OF ALL STEREOTYPES about cricket, one of the most frequently repeated is that cricket is played in the head as much as it is out in the middle. And it is true that mind games are everywhere. In real life we play them all the time, poking and prodding away in search of an Achilles heel to kick, an ego to flatter, a wound to reopen. In cricket the mind games can be crippling. And since it’s such a perverse, don’t-think-of-a-pink-elephant-gah-too-late! kind of a sport, you inevitably end up playing the games on yourself as much as on the opposition. Anyone who has ever taken part in so much as a beer match will know the paralysing inevitability of the moment the Doubts Start Creeping In.
Your team is batting first against a side who beat you the previous year and you’re due in at No. 6. So far, so bearable. But hang on, who’s that opening bowler with the foaming mouth and the other-worldly eyes? And why is he pawing at the turf and being restrained by his team-mates in his follow-through? Don’t remember him from last summer’s nine-wicket mauling. Why does our opening batsman – the only player in the team who is averaging in double figures this summer – keep patting the pitch down between deliveries? Bugger. No more patting for him. Clean-bowled playing no stroke. Must have done a bit. And there goes another. Better start warming up. Hope the opening bowlers are off by the time I get in. Would be lovely to get off the mark against the geriatric trundler rather than the wild man from the high veld who hasn’t been fed for several days. Time for a few throw-downs. Bat and pad together. Move those feet. Watch the ball out of the hand. Nothing premeditated. Shit, another wicket. Looks like it kept low. If this were a county game it would have been called off by now, surely. You can’t play on that. Hey? What? I’m in? Keep my seat warm. Back soon.
Pathetic, I know. But unless your name is Sir Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards, the chances are you do not walk out to the crease every time as if you own the ground and several of the buildings around it. No, you look for things that can go wrong to establish a cunning no-lose situation. It goes something like this: if and when things do go belly up (and we’re talking Mike Gatting’s belly here rather than Bruce Reid’s) you can tut sadly and demoralise team spirit even further by saying you knew that nasty ridge just outside off-stump was going to render the lunatic from Bloemfontein unplayable. And if by some miracle everything goes swimmingly, well, you have – in your own all-too-easily-upset mind at least – triumphed over adversity and moved effortlessly from the realm of the gamma male to the beta minus. It is a defence mechanism, and we all do it. It’s just that some do it better than others.
Several months before Michael Vaughan led England to Ashes success in 2005, I asked him how hard it would be to break a cycle of defeats that stretched back to 1989, the year civilisation as we know it ended. ‘First and foremost,’ he said, ‘Australia are probably the best Test team that’s ever lived, so there’s no disgrace in losing to them. The only disgrace is if you don’t compete.’ It was a clever way to begin an answer. It respectfully acknowledged the excellence of the Australians in a manner that made the prospect of defeat completely understandable. At the same time it laid down a challenge for his own side. It was hard-nosed realism disguised as a battle cry. After England beat Australia, Vaughan claimed he had deliberately played down his side’s chances in advance because the role of quietly confident underdog is the one all teams cherish. He did it brilliantly.
The tactic can work a treat at a less exalted level too. When Steve James turned up for Glamorgan’s county championship game against Sussex at Colwyn Bay in 2000, he took one look at the pitch and told a BBC journalist: ‘It would be nice to have a bowl on there. It’s sure to dart around.’ So when Sussex won the toss and elected to bowl, James had a ready-made excuse. At stumps, Glamorgan had reached 457 for 1, with James unbeaten on 193. He went on to make an undefeated 309 before Glamorgan declared on 718 for 3, which is the kind of total most of us only encounter when we have cheated at pencil cricket. And although James might genuinely have believed the pitch was ripe for the bowlers’ exploitation, his tendency to downplay had helped lower his own expectations, and thus the pressure. More importantly, he ended up with a score that still forms a proud part of his email address (and beats lawrencebooth61@etc.com any day of the week).
