’s doctors, who treated him with remdesivir as part of a cocktail of drugs — the negative results will heighten worries among the cost conscious. Remdesivir can run up to $3,120 per five-day course.
“The WHO study will hurt Gilead’s chances of getting government and other payers to pay hospitals more for using remdesivir than they pay for using less expensive steroids,” said Erik Gordon, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
The cheap generic steroid dexamethasone, backed by the WHO, is not a competing treatment — it targets inflammation later in the disease — but it has been shown to reduce mortality significantly, while remdesivir has not.
Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins, said the drug was now being prescribed less at his hospital. “When you actually look at the data, it wasn’t as strong as we had hoped it would be,” he said. “And if there is a benefit, it is very marginal and it’s likely in a select subgroup of patients.”
Do plants really have personalities?
Plants are compulsive communicators, but now one expert thinks they may also have different character traits – with some more nervy than others says The Guardian
Name: Plant personalities.
Age: Possibly millions of years old.
Appearance: Tall, thin, green.
They’re sometimes a bit drab, too. Oh my God, don’t let the plants hear you say that. You’ll hurt their feelings.
But they’re plants? Yes, and they have rich, wide inner lives. They certainly don’t need to be badmouthed by a human like you.
Yes, but they are plants. Plants are not just plants. Botanists have discovered that they can produce, detect and respond to complex chemical signals that help them communicate with the world around them. For example, if a caterpillar starts eating a wild tobacco plant, the plant can emit a chemical that will summon a caterpillar-eating predator.
What the hell? Yes, but we already knew this. The latest development in botanical research is the field of plant personalities.
I’m sorry, what? It’s very simple. Some plants are big brave soldiers, others are total scaredy-cats.
Nonsense! It’s true. Rick Karban, a professor of entomology at the University of California, who is at the forefront of the research, uses pandemic hygiene as an example. “If you have variation in how anal people are about washing their hands,” he told Bloomberg, “you might have some individuals who are hyper hygienic, and under certain conditions they might have an advantage over individuals who are really cavalier.”
Plants can’t wash their hands. But our reactions to the hand-washing command might be analogous to how plants give distress signals. Plant equivalents of “hyper hygienic” people will emit distress signals at the slightest provocation, and this could help to protect them.
Those plants sound jumpy and annoying. Exactly! Neighbouring plants will learn not to take them seriously because they thrive on needless drama. But if a more cavalier plant sends a distress signal, the surrounding plants will know that something serious has gone down and react accordingly.
Is this real? Possibly. Karban hasn’t published any papers about his theory of plant personalities, but plans to do so. And if there is anything to it, it might alter the way we see plants.
But I just stopped eating animals because I didn’t want to hurt them. Tough break, I guess. We might be just a few years away from realising that plants have feelings, too. And then who knows what we’ll eat. Polystyrene?
Or we could harness this new information to boost crop yields. Or get it wrong, wipe out loads of species and start a global famine. Stupid, clever plants.
Do say: “Plants might have their own personalities.”
Don’t say: “At least, that’s what a tulip told me, but everyone knows they’re massive drama queens.”
Sunday 22 November 2020
Thursday 19 November 2020
Saturday 14 November 2020
Sunday 8 November 2020
Saturday 7 November 2020
Thursday 5 November 2020
Under pressure: why athletes choke
What makes an elite sports star suddenly unable to do the very thing they have been practising for years? And is there anything they can do about it?
by A Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore in The Guardian
Scott Boswell stood at the start of his bowling run-up, immersed in his own very public hell. It was the final of the Cheltenham and Gloucester Trophy in 2001, which should have been the highlight of his cricket career. Instead, he found himself unable to do what he had been doing his entire life.
“I became so anxious I froze. I couldn’t let go. It was a nightmare,” Boswell recalled. “How can I not be able to run up and bowl – something that I’ve done for so many years without even thinking about it? How can that happen? What’s going on in my brain to stop me doing that, and to make me feel physically sick and anxious and that I can’t do something that I’ve just done so naturally?”
Boswell was a fast bowler for Leicestershire. After a man of the match performance in the semi-final, he had earned the right to play in the final at a sold-out Lord’s cricket ground, the home of cricket. It was the dream of every county cricketer.
But Boswell had lost his form in the three weeks since the semi-final, and his place in the final had become less secure. At 10pm the night before the final, Leicestershire’s coach said he wanted to see him. He asked Boswell “whether I was up for it, and whether I could manage. So there was a seed put in my head before I actually played.” He was finally told he was playing 45 minutes before the game. Somerset, Leicestershire’s opponents, won the toss and chose to bat on a sunny day. Boswell, as one of the opening bowlers, bowled the second over.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Scott Boswell after bowling his sixth wide in the 2001 C&G Trophy final against Somerset. Photograph: Naden Rebecca Naden/PA
“The first couple of balls, I felt OK,” he recalled. But on his last ball of the over, Boswell bowled an easy-to-hit short ball that was hit for four runs. “It just didn’t come out of the hands right … It just became a little bit stuck.” It signalled trouble ahead. The next over began with a huge wide. “I thought: ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. I’ve never bowled it that wide before – what’s happened there?’ And that was it. I then bowled another wide, the crowd started to make a bit of noise, I’m thinking: ‘Crikey.’ It went down the leg side, so I’ve got one on the offside, one on the leg side, I’ve overcompensated and I’m thinking: ‘Wow.’”
