This is from Mike Brearly in the times the other day, there is more to think about in this article than in most books...
Philosophy of Andy Flower has given England the power
One part of Andy Flower’s philosophy of coaching international cricketers involves the notion of cricketing myths, handed down in dressing rooms around the world. Such myths include partial insights and plain falsehoods but are often accepted as universal truths. One such myth is: top players don’t have to worry about their techniques.
Another is that form is like the weather, coming and going like the wind, which, in the words of the Gospel, “bloweth where it listeth”.
Flower suggests that the technique even of top players shifts constantly. Bodies change, both in mass and in shape. Steven Finn is a case in point; he has built up his body. But this extra strength, which in the long run will help to deliver speed and stamina, may also mean that in the short run he loses some assets of his earlier looseness. He may no longer flick the ball out with quite the same whip as before.
A player’s technique may slip, for various reasons. A batsman adjusts to compensate for being caught in the slip cordon by moving farther over to the off side; in the process he may fall over to off, or tip his head over from the vertical, and be vulnerable to leg-befores.
Sachin Tendulkar has been blessed with (or has chiselled out for himself) an exceptional basic technique, which hasn’t changed much over his long career. But he has tinkered constantly with his technique. He is not one of the naive ones who thinks it is a fixed asset to be taken for granted. He knows success is not in the lap of the gods, but down to him.
Among the mantras Flower and Andrew Strauss insisted on from the beginning of their working partnership was the development of a sense of honesty and responsibility. Only if each player (and the team as a whole) can be honest about their basic strengths can they know whether their play is slipping away from them, or needs attention. Without such honesty, form can seem a nebulous thing, entirely out of one’s control. Coaches, Flower says, can destroy a player. One route to such an outcome is to focus too much on weaknesses. He refers to the “super-strength theory” of Mark Bawden, the England team psychologist, to illustrate his point.
One question for each player in the squad is: “What makes you distinctive? What do you bring that is unique? What aspect of your play makes you or could develop you into a world-class player?”
Alastair Cook’s assets, for instance, have always been a combination of brilliant leg-side play with great ability to hit the short ball on either side of the wicket. Kevin Pietersen, with his height, reach and brilliant wristwork, has a capacity to dominate; with his high hands and big stride he can drive balls that other players would be modestly defending off the back foot.
Strengths imply what Bawden and Flower call “allowable weaknesses”; that is, these very qualities will lead at times to the batsmen’s downfall, and their subsequent lambasting from the media. It is vital, Flower says, that the coaches do not join in on this. Such errors or dismissals are part of the overall beneficial package. Of course, he adds, each player, having identified his own strengths and worked on them, must also be aware of the danger of overdoing such strong points.
(I am reminded of David Gower, whose elegant off-side strokes could result in his being caught in the slips, but overall this was his area of “super strength”, bringing him many runs, and also forcing bowlers to bowl to other strengths.) All players will have identifiable weaknesses; Flower’s aim with them is not to try to turn them into strengths, but to build these aspects of a player’s technique to the point where they cannot be readily exploited by the opposition. Real damage can be done if the coach, in what may be the traditional way, focuses too exclusively or too early on weaknesses.
Timing is also of the essence. One should not try to change key elements of technique in mid-series. The coach needs to enthuse his players. Flower cited Peter Moores, who was England head coach when Flower was first employed by England as batting coach, as a teacher whose optimism and enthusiasm always excited him, opening his mind to new learning. With Moores, he learnt something every day.
I feel the same, listening and talking to Flower. He maintains that players’ self-awareness needs constant development and attention. The more self-aware a player becomes, the more able he is to react favourably to stress. On a day when the ball swings, the swing bowler will have confidence in his skills, and the batsman will know how he can cope with pressure and challenge. Awareness is not a matter of articulacy, although being able to put it into words confirms that the player has achieved such awareness.
When I mention the comment of Graham Gooch, England’s present batting coach —“I don’t coach batting with top players; I help them score more runs” — Flower responds: “Yes, this shows how down to earth and pragmatic one needs to be. Gooch is brilliant at one-to-ones with batsmen, building on his own bank of knowledge, both from his own batting and from watching so much cricket at the highest level.”
Gooch, he says, also excels in drilling routines. They both use the simple dropped ball to help a batsman to groove his drive, say, so that he keeps his shape. “Get your weight and body position right and the hands will take care of themselves,” he says.