So how much did Vaughan, who as a captain had to draw on the little grey cells more regularly than his team-mates, feel cricket was played in the mind? His answer was 70 to 80 per cent, which is infuriating to us lesser mortals who know this figure is based on the assumption that any old idiot can go inside-out to hit Shane Warne from leg-stump through extra-cover. But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. After all, how much time does a top-class batsman actually spend physically scoring his runs? And how much time does he spend lolling on his bat at the non-striker’s end, watching his partner turn white at the prospect of another bouncer from Brett Lee and catching the eye of the comely brunette in row F? (Having said that, Len Hutton had a theory that if a batsman under pressure had a white face he would be OK. It was the panicky red version that betrayed impending doom.) At least cricket fans listening to the Test at home on the radio can make a cup of tea between overs or kick the cat. The non-striker has no such luxury. So what does he do to get the most out of the 70 to 80 per cent Vaughan mentioned?
It seemed an obvious question to put to a sports psychologist. In the old days, these people would have been treated like witches and dunked in the local pond, the better to dissuade them from their hocus-pocus. Now, they are still regarded with suspicion in the less sophisticated parts of the cricketing world but increasingly embraced in more forward-thinking regions.
Market Harborough in the east Midlands does not sound like the most obvious place to go for enlightenment, but that’s the home of Jeremy Snape, who played ten one-day internationals for England before taking a Masters in Sports Psychology at Loughborough University, setting up his own company, Sporting Edge Solutions, in 2005, and then being selected for England’s fifteen-man squad to take part in the inaugural Twenty20 world championship in South Africa in September 2007. He was even part of the coaching team that helped Rajasthan Royals win the Indian Premier League in 2008 before being snapped up by the South African national side. He lives and breathes sporting psychology, which made the question of concentration at the crease something of a slow full-toss. ‘Cricket is about turning the volume up and down,’ he told me. ‘People tend to say “switch on and switch off”, but that’s not entirely true, because you never switch off from it. It’s more of a volume control in terms of your concentration and your focus. There was a famous line about Michael Atherton’s innings of 185 not out in Johannesburg. He batted for eleven hours or something, and he said he’d only really batted for four – it wasn’t anywhere near the time he’d been at the crease. He was able to switch from high-intensity focus at the moment of delivery to things like the crowd between balls. A lot of batsmen’s success is down to the efficiency with which they do that.’
Sounds great. But how do you do it? How do you prevent the peripherals getting in the way? Looking back on my less-than-glamorous career as a medium-pace all-rounder, there have been countless examples of the mind messing it all up at the last second. The feeblest of my many weaknesses as a batsman – the runt of a particularly unhealthy litter – has been my tendency to play across the line to a full-length delivery for no reason other than I fancied clipping the ball through midwicket like those players on the telly. I know it is wrong, and talk to myself, like a younger version of Derek Randall, on my way to the middle. ‘Play straight, Booth. Nothing fancy now.’ My good intentions usually last about five balls before the bowler drifts onto middle stump. Then my eyes light up and my desire to look like Viv Richards takes over. Leg before wicket is my most common mode of dismissal. I fondly imagine my foible is a less elegant version of David Gower’s off-stump fiddle. In other words, I feel powerless to stop it.
Funny things can happen with the ball too. Towards the end of the same match in which I dispensed useful advice to Ian Bishop, the opposition needed seven to win with three wickets in hand. I had just sent down four reasonably tidy overs, but our opening bowler, the broadcaster Ralph Dellor, was desperate for a chance to have a crack at the tail and a tilt at glory. In a touchingly misplaced show of faith, the captain threw me the ball once more. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I insisted as my palms began to ooze sweat and my left eye twitched uncontrollably. My first ball was a leg-side beamer that screamed away for five wides. Heads dropped. I could hear the collective groan, quiet but audible because eleven men had made it simultaneously: my ten team-mates plus one of the umpires, a fellow cricket journalist who always stood in our games and was, shall we say, a reassuring presence if you happened to be batting. Encouraged by this demonstration of unity, I served up a leg-stump half-volley which was clipped to fine-leg for four. I wouldn’t say Ralph was looking smug, but then I wouldn’t say he was looking distraught either. Like a South African in a semi-final, I had bottled it good and proper.