An over in cricket comprises six balls – that is, six balls that are not considered a no-ball or wide. There are normally only a handful of no-balls in an innings. But Boswell’s second over in the final lasted 14 balls, as he repeatedly sprayed the ball too wide of the crease on either side. A YouTube video of the over, entitled The worst over ever? has been watched more than 1.5m times.
For Boswell, it felt like the over would “absolutely never end”.
Failure to manage anxiety and cope with the demands at a crucial moment can lead to a catastrophic drop in performance, known as choking. As the pressure in a match rises, so can an athlete’s anxiety.
Anxiety is a reaction to pressure or stress. It tends to arise during performances that trigger the fear of losing, or fear of damage to your standing. The symptoms of anxiety are psychological – worry and fear – and physiological – including sweaty palms and an increased heart rate. Anxiety uses up attention and working memory, hindering performance.
Athletes find themselves thinking about processes that normally come automatically. This was Boswell’s experience. The simple act of bowling a ball, on which his career had been built, suddenly seemed alien. “When your conscious mind doesn’t trust your subconscious mind, you’ve got an issue,” he explained. “When you’re in the flow and you’re not thinking about it, you just bowl and you just trust your skills.” Of that day at Lord’s, Boswell said: “I just didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust my action and I didn’t trust my skill set, and then when it was put under high pressure, it failed.”
When athletes are anxious, they overthink, and focus attention on the technical execution of the skill – those aspects of the movement that have generally become automated. It has been called “paralysis by analysis”: the mental effort actually inhibits performance. This explains why Boswell, a 26-year-old in his seventh season as a professional cricketer, suddenly found himself unable to bowl straight.
As his second over became more farcical – six of his first eight balls were wides – Boswell recalled the crowd getting “louder and louder”. To try to make the ordeal stop, Boswell rushed, taking less and less time before each ball. “I just remember trying to race through my over to get it completed as quickly as I could. Unfortunately, I sped things up when pressure got to me, rather than trying to slow it down and take a step back, do the breathing, have a little smile – ‘It’s only a game of cricket, off you go.’”
Boswell blames no one but himself, but it might have helped if his teammates had gone up to him and had a chat to help him calm down during his over. At Lord’s, the real problem was that Boswell’s method – bowling and self-calming – was not durable enough under pressure. “I probably didn’t have a process if something ever happened. It was just absolute panic.” Boswell only ever played one more game in professional cricket, bowling one terrible over – including two wides – before being dropped from the lineup.
Elite athletes are like the rest of us: they get anxious and it hampers their performance. In the last 30 seconds of tight basketball games, WNBA and NBA players are 5.8% and 3.1% respectively less likely to score from a free throw – an uncontested shot awarded to players who have been fouled – than at other moments in the game. When players take free throws in home matches, they are more likely to miss when the crowd is bigger.
The very best athletes manage to channel the anxiety they feel positively, especially if they have high self-confidence. Athletes with low confidence view anxiety as detrimental to performance, but those with high confidence tend to perceive anxiety as a sign of being ready for the challenge ahead. This makes them less likely to choke under pressure.
The best athletes are also more adept at brushing off disappointments during competition. The champion golfer Annika Sörenstam jokes that she never hit a bad shot in her life: “I don’t remember them.” Lesser players could be consumed by their mistakes, but Sörenstam would clinically dissect what happened, then get on with the business of trying to recover her position.
“You’ve just got to learn how to dissociate – make a quick analysis, boom. Forget about it, move on, don’t carry it with you, learn from your mistakes. We all hit bad shots. It’s just – how do you regain composure?”
by A Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore in The Guardian
Scott Boswell stood at the start of his bowling run-up, immersed in his own very public hell. It was the final of the Cheltenham and Gloucester Trophy in 2001, which should have been the highlight of his cricket career. Instead, he found himself unable to do what he had been doing his entire life.
“I became so anxious I froze. I couldn’t let go. It was a nightmare,” Boswell recalled. “How can I not be able to run up and bowl – something that I’ve done for so many years without even thinking about it? How can that happen? What’s going on in my brain to stop me doing that, and to make me feel physically sick and anxious and that I can’t do something that I’ve just done so naturally?”
Boswell was a fast bowler for Leicestershire. After a man of the match performance in the semi-final, he had earned the right to play in the final at a sold-out Lord’s cricket ground, the home of cricket. It was the dream of every county cricketer.
