By Dr. Rudi Webster
After the botched invasion of the Bay of Pigs on the South coast of Cuba by 1400 Cuban exiles in April 1961, President John F. Kennedy said: “Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan.”
Members of the just defeated West Indies’ teams must be feeling like shamed and rejected orphans. Even though they are being belittled and vilified by all and sundry, they must not allow themselves to be distracted by destructive comments. They have failed, but they are not failures.
The human brain is wired and configured to learn more from mistakes and failures than from success.
The results in New Zealand are just a measure of what they have been and what they have done. The results do not measure what they can do or what they can become. With a commitment to mastery of the basics and dedication to a new level of courage and discipline, they can undergo a psychological rebirth or revival to change the fortunes of the team.
Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson once said: “The most enjoyment I had was not always winning (although I hated losing). But what gave me the biggest thrill was the way I reacted when I was beaten – what I thought about when I was beaten and how I came back from defeat. To my mind the great champions are the ones who react to defeat in a positive way. I’d much rather climb into the head of someone who has lost to see what made that person come back to be a victor, than to climb into the head of a winner. You learn more from failure than success.”
Along the same lines Indian Test batsman VVS Laxman stressed that achieving success is not always easy. He once said: ”Successful people, including sportsmen, experience several failures and have to overcome many internal and external barriers along the way. I would encourage young sportsmen to read books (or watch videos) about successful people like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. They will see that success was not a cakewalk for them.”
In that context, I would advise our cricketers to talk to successful West Indies players like Sir Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Sir Vivian Richards, Sir Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Colin Croft, Sir Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh, Lance Gibbs, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Brian Lara, Sir Wesley Hall, Sir Garfield Sobers and Sir Clive Lloyd. Our young cricketers would then understand why these players were such great champions and why they dominated world cricket for more than twenty years. Current players would learn that success was not a cakewalk for them. All of these great players were committed to the highest standards. They had a great work ethic, were highly disciplined and motivated, and above all else had a powerful self-image, strong self-belief and a healthy level of self-confidence.
Few people know how disciplined Sir Clive’s team was at practice and in the game. Off the field they had their fun, but on the field it was all business. Self-discipline, self-belief and mastery of the basics are three factors that have been in short supply in West Indies teams of the last 20 years.
Years ago, Tony Rafferty, an ultra-marathon runner with whom I once worked, ran thousands of miles across Australia from Perth to Sydney. He often said that it was easy to be disciplined when things were easy and were going your way. The true test comes when things get difficult, when the odds are stacked against you, and when you have to push yourself to or beyond your limits.
He once told me: “The most successful people are those who are disciplined enough to do the things that other people refuse to do. If you do these hard things often enough, you start to enjoy them and they become important to you because you know they will give you an advantage over opponents and bring you success. The depth of your discipline and motivation determines the level of your success.”
Self-discipline creates the energy that takes you nearer to your goals, and your vision provides the force that drives discipline. Discipline separates the doer from the talker. Talkers can always give a good story about what they are going to do but without the discipline to follow through and finish the job they never do it.
Over the last 25 years the decision makers, coaches and teachers in West Indies cricket have been focusing on the symptoms and not the diseases of West Indies cricket. Just treating the symptoms will be palliative. It will not cure the disease. An honest and thorough examination of West Indies cricket to get past the symptoms to the diseases, is long overdue – performance, systems, structures, governance, and coaching.
We have more academically qualified coaches than we have ever had, yet the need for good coaching has never been greater. Johan Cruyff, one of the world’s greatest footballers and football managers once said that in professional soccer, two out of 10 coaches have a positive impact on the team and improve its performance; another two out of 10 have no impact; and six out of 10 actively harm the team. If that is true, we must look at our coaches, particularly at the youth level, to see if they are harming the growth, development and performance of our young cricketers.
One gets the impression that West Indies cricket has ignored or played down the importance of the basics during the last two decades. This is unfortunate because the basics form the fabric of performance. If that fabric is weak, performance will also be weak. The teams that choose and execute the basics best, win most of their games. In the current teams, that weakness is on show in just about every contest.
Going forward, I hope that the coaches and teachers do not confine their attention and preparation to fitness, strength training and technique. The returns on that approach will be disappointingly low. Performance in sport is built on four interconnected and interdependent pillars – fitness, technique, tactics and strategy and the mental skills, particularly concentration, handling pressure and dealing with different situations. If any one of these pillars is weak performance will suffer.
One gets the impression that the decision makers during the last 25 years did not understand the real significance of self-image, self-belief and team esteem in performance. Once the players get the basics right, performance will revolve around their self-image, self-belief, self-discipline and self-motivation.
In 2011, this is how Harsha Bhogle, an Indian journalist, summed up the West Indies team, after its disappointing performance in India:
”West Indies played the role of the challenger quite well. But you always knew it was a question of when rather than if, they will fall away. West Indies needs someone on the field to show them how to win, for at the moment, they give the impression it is out of bounds. Sometimes when you fear (or expect) the inevitable, you invite it. There is much promise in this side but it is on a long downward spiral, and the new talent coming in will take the shape of the mould it is cast into. It is the mould, the air they breathe, the acceptance of defeat that needs to be demolished.”
I heard through the grapevine that a certain degree of arrogance has infected the minds of some of the current players. I hope that this is a false report because arrogance, or false confidence is a prescription for failure.
Cricket is a physical and psychological battle with your opponents but unfortunately, it is a greater psychological battle with self.