What is to be done to dismiss the gremlins and prevent the mind from running riot? The former Australia opener and coach Bobby Simpson used to talk his way out of a bad run with the bat by telling himself that he was still a good batsman and that a few low scores meant a big one must be round the corner. This is all well and good for a player who once hit an Ashes triple century, but at the time of writing my top score is 61 (see that unimpressive email address), and I don’t really expect to beat it. I have made two half-centuries. Ever. After that, we’re talking about a handful of unbeaten 20s. If a big score is round the corner, then it must be one of those corners in a drawing by Escher that never seems to end.
For Jamie Edwards, the answer in the case of Andrew Flintoff in 2005 was to work on his presence. ‘Eldrick Woods becomes Tiger when he goes out to play,’ he told Peter Hayter in Ashes Victory, the England team’s official account of the series. ‘Michael Jordan becomes Air Jordan. We needed to turn Andrew Flintoff into Freddie Flintoff. He has a warrior presence and a warrior doesn’t walk into the arena with his head down.’
Again, this has a nice ring to it, but it is predicated on the notion of ‘presence’. My arrival at the crease is usually greeted with titters at best, rank indifference at worst: Lawrence Booth becomes, well, Lawrence Booth. I suspect Snape’s answer is more attainable for the average club cricketer, if only because it stresses routine rather than memories of your most recent Test hundred. The aim, he says, is to reach a state of unconscious competence – bear with me – whereby instinct takes over and puts into practice all those good habits you should have been acquiring in the nets.
Snape uses the analogy of learning to drive a car. ‘There are four steps,’ he says. ‘Before I start learning how to drive, I have no idea how to do it: I am unconsciously incompetent. Then I become consciously incompetent: I sit in the car in Tesco’s car park and realise I am crap. Then I become consciously competent: my dad is sitting with me, telling me to push that and move the gear here. I can do it. The mastery stage is unconscious competence, when you can do it without thinking about it. You get to fifth gear and sixth gear in your car, and you can’t remember moving through third and fourth. The mastery of anything we do is done instinctively and without conscious thought.’
The so-called conscious-competence learning model is not a new one. While most psychologists agree it has been around as a formal notion since the 1970s, there are suggestions its basis can be traced back to the days of Confucius and Socrates, when even the concept of reverse swing was little more than a mystery. More recently, the cerebral Australian batsman Dirk Wellham lamented that the ‘deplorable irony of batting is that once you think you should be aggressive, that instinctive aggression is tempered. Batsmen who do best are those who are relaxed, focused and not distracted by thought.’
What is new, however, is Snape’s application of the idea to cricket, a sport in which – by his own tongue-in-cheek admission – reading material in the dressing room occasionally fails to stretch beyond the Beano. ‘In cricket the time between deliveries will always make us aware of a conscious outcome,’ he explains. ‘Thoughts like, “This is the run-rate. This is where the fielders are. This bowler is trying to do this. The ball’s new. It’s going to bounce more. This wicket’s dodgy. That last one kept low. I haven’t scored a run. I never get runs at this ground.” They’re all conscious thoughts that stop the batsman playing at his best. So what we need to do is allow players to be instinctive.
‘If you speak to most batsmen, their best pull shot is when they weren’t even looking to pull the ball. The key is thousands of repetitions in the nets so that it becomes ingrained in your muscle memory. The only thing we need to do to trigger that instinctive shot is to see the stimulus, which is to see the ball come out at a certain length. What we do when we’re consciously thinking and stirring up all the things that happened before and thinking about the consequences of not playing that shot, is that we cloud that, we stop that instinct from playing.’