But Boswell had lost his form in the three weeks since the semi-final, and his place in the final had become less secure. At 10pm the night before the final, Leicestershire’s coach said he wanted to see him. He asked Boswell “whether I was up for it, and whether I could manage. So there was a seed put in my head before I actually played.” He was finally told he was playing 45 minutes before the game. Somerset, Leicestershire’s opponents, won the toss and chose to bat on a sunny day. Boswell, as one of the opening bowlers, bowled the second over.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Scott Boswell after bowling his sixth wide in the 2001 C&G Trophy final against Somerset. Photograph: Naden Rebecca Naden/PA
“The first couple of balls, I felt OK,” he recalled. But on his last ball of the over, Boswell bowled an easy-to-hit short ball that was hit for four runs. “It just didn’t come out of the hands right … It just became a little bit stuck.” It signalled trouble ahead. The next over began with a huge wide. “I thought: ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. I’ve never bowled it that wide before – what’s happened there?’ And that was it. I then bowled another wide, the crowd started to make a bit of noise, I’m thinking: ‘Crikey.’ It went down the leg side, so I’ve got one on the offside, one on the leg side, I’ve overcompensated and I’m thinking: ‘Wow.’”
An over in cricket comprises six balls – that is, six balls that are not considered a no-ball or wide. There are normally only a handful of no-balls in an innings. But Boswell’s second over in the final lasted 14 balls, as he repeatedly sprayed the ball too wide of the crease on either side. A YouTube video of the over, entitled The worst over ever? has been watched more than 1.5m times.
For Boswell, it felt like the over would “absolutely never end”.
Failure to manage anxiety and cope with the demands at a crucial moment can lead to a catastrophic drop in performance, known as choking. As the pressure in a match rises, so can an athlete’s anxiety.
Anxiety is a reaction to pressure or stress. It tends to arise during performances that trigger the fear of losing, or fear of damage to your standing. The symptoms of anxiety are psychological – worry and fear – and physiological – including sweaty palms and an increased heart rate. Anxiety uses up attention and working memory, hindering performance.
Athletes find themselves thinking about processes that normally come automatically. This was Boswell’s experience. The simple act of bowling a ball, on which his career had been built, suddenly seemed alien. “When your conscious mind doesn’t trust your subconscious mind, you’ve got an issue,” he explained. “When you’re in the flow and you’re not thinking about it, you just bowl and you just trust your skills.” Of that day at Lord’s, Boswell said: “I just didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust my action and I didn’t trust my skill set, and then when it was put under high pressure, it failed.”
When athletes are anxious, they overthink, and focus attention on the technical execution of the skill – those aspects of the movement that have generally become automated. It has been called “paralysis by analysis”: the mental effort actually inhibits performance. This explains why Boswell, a 26-year-old in his seventh season as a professional cricketer, suddenly found himself unable to bowl straight.
As his second over became more farcical – six of his first eight balls were wides – Boswell recalled the crowd getting “louder and louder”. To try to make the ordeal stop, Boswell rushed, taking less and less time before each ball. “I just remember trying to race through my over to get it completed as quickly as I could. Unfortunately, I sped things up when pressure got to me, rather than trying to slow it down and take a step back, do the breathing, have a little smile – ‘It’s only a game of cricket, off you go.’”
Boswell blames no one but himself, but it might have helped if his teammates had gone up to him and had a chat to help him calm down during his over. At Lord’s, the real problem was that Boswell’s method – bowling and self-calming – was not durable enough under pressure. “I probably didn’t have a process if something ever happened. It was just absolute panic.” Boswell only ever played one more game in professional cricket, bowling one terrible over – including two wides – before being dropped from the lineup.
Elite athletes are like the rest of us: they get anxious and it hampers their performance. In the last 30 seconds of tight basketball games, WNBA and NBA players are 5.8% and 3.1% respectively less likely to score from a free throw – an uncontested shot awarded to players who have been fouled – than at other moments in the game. When players take free throws in home matches, they are more likely to miss when the crowd is bigger.
The very best athletes manage to channel the anxiety they feel positively, especially if they have high self-confidence. Athletes with low confidence view anxiety as detrimental to performance, but those with high confidence tend to perceive anxiety as a sign of being ready for the challenge ahead. This makes them less likely to choke under pressure.
The best athletes are also more adept at brushing off disappointments during competition. The champion golfer Annika Sörenstam jokes that she never hit a bad shot in her life: “I don’t remember them.” Lesser players could be consumed by their mistakes, but Sörenstam would clinically dissect what happened, then get on with the business of trying to recover her position.
“You’ve just got to learn how to dissociate – make a quick analysis, boom. Forget about it, move on, don’t carry it with you, learn from your mistakes. We all hit bad shots. It’s just – how do you regain composure?”
Annika Sörenstam during the 2000 Evian Masters in France. Photograph: Andrew Redington/Allsport
Those with the greatest mental strength have been shown to be the best at adapting to negative feedback and using it to improve their performance. “You’ve got to learn how to throw bad shots out and stand over the next shot and say: ‘OK this is the most important shot,’” Sörenstam said. “I always call it ‘the now shot’. The shot you’re hitting now is the most important. Ten minutes ago is irrelevant, and who knows what’s going to happen in another 10 minutes.
“You have to have a positive mind, you have to stand there and be tension-free. If you stand there and are worried about everything, it’s hard to swing. When I play my best, it’s free-flowing and relaxed, no tension – just focus and have a target, but you’re relaxed and your muscles can perform. There’s nothing worse than when you try to do something and it’s all tension and pressure and you can’t breathe properly.”
