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[Sockouk]

Why do I need to sit as the Chairman of the Board to understand Burnout?
 It is an exhaustive psychophysiological response exhibited as a result of frequent, sometimes extreme and generally ineffective efforts to meet excessive training and competitive demands. Burnout involves a psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical withdrawal from a formerly enjoyable activity in response to excessive stress or dissatisfaction over time. (Smith, 1986)

Just because you can perform one day under extreme pressure does not mean that that particular performance has not had a negative effect on your future performances or, at least at the start, your personal expectations of future performances.

What do you actually mean by this?
The theory of self efficacy tells us that if someone performs well in a situation, then due to the 'Performance Accomplishments' aspect of Self Efficacy they would have raised Self-Efficacy and thus be able to repeat their performance.

Many top players actually find a degree of anxiety to be facillitative to performance. the fact that they have a raised pulse before they go out to band is the somatic way of telling them they are ready for performance.

You mention that players technique disintegrates in times of pressure? Generally isn't most pressure experienced at the end of a cricket match when chasing a tight run rate or trying to keep the opposition from scoring? At the end of the match you will have been playing for a good few hours so technique is more likely to deterioate due to fatigue.

Eysenck's Processing Efficiency Theory (1992) is based on the assumption that individuals have a limited pool of attentional resources. If a player is experiencing anxiety then this anxiety will be consuming the attentional resources leaving less free resources to devote to the task in hand.

Your comment about pressure never being real and only applying to the person in question is silly. You could say that about all emotions

[Talisman]

Trescothick and Thorpe suffered from problems off the field and very real, not all the facts are in their biographies, some will not be wanted to be discussed here. They caused stress in their minds and that led to them not being able to perform at the highest level. Nothing to do with the cricket or its pressure's.

It would be the same for me if I suffered from the same problems as them, which 6 years ago I did and it had the same effect for a while. Burnout to me is like loving a food type and being force fed it every meal time, pretty soon it will make you sick and you will crave a change. Sensible exposure would allow you to enjoy it. Cricket is a job, but not many of us take the work home and everywhere we go...

[art]

One of the true arts of life is to understand what pressure really is. Living in the moment when everyone else is felling 'pressure' is an interesting state of being.

The subject will be expanded on in later postings etc and perhaps it is not accepted by many so called sport's educators but like much of the training of umpires, it is just verbal rubbish designed to promote the being and talks of so called experts.

Pressure or what people suppose is pressure can be eliminated. Oh and I and many others dispute that an elevated heart beat at the time of going out to bat means you are ready for the task.

If mental 'disintergration' was not part of tearing apart performance of the opposition why is taught and practisied so rabidly as a tactic in many sports?

Why do you need to sit as Chairman of the Board to understand burnout? Well perhaps then you would learn that almost all burnout is self inflicted. You either learn how to handle such things or you don't and often fail at crucial times. Handling 'pressure' is simple but then again it costs people a lot of money to understand what is being said.

[bucko2007]

I totally agree with Talisman about the analogy of your favourite meal... This is why I feel a lot of talented youngsters are being put off the sport because of the amount of time commitment they have to make. If the shortened form of the game was promoted more at all levels, it would spark much more interest. When it comes to a 20 over game I would jump at the chance to play... Its a good chance to make a few runs, but if you do get out, you don't end up sitting there for hours and then having to go and field for another 3 hours. You might come out with some more crap about "never had a problem in our day with 50 overs", and that may be true to a certain extent, but people lead much busier lives these days and just because you didn't have a problem with it does not mean it shouldn't be changed for the better.

As for your comment about pressure art, of course there are techniques to help you live in the moment and manage the nerves that come with it, but you are living in cloud cuckoo land if you think that any professional cricketer is an enlightened Buddhist Monk. We are only human, and of course over time we can work on the realisation of what "pressure" is, but its easy for you to say "there is no pressure, this game doesn't really matter". The reason professional cricketers got to that level is largely because of their willingness to win and the competitive pressure they put on themselves to achieve victory. With that comes anxiety, fear of failure etc. and not only that the nature of the sport means, especially for batsman, where your performance relies on delicate reactions to incredibly brief stimuli, that players are very vulnerable to their performance being affected whether positively or negatively.

[Sockouk]

Art

One of the true arts of life is to understand what pressure really is. Living in the moment when everyone else is felling 'pressure' is an interesting state of being.