Snape’s approach echoes the findings of Dr Peter McLeod, who in 1986 carried out a series of tests at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. Using Peter Willey, Allan Lamb, Wayne Larkins and John Lever as his guinea pigs, McLeod wanted to discover how top-class batsmen were able to react so adeptly in the face of a small round object hurtling towards them in excess of 90 mph. One of his conclusions, as outlined by Tony Francis in The Zen of Cricket, was that professional cricketers had the edge over their amateur counterparts mainly because repetition had turned their reflexes into second nature. ‘It’s conceivable,’ said McLeod, ‘that after years of highly motivated practice the flight of the ball becomes such a predictable and salient stimulus for professional cricketers that it can be handled like information about their own body rather than information from the outside world.’
It is another way of saying that you have to get into a state of mind where analysis gives way to instinct. And this, says Snape, is where cues or triggers come in. Watch top-class batsmen and most of them will have a routine before each delivery. Some are simple: Nick Knight used to touch the peak of his helmet like a village postman; Alec Stewart would twirl his bat as if he were a baton-wielding majorette. Others verge on the realm of obsessive-compulsive: Dermot Reeve seemed to adjust every part of his equipment, with special attention – the Freudians among you will note – paid to his box. The Hampshire wicketkeeper Nic Pothas carries out a series of strange gestures which seem to be based on measuring the distance from one imaginary spot to another. But however certifiable the cue, each has the same goal: to transport the batsman from the analytical to the instinctive without the panic that might otherwise arise in between.
Naturally enough, the fielding side takes great delight in trying to provoke this panic, by fair means or foul. One of Snape’s greatest gifts to the game was the moon ball, an off-break tossed so high that it could easily have been confused with a celestial object. But the other possible etymology works just as well: the moon ball is in the air for so long that it would probably give the bowler enough time to bare his bottom and still take a return catch. Snape used it to great effect while Leicestershire were winning the Twenty20 Cup in 2004 and 2006, and believes it is a good example of staying one step ahead of the batsman. ‘It’s important not to be too caged in by tradition,’ he says. ‘A traditional off-spinner should look to flight the ball at 55 mph in a beautiful parabola just going outside off-stump and hitting middle. But if I do that in Twenty20 cricket, I’m dust. So you’ve got to find something else. And what I quickly worked out was that the best ball in Twenty20 cricket is the opposite of what the batsman’s thinking. So if he’s going to sweep me and he’s predetermining the sweep shot, I’ve got to understand that.’
Staying one step ahead can be taken literally too. ‘Preparation is everything for the bowler, and the batsman is the same,’ says Snape. ‘His preparation phase is me picking the ball up next to the umpire and walking back to my mark. If I go back 10 metres, get my fingers right on the ball, spin it up a few times, scratch my bum, look round at the crowd, do my hair and come in, he’s got enough time to have a very clear thought about what he’s going to do. So why don’t I just stand next to the umpire and bowl? I don’t need any run-up to bowl at my pace, and my action’s strong enough to bowl off a yard. So where’s his thinking time gone? He hasn’t got any. So what’s he more likely to do? Make a clouded judgement. Clouded judgements make you get out, make you choose the wrong options. The more he does that, the more times I win. If you analysed the balls that I bowled, I was one of the worst bowlers in county cricket. But the thinking isn’t.’
In another move that is certain to outrage the purists who regard Twenty20 as the bastard offspring of international cricket’s grubby alliance with the marketing men, Snape explains how it might not be such a bad idea to actually offer the batsman a single. Yes, that’s offer the batsman a single. ‘If the guy’s a good player, he’s a threat. So I think, I’m going to give him one: a full-toss on leg-stump to get him off strike. Now, how many bowlers in one-day cricket have given the bloke a run? But I know that when I bowl at the youngster at the other end and I bring the field in and change the pace at which I’m bowling, he doesn’t play a big shot, so I can bowl a few dots to him, and I’ve gone for not very many off the over.’ And if you think that’s just talk, Snape’s economy rate in the 2006 competition was a shade over six. Since a run a ball over the course of an innings gives you a total of 120 and the average first-innings score that year was roughly 50 more than that, this was pretty outstanding.