The best golfers make greater use of positive self-talk, goal-setting and relaxation skills, reporting less worry and less negative thinking. Personality characteristics such as hardiness and even narcissism can further insulate the best athletes from the ravages of anxiety.
“Of course I felt pressure,” Sörenstam, now retired, recalled. “But it was a fun pressure – I wanted to see if I could handle it, just staying true to myself and believing in myself coming down the stretch.”
For Sörenstam, keeping that belief over 18 holes meant sticking to her routine – the 24 seconds she liked to take for each shot – as far as possible, fighting her impulse to speed up. Under pressure, golfers approach shots differently, reducing the range of movement for the head of the golf club and applying greater force to the ball. They rush. In baseball, pitchers who flounder under pressure seem to rush their foot movements and speed up the way they flex their elbows.
Athletes weighed down by anxiety also use their eyes less efficiently. When table tennis players are anxious, they spend longer fixating on the ball and less time on their opponent, which may reduce their ability to pick up cues and anticipate what will happen next. When tennis players are anxious, they become less effective at picking up contextual information such as the sequencing of shots in the rally and the probability of their opponent playing certain types of shots. Other anxiety-induced responses include hypervigilance – the “deer in the headlights” phenomenon – a narrowed field of view or tunnel vision, or paying attention to irrelevant sights. In each of these cases, anxious athletes are likely to miss critical information.
When they rush, athletes tend to make worse decisions. Maintaining routines under pressure can help prevent such errors. “That’s the key – whether it’s the first green or the 18th green on a Sunday at the US Open or a Pro Am, I just stick to the same routine,” Sörenstam said. “By doing that, you can deal with the pressure. People think: ‘People are watching, this putt means this.’ Or ‘This is a tough hole’, or ‘It’s an easy hole and I really should make it.’ All these things around you have an effect on how you feel and how you perform. But if you can get less of it into your bubble, that makes it a lot easier.”
It was the semi-final of the 1999 Cricket World Cup. One of the most extraordinary games of all time was reaching an excruciatingly tense conclusion. South Africa needed 214 to beat Australia and reach their first final. If the two teams got exactly the same number of runs – which was unprecedented in World Cup history – Australia would qualify, by virtue of having finished higher in the pool stage.
The last over began with South Africa, down to their final batting pair, needing nine runs to win. Facing the bowler was Lance Klusener, who was in the midst of a stunning run of form. In the first two balls of the final over, Klusener crunched both deliveries for four.
South Africa needed one run from four balls – with Klusener still facing the ball. At the other end, Allan Donald, South Africa’s No 11 – a brilliant fast bowler, but the team’s worst batsman – didn’t need to face a ball. He just needed to run to the other end to get the single run South Africa needed. In South Africa’s changing room, one player had a bottle of champagne at hand, ready to pop.
Those with the greatest mental strength have been shown to be the best at adapting to negative feedback and using it to improve their performance. “You’ve got to learn how to throw bad shots out and stand over the next shot and say: ‘OK this is the most important shot,’” Sörenstam said. “I always call it ‘the now shot’. The shot you’re hitting now is the most important. Ten minutes ago is irrelevant, and who knows what’s going to happen in another 10 minutes.
“You have to have a positive mind, you have to stand there and be tension-free. If you stand there and are worried about everything, it’s hard to swing. When I play my best, it’s free-flowing and relaxed, no tension – just focus and have a target, but you’re relaxed and your muscles can perform. There’s nothing worse than when you try to do something and it’s all tension and pressure and you can’t breathe properly.”
The best golfers make greater use of positive self-talk, goal-setting and relaxation skills, reporting less worry and less negative thinking. Personality characteristics such as hardiness and even narcissism can further insulate the best athletes from the ravages of anxiety.
“Of course I felt pressure,” Sörenstam, now retired, recalled. “But it was a fun pressure – I wanted to see if I could handle it, just staying true to myself and believing in myself coming down the stretch.”
For Sörenstam, keeping that belief over 18 holes meant sticking to her routine – the 24 seconds she liked to take for each shot – as far as possible, fighting her impulse to speed up. Under pressure, golfers approach shots differently, reducing the range of movement for the head of the golf club and applying greater force to the ball. They rush. In baseball, pitchers who flounder under pressure seem to rush their foot movements and speed up the way they flex their elbows.
Athletes weighed down by anxiety also use their eyes less efficiently. When table tennis players are anxious, they spend longer fixating on the ball and less time on their opponent, which may reduce their ability to pick up cues and anticipate what will happen next. When tennis players are anxious, they become less effective at picking up contextual information such as the sequencing of shots in the rally and the probability of their opponent playing certain types of shots. Other anxiety-induced responses include hypervigilance – the “deer in the headlights” phenomenon – a narrowed field of view or tunnel vision, or paying attention to irrelevant sights. In each of these cases, anxious athletes are likely to miss critical information.