So in Flower’s book, technique has a high priority, even for the very best players. By “technique” he does not mean a routine technique abstracted from a textbook and applied to each player, but a honed, worked-out and developed personal technique based on simple basic guidelines: are you watching the ball, playing it late, playing straight, hitting the ball on the ground, are your feet moving forward or across and back, are you balanced, are you making good decisions? If you are out of form, one or more of these basic attributes is bound to be faulty.
Another myth — that confidence is all — is exploded, for confidence is eroded when technique slips. And another: that great players defy technique — look at Shivnarine Chanderpaul or Pietersen. In fact both do most things according to the book; when they play well the checklist above is all positive. They have their peculiarities and exceptional strengths, but these appear on top of good basic techniques.
I ask Andy if the focus on technique, statistics, self-awareness, along with the ubiquity of personal DVDs, could lead to a loss of spontaneity? Are people’s instincts less valued or permitted? Flower says no, despite such criticisms being made of England’s approach. Rather the challenge is to learn how to make use of statistics, how to make awareness functional rather than self-conscious. He knows that to be a top cricketer one has to make use of good instincts; whether these lead one to certain willingness to take risks, or to fight it out, or to be attuned to the demands of each form of the game. Joe Root has well-developed instincts; in all his innings for England, whether in Twenty20, ODIs, or Test matches his tempo has been suited to the format, to the pitch, to the state of the game and the bowling.
Moreover, a player’s instincts, informed and educated by watching and making innumerable minute judgments over time, will hopefully alert him to what the opposition batsman or bowler is about to do, to whether a bowler is going to bowl a bouncer, say, or a slower ball. He may read the body language of the opponent, and/or what he does with his hands at the instant of action.
Beyond technique, Andy suggests, a broader education is called for. He told me how England had their own version of the kind of team-building and personality building ventures that Steve Waugh and John Buchanan used with the successful Australia sides of the early 2000s. For example, the England squad went to Ypres, to the trenches; the players learnt something of that miserable period of English and continental history. They heard about military tactics. They also went to Germany to be trained by the military. Flower was astonished at how quickly, under military training, individuals learnt to do what they were told; he came to see how soldiers, mostly without hesitation, would climb out of a trench and run towards machinegun fire.
Hardship training — going through it together — resulted in mutual respect, even when players didn’t like each other.
Another myth: that good teams have to get on well together or like each other. Not (necessarily) so. The key thing is respect. Such training also broke down hierarchical boundaries, for instance between management and players.
The team visited the concentration camp at Dachau. On each of the two tours to Bangladesh they visited units treating women suffering from acid burns. On every tour they do some charitable work, not for any payback but because it is an important lesson in life and in priorities to give something of oneself.
Occasionally a player is asked to share with the team a piece of advice, an anecdote, a saying, or a poem — something that matters to the person sharing.
(I add: “And if they aren’t able to, they’re not punished for not doing their homework?”) Each player will be asked from time to time to run a debriefing session; people often function in pairs, help is offered.
Andy agreed with my suggestion, that one aim is to create a team of thinking players, a team of potential captains. Awareness is enhanced when players think about the whole game, not only their own direct role.
I put to him George Gunn’s remark that “batsmen pay too much attention to the bowler rather than going with the tide”. He recalled fine players talking up the opponents’ shrewdness, and thereby dangerously fanning their own anxiety.
I mentioned Greg Chappell’s dictum, that premeditation is the graveyard of batting. Andy said: “It depends what he means by premeditation; if he means that if the ball comes there I’ll do that, isn’t that what batting is?” Again he referred to Tendulkar, to an innings in which he kept pulling Glenn McGrath or Allan Donald from just short of a length. As a spectator, Flower thought: “He must be premeditating that!” We agreed that it is a matter of how narrow the options given to oneself were.
I suggest that there must be drawbacks as well as advantages in having two coaches for different forms of the game. Might he feel he loses his team when they go off to play ODIs, say, under Ashley Giles? Andy agreed. “It’s harder to have his finger on the pulse of the team,” he says. “And it won’t be easy for Cook, either, as he has another important relationship to build into something healthy and effective. This is an experiment, two coaches, two captains, in different forms of the game.”
I found our conversation stimulating. I wish I had had a coach like Andy Flower to work with when I was playing.
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Topic: Help Needed in every way shape and form (Read 1395 times)