He has retired now, but when Snape first played county cricket for Northamptonshire in 1992, he learned about the game over a beer in the bar with the likes of Allan Lamb, Curtly Ambrose, Rob Bailey and David Capel. But the onset of professionalism – showers these days are more likely to come in the form of water than Foster’s lager – and the fashion for ice baths, rub-downs and early nights have led to less time for picking each other’s brains. Snape says all he is doing is filling a gap left by the demise of the end-of-play refresher, even if he has to be careful not to cause players’ eyes to glaze over with too much talk of unconscious incompetence. If it weren’t for the bewildering number of syllables, unconscious incompetence sounds like precisely the sort of insult Merv Hughes might have hurled at Graeme Hick during the 1993 Ashes series. And underpinning everything Snape says is the matter of how to deal with sledging, a subject matter whose obvious appeal to fans keen to get inside the players’ minds has spawned tomes and after-dinner speeches in their hundreds, not to mention the bulk of another chapter later in this book.
Snape says that self-confidence is a vital part of coping with Australian abuse, although he doesn’t say whether this applies to life outside cricket as well. But for anyone who has been heckled with the line ‘here comes the night-watchman’ as they walk out to bat at No. 3 in the baking heat of the lunchtime sun – as I might once have been – the question still remains: how do you block out the barking and prevent it from chipping away at the protective layer which enables you to believe that you really are about to score your maiden hundred? Reassuringly, it has happened to the very best of us, since even Don Bradman may once have fallen victim to a bowler’s taunts. Batting rather slowly at Adelaide against the gentlemanly Gubby Allen, the man who refused to follow Douglas Jardine’s instructions and bowl Bodyline, Bradman was confronted with the not-exactly-withering: ‘Why don’t you have a go at ’em – they won’t give you out!’ He nicked the next ball into his stumps. According to Snape, the key to ignoring the claptrap lies, once more, in those cues: the tics and foibles which help ease any batsman into the frame of mind where only a chemical synapse separates you from that Mark Waugh-like cover-drive.
In some cases, the tics and foibles become ends in themselves. Mark Lathwell was a gloriously gifted opener for Somerset in the early 1990s, but he developed a pathological hatred of the spotlight. ‘Publicity bothers me,’ he told the Guardian journalist David Foot in 1993, the year of his brief elevation to the England side. ‘I simply can’t see why anyone should be interested in me. Maybe I’m subconsciously trying to slow it down. I want to avoid any impression that I’m more important than I am.’ Walking out to open the innings against Australia at Headingley that year, he was told by his partner Mike Atherton: ‘Good luck, the crowd are rooting for you.’ Lathwell’s reply was a masterpiece of self-defeating negativity: ‘They won’t be in a minute when I’m on my way back.’ Foot would later write: ‘Only the unimaginative players escape the tension. Many, whatever their seeming unconcern, retreat into caverns of introspection.’ That day at Headingley Lathwell made a duck.
South Africa’s Daryll Cullinan became so fearful of his encounters with Shane Warne that he sought out a psychotherapist for advice. As Warne put it with typical delicacy in his autobiography: ‘I knew that Daryll was a bit fragile at times, but never imagined he would go to a shrink to learn how to read the googly.’ In fact, the googly was low down the list of Cullinan’s problems, beneath the leg-break, the flipper, the slider, the zooter and presumably – as David Lloyd put it years later – the ‘this-er and the that-er’. As Cullinan took guard in Melbourne in 1997 for his first innings after his consultation, Warne was standing there, tossing the ball from one hand to the other like a coordinated praying mantis. ‘Daryll,’ he crowed, ‘I’ve waited so long for this moment and I’m going to send you straight back to that leather couch.’ The entry on the scorecard reads ‘Cullinan b Warne o’. The situation became so one-sided – Warne would eventually dismiss Cullinan twelve times in international cricket – that before the next Test at Sydney two senior members of the South African side approached Warne and his captain Mark Taylor to ask them to go easy on the verbals with Cullinan. It must have been like telling Warne he couldn’t eat pizza for a year or text anyone on his mobile phone.