When they rush, athletes tend to make worse decisions. Maintaining routines under pressure can help prevent such errors. “That’s the key – whether it’s the first green or the 18th green on a Sunday at the US Open or a Pro Am, I just stick to the same routine,” Sörenstam said. “By doing that, you can deal with the pressure. People think: ‘People are watching, this putt means this.’ Or ‘This is a tough hole’, or ‘It’s an easy hole and I really should make it.’ All these things around you have an effect on how you feel and how you perform. But if you can get less of it into your bubble, that makes it a lot easier.”
It was the semi-final of the 1999 Cricket World Cup. One of the most extraordinary games of all time was reaching an excruciatingly tense conclusion. South Africa needed 214 to beat Australia and reach their first final. If the two teams got exactly the same number of runs – which was unprecedented in World Cup history – Australia would qualify, by virtue of having finished higher in the pool stage.
The last over began with South Africa, down to their final batting pair, needing nine runs to win. Facing the bowler was Lance Klusener, who was in the midst of a stunning run of form. In the first two balls of the final over, Klusener crunched both deliveries for four.
South Africa needed one run from four balls – with Klusener still facing the ball. At the other end, Allan Donald, South Africa’s No 11 – a brilliant fast bowler, but the team’s worst batsman – didn’t need to face a ball. He just needed to run to the other end to get the single run South Africa needed. In South Africa’s changing room, one player had a bottle of champagne at hand, ready to pop.
South Africa’s Allan Donald (in green, right) seconds after being run out against Australia in the Cricket World Cup semi-final in 1999. Photograph: Ross Kinnaird/Allsport
This was “nearly job done”, Klusener recalled. “I said to Al that the first thing we would like to do is hit the ball for six, shake hands and walk off, but at the same time, if we can scramble a single run somewhere, that also needs to be an option for us. ‘One good ball and the game is over.’”
After a protracted wait, the bowler delivered his third ball. Klusener hit the ball straight towards a fielder. There was no time for the batsmen to run, yet Donald set off down the pitch. Klusener quickly sent him back, and Donald had to dive across the crease to get home. He was only saved because the Australian fielder’s throw missed its target.
Donald later described the moment in his autobiography. “Sprawled on the floor, heart pounding, I thought: ‘Thank God, we’ve got away with it. We’ll be OK now.’” Before the next ball, Donald told Klusener: “Pick your spot, and hit it out of the park.”
Klusener started to run as soon as he hit the ball.
The ball before, Donald had run when he shouldn’t. This time, he didn’t run at all, remaining motionless as Klusener hurtled towards him. By the time Klusener hared past him, all Donald had managed to do was drop his bat and look around forlornly. His legs wouldn’t move. “I looked up at Lance, saw him rushing to my end, and so I started to run,” Donald wrote. “My legs felt like jelly, as if I wasn’t making any headway at all down to the other end. I tried to get my legs moving properly. It was a dreamlike sequence, almost in slow motion.”
Donald was paralysed by anxiety – a classic symptom of choking. When he finally started to run, he was out by yards. South Africa were out of the competition.
Since 1999, South Africa’s World Cup eliminations have straddled the full spectrum of sporting farce. In 2003, when they hosted the World Cup, South Africa were eliminated after misreading the required score to win and being knocked out after a tie. In 2011, they were cruising to victory in the quarter-final before a self-inflicted collapse against New Zealand. Four years later, South Africa missed several catches or run-outs before losing an epic semi-final, once again against New Zealand.
The South Africa men’s team have played in 19 global tournaments – the World Cup, the Champions Trophy and the Twenty20 World Cup – since that fateful day in 1999. Although consistently one of the leading cricket nations in this time, South Africa haven’t reached a final. They have reached eight semi-finals – and lost every single one.
This litany of failures invites the question: when Donald was run out, was he paving the way for a whole era of South African World Cup failure? Did that run out not merely scupper South Africa’s golden chance in 1999, but burden future generations of players?Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning
“Stereotype threat” is the idea that when a negative image becomes associated with a group, it takes on a life of its own, and the outcome and behaviours are more likely to be repeated. In a classic study on this subject from 1999, scientists asked men and women to take an arithmetic test. Some students were told that men and women performed equally well on the test; the others were told that men performed better. When the scientists told the women that women performed just as well as men, they subsequently performed as well as the men on the test. When women were told that women tended to perform worse, they performed worse than men on the test. Being made aware of the stereotype seemed to affect whether participants would adhere to it or not.
Stereotype threat can permeate sport, too. It can affect “any situation where you have the possibility or worry that people might judge you based on your inclusion in a certain group – that could be race, that could be gender, that could be the team you play on,” said Sian Beilock, the cognitive scientist and author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
In sport and life, past failure can make future failure more likely. Since 1999, South African cricketers have lugged stereotype threat around with them, like an unwanted piece of oversized baggage, from one major tournament to the next. South Africa’s head coach between 2011 and 2013, Gary Kirsten, called the legacy of previous failures “a dark mist that hangs over South African cricket in knockout events”.
As every England football fan scarred by penalty shootouts could attest, failure seems to beget more failure. Every choke, real or perceived, creates more of a burden the next time the team is in the same position, making the hurdle even more overwhelming.
