About 25 years ago, a friend who had just returned to South Africa from Barbados as manager of a junior South Africa team told me that the standard of youth cricket and school cricket in Barbados was disappointingly low and that a decline in West Indies cricket would inevitably follow.
His prediction was spot on. A few years later, one of the coaches at the Shell Cricket Academy in Grenada complained bitterly about striking deficiencies in young players that the West Indies Cricket Board had sent to the Academy. He was concerned about the players’ understanding of the fundamentals of the game, their work ethic, fitness and technique, and their mental skills particularly concentration, self-discipline and self-motivation.
On a Barbados radio programme last week I was disappointed to hear two former Jamaican players complaining about the poor standard of school and club cricket in Jamaica. I was also shocked to learn that little or no school cricket is currently played in Guyana.
But I was pleased to hear a representative of the Barbados Cricket Association speaking enthusiastically about the organisation, structure and standard of youth, school and club cricket in Barbados, and about the resources that have been invested in those areas.
In the last 25 years, Barbados has done well in regional cricket and has won many championships. But it has not produced a single world-class batsman. During that period the averages of its most successful Test and First Class batsmen fluctuated between the twenties and thirties. Not one of them averaged above forty, the minimum international standard for good batsmanship.
Many years ago in Trinidad, I heard Frank Worrell telling a young Garfield Sobers and Rohan Kanhai that they should always aim for the highest standards of batting in world cricket and not be satisfied with just meeting local and regional standards.
Subject to correction, I believe that in the last 20 years of West Indies Test cricket, only Gayle, Sarwan and Adams reached averages in the low forties; Lara and Chanderpaul, our best players, averaged over fifty.
Among the current West Indies players, it is hard to find a batsman averaging forty or more in Test or First-Class cricket. They are all languishing in the thirties and twenties. Yet, supporters constantly boast about the abundance of ability in the region. Two players with Test averages in the twenties and First-Class averages in the thirties have already been acclaimed to be ‘great players’ by local supporters!
Someone once said that mathematics was invented to prevent us from distorting reality. It helps us to see things in their true perspective and forces us to differentiate between facts and opinions, and results and style.
MS Dhoni, a former captain of Team India once told me: “God gives natural gifts to all of us. We need to realise that and work hard to strengthen and maximise them, and strive to improve in those areas where our weaknesses lie.”
Mahatma Gandhi, a very wise man, made the important point that strength and performance do not just come from physical capacity; they come from indomitable will. He understood the overwhelming importance of commitment and motivation.
At the top level of sport, self-discipline and self-motivation create the energy that takes you nearer to your goals. In fact, the depth of a player’s self-motivation and self-discipline determines the level of his success. Some experts now claim that at that level, the correlation between self-motivation/self-discipline and success is much greater than the correlation between ability and success.
Hundreds of years ago, the great French General, Napoleon Bonaparte emphasised that point when he said that in his successful battles and campaigns; the psychological was to the physical, what two is to one.
Ability is necessary for good performance, but it only indicates what a player is capable of doing. It does not guarantee that he will do it, nor does it assure good performance.
Motivation on the other hand reveals why a player might do something and how likely he is to do it. It is a powerful force that drives performance. It is usually a much better predictor of future performance than ability.
When I worked with Team India, Rahul Dravid once said to me: “When we look at talent in cricket, we often see it as just the ability to hit a ball or bowl a ball. Most so-called talented players are deficient in the mental side of the game and hardly ever do well or make it to the top. They don’t understand how the mind works and they don’t work hard enough to get to know and understand themselves.”
Dravid continued: “Most top athletes have good technique, strong strategies and a reasonable level of fitness, but in competition their performance is controlled by the mind – their ability to get into the right frame of mind consistently and regularly, day in and day out. Your state of mind controls how you combine and use your fitness, technique and game strategies.”
The players’ statistics that were mentioned earlier are just a reflection of what our current players have done and have been. They do not indicate what they can do or what they can become. They have the capacity to rewrite their future. They can choose to remain in their comfort zones and be satisfied with the status quo or, they can welcome change and commit to becoming the best players that they can be.
Eighty percent of the players’ success will come from twenty percent of the things they do. But what is that twenty percent?
Can the West Indies team be competitive and do well in the Tests in New Zealand? They can, if the players use their heads and common sense and play with intent and purpose. If they make self-discipline and good execution of the basics first important priorities the odds of doing well will automatically increase. And if they absorb the pressure that the Kiwis will place on them and then return the favour at critical periods of the game they might rattle their opponents.
However, the West Indies’ players must understand that in the next few days their greatest opponent will not the one on the field; it will be the one inside their heads.
Finally, success in top-class sport is no longer possible with just ability. Success must first be created in the mind, then planned and pursued diligently over time. It does not happen all at once or in a straight line. It is a journey that takes time and energy, patience and persistence, and is usually punctuated by ups and downs, successes and failures. Enjoyment of the journey is the key to success.