Appearances, then, can be everything. Snape chuckles at the memory of his part in England’s one-day tour of India in 2002. ‘I was in a press conference and a Hindustan Times reporter said to me: “They tell us in India you’re a specialist one-day spin bowler. You must have a very clear plan of how you aim to tame the tiger Tendulkar.” I looked at him and nearly laughed. But I had to say, “I’ve got some plans but I’d like to keep them to myself at this stage.” Actually, I hadn’t got a clue.’ It is the modern-day equivalent of the Wilfred Rhodes observation about pitches that may or may not be turning: ‘If the batsman thinks it’s spinnin’, it’s spinnin’.’
The truth is that psychology, even reverse psychology, has been around in one form or another in cricket since the days when W.G. Grace tried to curb the big-hitting instincts of the 6 ft 6 in Australian George Bonnor by calling him – cover your eyes now – a ‘slogger’. To Grace’s delight, Bonnor responded by blocking, only for the Australia captain Billy Murdoch to drop him down the order, saying ‘You are now only a plodder.’ Bonnor responded in turn by begging to return to his normal batting berth, and promptly hammered the bowling all over the place just like old times. Then there’s the time Australia’s 22-year-old batsman Dirk Wellham was nearing a century on Test debut at The Oval in 1981. It was the fourth evening and England, who were up against it, did not want to bat before the close. As Wellham edged through the nineties, Ian Botham urged him on. ‘Don’t give it away now, Dirk. You’ve done all the hard work, Dirk. Just a few more runs, Dirk.’ Wellham got his head down and spent twenty-five minutes on 99 before reaching three figures. His caution, thanks in part to Botham’s cunning, meant Australia were unable to declare that night, and England finished the final day seven wickets down. QED.
England’s captain that year was Mike Brearley, who tells a nice story in his mini-epic The Art of Captaincy about Derek Randall, an England colleague who on this occasion was playing in a county match for Nottinghamshire against Brearley’s Middlesex. Randall was a hopelessly nervy starter, and the morning after he and Brearley had discussed the very topic, he hooked his second ball straight to Phil Edmonds at deep square-leg. Brearley then spent the night before Randall’s second innings at Randall’s house, and teased him on the way into the ground the next day about which ball the bouncer would be. Again, it was the second one. Again, Randall was caught on the boundary to complete one of the game’s most glorious pairs.
The tale backs up one of Snape’s more surprising contentions. ‘I wasn’t a great cricketer, but I’d say I was probably dismissed [by the skill of the bowler] ten times in my whole career. I’d hate to think how many times I got out, but it was a lot more than ten. There were thousands of times where I just thought the wrong thing at the wrong moment, or tried to play a too high-risk shot, or he’s moved so I’ll try to hit it there, or this bloke’s going to bowl a good ball in a minute. Well, if you think that, you’re out. It wasn’t a good ball: you made it into a good ball.’
I once played in a friendly match for Wisden – the other matches in my career have, naturally, all been life-or-death affairs – against a team led by a wily 50-year-old who bowled that brand of darting off-spin which was the basis of John Emburey’s entire Test career. Honed, presumably, through years of trying to keep youngish whippersnappers like myself quiet and driven by the obsessive desire not to give away a single run as if his mortgage depended on it, he would nag away like a broken tap. In case this gives the impression of permanence at the crease, I should add that I hit the old codger for a single boundary. And, yes, it was with a turn of the wrists through square-leg. ‘He’s aiming everything to leg,’ he declared with enough venom and volume to suggest that he was personally affronted by my decision not to score exclusively on the off-side. But – and I write this with a hanging head, so please excuse any typing errors – the tactic worked. In the next over I tried to hit their left-arm seamer straight back past him and lost my middle stump. I glanced over at C. Odger esq., but he was already plotting the downfall of our next batsman. Outpsyched and ignored. It was quite a double.
To move from the ridiculous to the slightly less so, Don Bradman used to say that he never even considered the possibility of getting out. That’s all very well if you spent your childhood hitting a golf ball against a water tank with a stump, but he had a point. Steve James had an even simpler one when I asked him about batsmen allowing their concerns to affect their game. ‘So many batsmen worry too much about their technical aspects,’ he said. ‘And a lot of players don’t watch the ball. They just look in the general direction, because they’re so busy worrying about technical issues. I didn’t watch the ball properly for the first five years of my career, until someone – I think it was my Glamorgan team-mate Adrian Dale – asked me whether I was. I said, “Yeah, of course I do.” But when I went away and thought about it, I knew I wasn’t.’
