Look at where you slip not where you fall
In the late nineties, I spent a few days in Johannesburg, South Africa at the home of a friend who was the manager of a junior South African Cricket team that had just returned from a tournament in Barbados. After a few pleasantries about Barbados he said: “West Indies cricket will go into a serious nosedive because your school cricket and club cricket are poor. In South Africa our schools and clubs are the nurseries for our senior teams.” How prophetic he was!
Soon after, I recalled some comments that Frank Worrell made in 1961 about the role unstructured games, school cricket, club cricket, self learning and self coaching played in the development and success of West Indies cricket. He said: ‘I was playing cricket six hours a day and we would practise in the mornings before school in the far corner of the Fourth Eleven field. At the age of ten I bowled at many senior players at Empire Club when they ran out of practice bowlers.
“We used to prepare our own wickets in the far corner of the Empire ground and we played cricket for days and days in the vacation from nine in the morning to three-thirty in the afternoon when the club members started to practise. Our matches were played to an end and at times you found yourself batting for three days and then you had to go back and field for another day or two and it was in this environment that I started to learn about the game and my game.”
Worrell continued: “The concentration of cricket clubs in Barbados is a significant contributory factor in the early emergence of young Barbadian players into inter-colonial and international cricket.
“Another advantage the young Barbadian schoolboy has on his counterparts in the rest of the cricketing world is the opportunity of playing against recognized cricketers while still at school, as some of the secondary schools play first eleven cricket. By the time a young player is about to leave school he may have had four years experience in the local senior competition which enables him to walk into any senior club side and without any readjustment or necessity for a transition period, continue to hold his own.”
Of club cricket in the Lancashire League Worrell said: “One can learn more in three years of league cricket then in twelve years of cricket outside the United Kingdom, even at the international level. One learns to cope with the swerving ball, the turning ball, the cutter, and the stopping ball. One has to be brave enough to ignore the cold, dark and blustery weather, the running noses, cold hands and cold feet, faulty umpiring decisions, dropped catches and traditional needle matches. Club cricket in the league is a must for any youngster who hopes to make the grade.”
Worrell claimed that the real importance of concentration, self-responsibility, self-discipline and self-motivation in performance was brought home to him while he was playing club cricket in the league. That was great insight way back in the fifties. Decades later, experts in performance said that in top class sport the level of a player’s success is determined by the depth of his motivation and self-discipline. They also claimed that the correlation between discipline/motivation and success is greater than the correlation between ability and success.
In 1960/61 Worrell was able to imprint those assets and core values into the minds of young players in the team that he took to Australia. Few of them had any kind of reputation before they arrived in Australia but by the time they left they were all superstars. Under his leadership the players developed powerful self-belief, a healthy level of selfconfidence and a strong will to win. His team soon became the best in the world.
Ten years later, Clive Lloyd followed in his footsteps and imprinted similar core values into his players’ minds. His team went on to dominate world cricket for over fifteen years and was rated as one of the best teams in the history of sport.
Since then, West Indies players and administrators seem to have forgotten the key factors that brought success to those champion teams. They have been captivated by things new and have ignored the old and proven. It is not good enough merely to discard old values and methods in favour of the new, for much of conventional methods and conventional wisdom still have enormous value today.
Ability is necessary for good performance but does not guarantee it. It only indicates what a player is capable of doing. Motivation on the other hand indicates why he will do something and how likely he is to do it. Some people now feel that motivation is a better predictor of performance than ability. That may be true but both of them are needed for good performance.
On the field, performance is built on four important interconnected and interdependent pillars – physical fitness, physical technique, tactics and strategy and, mental skills. If any one of them is weak or substandard performance will suffer. Clive knew this and rightly focused on a high level of fitness, sound technical skills, productive tactics and strategies, and the development of strong mental skills – simple thinking, concentration, selfbelief, discipline and the management of pressure. That focus produced a physically and mentally tough unit that became the best batting team, the best bowling team and the best fielding team.
In the last two decades, past and present West Indies teams have been in an ever-increasing decline. The players are not just weak in any one pillar; they seem to be weak in all four of them. Continued failure will be guaranteed if the players and coaches do not pay close attention to these four pillars and strengthen and integrate them. They are the basics on which every performance is built. If they are ignored or forgotten performance will fall apart, particularly under pressure. Teams that execute the basics best win most of the time.
A wise man once said, “Our tendency is to try things out capriciously...without an indepth grasp of their underlying foundation, and without the commitment necessary to sustain them. When a new idea fails, we give up instead of investigating the cause of failure and addressing them systematically.”
Here is an African saying that West Indies cricket should contemplate and follow: “When a man falls look at where he slips not where he falls.” Our cricket boards have been making the mistake of focusing almost exclusively on the falls.