The subject will be expanded on in later postings etc and perhaps it is not accepted by many so called sport's educators but like much of the training of umpires, it is just verbal rubbish designed to promote the being and talks of so called experts.

Pressure or what people suppose is pressure can be eliminated. Oh and I and many others dispute that an elevated heart beat at the time of going out to bat means you are ready for the task.

If mental 'disintergration' was not part of tearing apart performance of the opposition why is taught and practisied so rabidly as a tactic in many sports?

Why do you need to sit as Chairman of the Board to understand burnout? Well perhaps then you would learn that almost all burnout is self inflicted. You either learn how to handle such things or you don't and often fail at crucial times. Handling 'pressure' is simple but then again it costs people a lot of money to understand what is being said.

I really don't know what you are trying to say in your first two sentences, so I can't respond much to them.

You and many others dispute what I said about a raised heart beat? In 1995 Jones & Swain conducted a study where they took 133 male cricketers aged 16-43. They were then split into two groups Elite - County first team and Full International- and Non-Elite - Semi proffesional and below.
They were then asked to complete the CSAI-2. The non elite athletes did not find cognitive anxiety facilliatative to their performance at all. The elite athletes did.
The non- elite athletes however did feel that some somatic anxiety (raised pulse, sweaty palms, butterflies etc) was facilliative to their performance and the Elite athletes even more so.
So if you want to dispute this, the best way would be to conduct your own experiment.

I do not know what you are trying to say by your fourth sentence either.

I've already explained what Burnout is and why I don't need to be the Chairman of the Board to understand it and the latter half of the last sentence is also not very clear as to what you mean.

[Arthur]

I totally agree with Talisman about the analogy of your favourite meal... This is why I feel a lot of talented youngsters are being put off the sport because of the amount of time commitment they have to make. If the shortened form of the game was promoted more at all levels, it would spark much more interest. When it comes to a 20 over game I would jump at the chance to play... Its a good chance to make a few runs, but if you do get out, you don't end up sitting there for hours and then having to go and field for another 3 hours. You might come out with some more crap about "never had a problem in our day with 50 overs", and that may be true to a certain extent, but people lead much busier lives these days and just because you didn't have a problem with it does not mean it shouldn't be changed for the better.

Yes but what does T20 give you? If you get out, you know that there is, in many cases, tomorrow or the day after to get another chance. This means your head won't be completely concentrated on the one innings, whereas in Tests or longer formats you have the annoyance of, if a specialist bat, standing in a field contemplating and trying to work out where to improve as you have time to think. T20 is just a bish-bash-bosh form of the game that can be enjoyable watching the top players get 170+ in their innings, but when you play at a lower level totals are often sub-100 which makes a very boring match. I'd much rather be on 90 after 20 but then go on to 200 off 50, at least that's interesting to watch.

As for burnout, pro's get it and that's understandable. Being away from home and family for months at a time can be traumatic for some and stressful for most. Take this summer, England will be fine despite having a very long summer. Australia however may find it difficult as they are away for several months.

[art]

There are other ways of training in these matters that are out of mainstream and as such are 'controversial".

Then again some of us have never been into mainstream thinking on various matters.

There is a interesting aside here and that is whether sports people in reality mean much in absolute stress or pressure testing. I guess if you are in the sport then it means something but performing year in year out at high levels in corporate presents various opportunities in both real life and training situations. In sport you have a limited number of years to perform, in corporate you can rise rather rapidly to the top with diligence and education and stay there for a very long time..

So perhaps with a lot of real experience, many years instead of a handful, pressure becomes virtually non existant because you know what, how and when to react and you know how to pick off those who show signs of 'stress'.

The downside of looking and feeling at ease in all situations is that many people, believing popular (and studied) modern hype, fail to understand the situation and believe you can't be trying!!!. Interesting to watch what happens.

There is a lesson here if you want to study and understand.

[Sambo]

Can someone define pressure? Until someone can say it then everything else seems to be worth nothing.

If you can get a vast amount of cricket experience, cricketing ablility, confidence, knowledge about the game and a good mindset and doesn't get crippled from injury. then you will be a successful cricketer. Confidence, knowledge about the game and mindset takes care of pressure. Sure there will be a fear of failure. If anybody can put this stuff together then they will do well at any form, let alone 20/20. Sachin Tendulkar is a prime example. Vast cricket experience. yep. cricketing ablility, der. confidence, yup, knowledge, very much so and a good mindset. check. Thats why he has done so well for so long.

I challenge someone to find a cricketer who had all of these and without political influence failed.