Gareth Southgate spent 22 years looking back at his part in England’s defeat by Germany in a penalty shootout at Euro 96, trying to work out what had gone wrong. His conclusion was that he had rushed. Before he took his sudden-death penalty against Germany, “All I wanted was the ball: put it on the spot, get it over and done with,” he later wrote. Rushing penalties under pressure damages the chances of scoring: a study found that when players started their run-up less than one second after the referee blew the whistle, the success rate was a paltry 58%. As England manager in 2018, Southgate encouraged the players to take more time from the spot, and led England to their first-ever World Cup penalty shootout win.
Some athletes are gifted with psychological advantages from birth, but these are not immutable. Interventions designed to increase mental toughness can improve athletes’ performances. The more players practise, the more automated aspects of their movements become, helping athletes to manage anxiety and heighten focus. Maintaining pre-performance routines, as Sörenstam did, makes players more robust under pressure. Coaching designed to help players think independently, rather than being told what to do, helps develop implicit rather than explicit knowledge, and gives players the best chance of avoiding choking.
“If you’re more explicit in how you acquire skills, you’re potentially more likely to break down under pressure,” observed Phil Kenyon, a leading putting coach who has worked with golf major championship winners including Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson. “I try and encourage implicit learning, giving them a better chance of being able to handle things under pressure.”
It is often said that nothing in training can exactly replicate the pressures of the biggest moments in matches. But even if that is true, more pressurised training can help athletes cope with pressure on the field.
Whether preparing for public speaking or a big sports match, “one of the really important things is to practise under the kind of conditions in which you’re going to perform,” Beilock said. “There’s often a lack of attention given to practising in high-pressure situations. We know if you can do that you have the likelihood of being inoculated from choking.
“We know that students get better at taking tests when they take real-time practice tests – it’s all about closing that gap between how you practise and how you perform.” There is, she said, no reason why the same principle would not apply to elite athletes.
At the 2012 Ryder Cup – the biennial men’s golf competition between Europe and the US – in Medinah, Europe trailed the US 10–4. Ian Poulter and his partner, Rory McIlroy, were behind in their matches. So were the other European pair, Sergio Garcia and Luke Donald. Europe was on course to go 12–4 down at the end of the second day.
This was “nearly job done”, Klusener recalled. “I said to Al that the first thing we would like to do is hit the ball for six, shake hands and walk off, but at the same time, if we can scramble a single run somewhere, that also needs to be an option for us. ‘One good ball and the game is over.’”
After a protracted wait, the bowler delivered his third ball. Klusener hit the ball straight towards a fielder. There was no time for the batsmen to run, yet Donald set off down the pitch. Klusener quickly sent him back, and Donald had to dive across the crease to get home. He was only saved because the Australian fielder’s throw missed its target.
Donald later described the moment in his autobiography. “Sprawled on the floor, heart pounding, I thought: ‘Thank God, we’ve got away with it. We’ll be OK now.’” Before the next ball, Donald told Klusener: “Pick your spot, and hit it out of the park.”
Klusener started to run as soon as he hit the ball.
The ball before, Donald had run when he shouldn’t. This time, he didn’t run at all, remaining motionless as Klusener hurtled towards him. By the time Klusener hared past him, all Donald had managed to do was drop his bat and look around forlornly. His legs wouldn’t move. “I looked up at Lance, saw him rushing to my end, and so I started to run,” Donald wrote. “My legs felt like jelly, as if I wasn’t making any headway at all down to the other end. I tried to get my legs moving properly. It was a dreamlike sequence, almost in slow motion.”
Donald was paralysed by anxiety – a classic symptom of choking. When he finally started to run, he was out by yards. South Africa were out of the competition.
Since 1999, South Africa’s World Cup eliminations have straddled the full spectrum of sporting farce. In 2003, when they hosted the World Cup, South Africa were eliminated after misreading the required score to win and being knocked out after a tie. In 2011, they were cruising to victory in the quarter-final before a self-inflicted collapse against New Zealand. Four years later, South Africa missed several catches or run-outs before losing an epic semi-final, once again against New Zealand.
The South Africa men’s team have played in 19 global tournaments – the World Cup, the Champions Trophy and the Twenty20 World Cup – since that fateful day in 1999. Although consistently one of the leading cricket nations in this time, South Africa haven’t reached a final. They have reached eight semi-finals – and lost every single one.
This litany of failures invites the question: when Donald was run out, was he paving the way for a whole era of South African World Cup failure? Did that run out not merely scupper South Africa’s golden chance in 1999, but burden future generations of players?Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning
“Stereotype threat” is the idea that when a negative image becomes associated with a group, it takes on a life of its own, and the outcome and behaviours are more likely to be repeated. In a classic study on this subject from 1999, scientists asked men and women to take an arithmetic test. Some students were told that men and women performed equally well on the test; the others were told that men performed better. When the scientists told the women that women performed just as well as men, they subsequently performed as well as the men on the test. When women were told that women tended to perform worse, they performed worse than men on the test. Being made aware of the stereotype seemed to affect whether participants would adhere to it or not.
