In this week’s edition of In Search of West Indies Cricket, Roger Seymour looks at a routine event that occurred before a Test match.
As sports evolve into fulltime professions, the actual contests are just the products of layers of preparation that involve input from several other professionals, coaches for every facet of the discipline, doctors, therapists, nutritionists, publicists, personal trainers, sports psychologists, to mention a few. Despite all the planning and preparation, the mind game is difficult to anticipate; more so, when an unexpected event occurs and it appears to be just another minor incident.
Bobby Fischer, the chess genius, was the ultimate master of preparation. As the world waited patiently for his 1972 title match with defending world champion Boris Spassky to begin, Fischer was memorising every move Spassky had played at international level (all 14,000), coupled with an
