Pringle: Vince is facing mental test to succeed
Derek Pringle says that the game is littered with talented players who could not step up due to their temperaments
When anxiety takes over it can be hard to shift. Although most players have access to psychologists these days, solutions, and their effectiveness, vary widely
All Test matches are important to players but this Old Trafford match looks like it could represent a make or break situation in the career of James Vince.
Brought in at the start of the summer, following the sudden retirement of James Taylor, Vince, 25, has yet to persuade many, himself included, that he belongs at this level. In four Tests, three against Sri Lanka and all at home, he averages 18.6 with a top score of 42.
The worry is not that he is not good enough, but that he cannot control his nerves well enough to do his talent justice on the big stage. As Trevor Bayliss, the England head coach, said after the Lord’s Test in which Vince looked as if he might get out almost any over: “It would be an injustice if he doesn’t make it.”
The trouble is it is no good looking like a world-beater in practice or when it doesn’t count. Indeed, all sport is strewn with people whose talent was let down by their temperament. They tend to be from individual disciplines like golf, snooker and tennis and not from team sports, where the herd provides succour in times of stress. But cricket, although a team game, is comprised of highly individual acts which afflict its participants accordingly.
Test cricket, where the mental examination of players is most extreme, can be especially challenging and there are plenty who only scratched the surface of their potential because they were afflicted by anxiety, fear of failure, too much desire for success, pressure of expectation or plain old big-stage nerves.
Most competitors feel some anxiety when they perform, simply because there is an element of the unknown at play, doubly so if you are up against an opponent. But too much stress can, apart from creating chemical imbalances that turn your fight instinct to flight, disturb your focus to the point where justice to one’s talent is simply not served.
Who can forget Mark Lathwell, a quirky but talented batsman from Somerset thrust suddenly into the third Ashes Test of 1993 at Trent Bridge, after England had lost the first two?
Taken out of his county comfort zone, Lathwell did not cope with the hike in quality that international cricket demands nor the extra focus it brings on players. He was also picked on the back of his form wave and not the front, so was not playing as well as he had been a few months earlier. This is something that Vince has suffered from this summer, though when he was at the top of his game, around the time of the South Africa tour, there were no vacancies in the side after England had decided to play Nick Compton.
Graham Gooch was England captain when Lathwell was picked by selectors who were clearly rolling the dice after two defeats. Weary of getting beaten by Australia, Gooch later summed up the selection by pointing out that England and Australian had young openers in that game (Lathwell was 21, Michael Slater 23). But whereas one was savvy and comfortable playing top-level cricket (Slater), the other was naive and nervous in the extreme. Indeed, Lathwell played the next Test and was never considered for England selection again, an indecently hasty passing over even for the Nineties.
Some players, Mark Ramprakash springs to mind, got many more chances than Lathwell, but still didn’t cross the Rubicon to achieve the contentment of an international career. Ramprakash played 52 Tests from 1991 to 2001, but seldom succeeded like he did at county level. It wasn’t a case of the step-up being too great either, at least not skill-wise. Rather it meant too much to him to succeed and that proved an impediment he never overcame.
It isn’t just batsmen who suffer the indignity of not doing themselves justice or, in some cases, of losing the plot entirely. Kevin Emery and David Gurr were two pacey, swing bowlers who played for Hampshire and Somerset respectively. Both had excellent strike-rates and were soon talked of as potential England bowlers though it was after such talk reached their ears that doubt set in. For some reason they went downhill in the space of a year, both losing their actions to the extent where even in practice they were hitting the side-netting.
They are not the only players to be affected by talk of England caps and I wonder if that is why the selectors, as some kind of early stress test, make it obvious when they go to watch a county player with international potential.
When anxiety takes over it can be hard to shift. Although most players have access to psychologists these days, solutions, and their effectiveness, vary widely.
Back in the Seventies, Derbyshire’s Fred Swarbrook, a talented left-arm spinner got the yips. The solution, which came from a sports psychologist, was for Fred to carry a pebble in his pocket in the field and to stroke it whenever he felt stressed. All seemed to go well until one day Essex’s Ken McEwan started smashing Swarbrook’s left-arm spin out of the ground. At which point the advice from a certain David Steele became: “Put the ball in your pocket, Fred, and bowl him the pebble.” Vince does not require anything so folksy but he needs, somehow, to allow his instincts for batting to take over when he is in the middle. Once a player’s head becomes filled with the demons of doubt they no longer see a cricket ball for what it is – something to be left alone, stopped dead or hit for runs. I don’t know what music Vince prefers but I refer him to a George Clinton and Eddie Hazel song to haul him from his trough – “Free your mind... and your ass will follow.”