Stereotype threat can permeate sport, too. It can affect “any situation where you have the possibility or worry that people might judge you based on your inclusion in a certain group – that could be race, that could be gender, that could be the team you play on,” said Sian Beilock, the cognitive scientist and author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
In sport and life, past failure can make future failure more likely. Since 1999, South African cricketers have lugged stereotype threat around with them, like an unwanted piece of oversized baggage, from one major tournament to the next. South Africa’s head coach between 2011 and 2013, Gary Kirsten, called the legacy of previous failures “a dark mist that hangs over South African cricket in knockout events”.
As every England football fan scarred by penalty shootouts could attest, failure seems to beget more failure. Every choke, real or perceived, creates more of a burden the next time the team is in the same position, making the hurdle even more overwhelming.
Gareth Southgate spent 22 years looking back at his part in England’s defeat by Germany in a penalty shootout at Euro 96, trying to work out what had gone wrong. His conclusion was that he had rushed. Before he took his sudden-death penalty against Germany, “All I wanted was the ball: put it on the spot, get it over and done with,” he later wrote. Rushing penalties under pressure damages the chances of scoring: a study found that when players started their run-up less than one second after the referee blew the whistle, the success rate was a paltry 58%. As England manager in 2018, Southgate encouraged the players to take more time from the spot, and led England to their first-ever World Cup penalty shootout win.
Some athletes are gifted with psychological advantages from birth, but these are not immutable. Interventions designed to increase mental toughness can improve athletes’ performances. The more players practise, the more automated aspects of their movements become, helping athletes to manage anxiety and heighten focus. Maintaining pre-performance routines, as Sörenstam did, makes players more robust under pressure. Coaching designed to help players think independently, rather than being told what to do, helps develop implicit rather than explicit knowledge, and gives players the best chance of avoiding choking.
“If you’re more explicit in how you acquire skills, you’re potentially more likely to break down under pressure,” observed Phil Kenyon, a leading putting coach who has worked with golf major championship winners including Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson. “I try and encourage implicit learning, giving them a better chance of being able to handle things under pressure.”
It is often said that nothing in training can exactly replicate the pressures of the biggest moments in matches. But even if that is true, more pressurised training can help athletes cope with pressure on the field.
Whether preparing for public speaking or a big sports match, “one of the really important things is to practise under the kind of conditions in which you’re going to perform,” Beilock said. “There’s often a lack of attention given to practising in high-pressure situations. We know if you can do that you have the likelihood of being inoculated from choking.
“We know that students get better at taking tests when they take real-time practice tests – it’s all about closing that gap between how you practise and how you perform.” There is, she said, no reason why the same principle would not apply to elite athletes.
At the 2012 Ryder Cup – the biennial men’s golf competition between Europe and the US – in Medinah, Europe trailed the US 10–4. Ian Poulter and his partner, Rory McIlroy, were behind in their matches. So were the other European pair, Sergio Garcia and Luke Donald. Europe was on course to go 12–4 down at the end of the second day.
LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers scoring a free throw earlier this year. NBA players are about 3% less likely to score at this moment than at other points in the game. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
“As bad as it felt, you knew that there’s still a glimmer of a chance – there’s still two matches on the course,” Poulter remembered. “You have to think in the back of your mind that you’ve got an opportunity to turn those two matches around … that is all a process of telling yourself that there’s a chance. There’s a process of pride that kicks in that doesn’t allow you to be beaten in that match.”
Poulter was not used to Ryder Cup failure. In 2010, he earned the nickname The Postman – because he always delivered points. After 12 holes, Poulter and McIlroy were two shots down: “It was looking miserable.” And yet the very desperation of the situation – in the match and the Ryder Cup alike – drove Poulter on.
Poulter and McIlroy had to attack relentlessly. After McIlroy birdied the 13th hole (ie came in one shot under par) to cut the deficit to one hole, Poulter – with his eyes bulging – reeled off five consecutive birdies, in one of the most extraordinary individual passages of play in Ryder Cup history.
“Finding yourself in that frame of mind is something which doesn’t happen very often,” Poulter said. “And when you take yourself to that place, you’re able to deliver and turn matches around and execute shots one after another. I don’t know whether we’d have played any different if we’d have been three up in the match. The fact of the matter was, we had to be aggressive. We had to win that match. It was extremely simple. We had to birdie every hole.
“Great things happen in those moments. There were a lot of good shots executed all within a period of six holes, and it [produced] a level of motivation for the team. There was a big wave of momentum.”
As dusk fell over Medinah, Poulter secured a one-shot victory with a remarkable 15ft putt on the 18th hole, celebrated by a roar of delight and a scream of “Come on”.
A few hours earlier, Europe feared they had lost the Ryder Cup. Now, Europe could “go to sleep on a high after winning the last two matches,” Poulter recalled, and the team felt “energised to go out to have an opportunity to win”.
The team also sensed a change in their opponents’ mood, he said: “They were extremely jovial and joyous on Saturday when they were 10–4 up. And momentum started to change – all of a sudden the pressure gets loaded off us and gets put back on them.”
Early in his match on Sunday, Poulter struggled, going two shots down after four holes. Yet Poulter still “knew I’d win my point”, he said later. “It’s a weird feeling when you’re in the zone and all that mayhem is going on around you, and you find that you are entirely focused on the shot. All this adrenaline was flowing and I was thinking to myself: ‘There’s no way I’m losing this.’”
What Poulter described is called a “clutch state”. Clutch states occur when athletes under pressure are able to summon up whatever is necessary to succeed, to perform well, and perhaps change the outcome of the game. Flow states are when a harmonious state exists between intense focus and absorption in the event, to the exclusion of irrelevant emotions and thoughts, creating a sense that everything is coming together or clicking into place. Athletes with high mental toughness are more likely to experience flow and clutch states than those less mentally tough.
“Anything that helps you focus on why you should succeed, rather than why you should fail, can be powerful,” Beilock explained. In the end, Tiger Woods missed a straightforward putt and Europe won the Ryder Cup outright.
Scott Boswell now works as a well-regarded cricket coach for a club and school. His methods lean upon his own experiences of choking – and how to give players the capacity to hold up in the most pressurised moments. His coaching sessions aim to put players “under the same sort of scenarios that they’re going to have when it comes to a match,” he said.
Boswell wants to prevent others going through what he did. “My mental and physical side just basically crumbled in front of God knows how many people watching live on television … I’ve only watched it once – and then not all the way through. But I watched about five or six balls and just thought: ‘That’s a car crash.’”
He does not believe there is anything inevitable about choking – and that everyone can practise in a way that makes them less likely to choke. “Could I have dealt with that differently? Could I have had methods to slow myself down? I think I could.”
“As bad as it felt, you knew that there’s still a glimmer of a chance – there’s still two matches on the course,” Poulter remembered. “You have to think in the back of your mind that you’ve got an opportunity to turn those two matches around … that is all a process of telling yourself that there’s a chance. There’s a process of pride that kicks in that doesn’t allow you to be beaten in that match.”
Poulter was not used to Ryder Cup failure. In 2010, he earned the nickname The Postman – because he always delivered points. After 12 holes, Poulter and McIlroy were two shots down: “It was looking miserable.” And yet the very desperation of the situation – in the match and the Ryder Cup alike – drove Poulter on.
Poulter and McIlroy had to attack relentlessly. After McIlroy birdied the 13th hole (ie came in one shot under par) to cut the deficit to one hole, Poulter – with his eyes bulging – reeled off five consecutive birdies, in one of the most extraordinary individual passages of play in Ryder Cup history.
“Finding yourself in that frame of mind is something which doesn’t happen very often,” Poulter said. “And when you take yourself to that place, you’re able to deliver and turn matches around and execute shots one after another. I don’t know whether we’d have played any different if we’d have been three up in the match. The fact of the matter was, we had to be aggressive. We had to win that match. It was extremely simple. We had to birdie every hole.
“Great things happen in those moments. There were a lot of good shots executed all within a period of six holes, and it [produced] a level of motivation for the team. There was a big wave of momentum.”
As dusk fell over Medinah, Poulter secured a one-shot victory with a remarkable 15ft putt on the 18th hole, celebrated by a roar of delight and a scream of “Come on”.
A few hours earlier, Europe feared they had lost the Ryder Cup. Now, Europe could “go to sleep on a high after winning the last two matches,” Poulter recalled, and the team felt “energised to go out to have an opportunity to win”.
The team also sensed a change in their opponents’ mood, he said: “They were extremely jovial and joyous on Saturday when they were 10–4 up. And momentum started to change – all of a sudden the pressure gets loaded off us and gets put back on them.”
Early in his match on Sunday, Poulter struggled, going two shots down after four holes. Yet Poulter still “knew I’d win my point”, he said later. “It’s a weird feeling when you’re in the zone and all that mayhem is going on around you, and you find that you are entirely focused on the shot. All this adrenaline was flowing and I was thinking to myself: ‘There’s no way I’m losing this.’”
What Poulter described is called a “clutch state”. Clutch states occur when athletes under pressure are able to summon up whatever is necessary to succeed, to perform well, and perhaps change the outcome of the game. Flow states are when a harmonious state exists between intense focus and absorption in the event, to the exclusion of irrelevant emotions and thoughts, creating a sense that everything is coming together or clicking into place. Athletes with high mental toughness are more likely to experience flow and clutch states than those less mentally tough.
“Anything that helps you focus on why you should succeed, rather than why you should fail, can be powerful,” Beilock explained. In the end, Tiger Woods missed a straightforward putt and Europe won the Ryder Cup outright.
Scott Boswell now works as a well-regarded cricket coach for a club and school. His methods lean upon his own experiences of choking – and how to give players the capacity to hold up in the most pressurised moments. His coaching sessions aim to put players “under the same sort of scenarios that they’re going to have when it comes to a match,” he said.
Boswell wants to prevent others going through what he did. “My mental and physical side just basically crumbled in front of God knows how many people watching live on television … I’ve only watched it once – and then not all the way through. But I watched about five or six balls and just thought: ‘That’s a car crash.’”
He does not believe there is anything inevitable about choking – and that everyone can practise in a way that makes them less likely to choke. “Could I have dealt with that differently? Could I have had methods to slow myself down? I think I could.”
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