I realise I have concentrated mainly on batsmen here, but then batsmen are the ones faced with the more taxing existential problem: one mistake, and they’re a goner. Bowlers can make a whole host of errors and still end up with five wickets. Conversely, they can become overwhelmed by the knowledge that it is their job to place the ball in the business area of the pitch. The result is the yips, an affliction that more commonly affects golfers on the putting green or journalist with a round to buy. But generally bowlers are not subjected to attempts by batsmen to put them off. The obstacle, if there is one, comes purely from within. Scott Boswell, a jobbing seam bowler for Leicestershire, famously fell to pieces during the 2001 Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy final against Somerset at Lord’s. To the undisguised mirth of one or two of his team-mates, he bowled eight wides in his second over and was immediately removed from the attack. Reduced to a gibbering wreck, he played his last game for the county a fortnight later, when the single over he sent down cost 18 runs. Boswell had forgotten how to do what should have come naturally to him.
Of course, there is another way of dealing with nerves, and it inhabits the opposite end of the mental spectrum from psychology. Richard Dawkins calls it the God Delusion, but I wonder whether he might question his ultra-atheism if his job as Oxford University’s Professor of the Public Understanding of Science depended on him keeping out an over of leg-breaks and googlies from Mushtaq Ahmed. The role of religion in English cricket was never more explicit than when Sussex won the county championship in 2006 – their second triumph in four seasons – and their captain, Chris Adams, publicly thanked Allah for His contribution to their success. Adams was referring to Mushtaq’s Muslim faith which, according to Mushy himself, helped him take 102 championship wickets that season at under 20 apiece. It might irk some to see Christian sportsmen crossing themselves or Muslims, such as Mohammad Yousuf, a convert from Christianity, kissing the ground. After all, why should God/Allah/Richie Benaud care about a batsman’s average or a bowler’s strike rate? But when I went to visit Mushtaq in his Brighton home in 2006, I was struck by the extent to which belief in the Almighty can be as useful to a cricketer as belief in unconscious competence.
‘I ask God to help me and pray five times a day, and that helps me become a calm person and not worry about the results,’ said Mushtaq. ‘Since I’ve been into religion, it has helped my game big time. As a sportsman, it helps to remind you that your personality will be the same if you get five wickets or none for 200. It’s about the bigger picture. I’m happy I can run, I’m happy I’ve got two arms, I’m happy I can see, and talk. I remember these things rather than what will happen if I don’t bowl well tomorrow and we lose, and all the expectation on my shoulders and how I’m going to let people down. With religion, your personality stays very stable because God gives you coolness and calmness. He allows you to stay the same and not worry about the result.’
If, like Dawkins, you regard this kind of thinking as an insult to evidence-based rationality, then you are probably seething at the suggestion that Allah was instrumental in Sussex’s success. But if one of the benefits of a belief in God is to maintain a perspective – one that allows you to see cricket for what it is – then you will agree that Mushtaq might just be on to something. It doesn’t matter whether Mushtaq is right or wrong about the existence of Allah. What matters is that he believes he is right: and it is that belief which is the source of his strength. It is a more profound kind of psychology – with the added bonus of being relevant once the cricket is over for the day. And possibly to the after-life too.
In fact Mushtaq, in the years before he turned to Islam, was also open to the idea of a more secular approach to the psychology of sport. He told me about the time Pakistan were sorting out their game plan for the 1992 World Cup final against England. They had made a shocking start to the tournament and would have been knocked out if rain had not intervened after England had dismissed them for 74 at Adelaide. But their captain, Imran Khan, had exhorted his side to ‘fight like cornered tigers’ (the kind of instruction that would have been met with strange looks in a county dressing room), and now he worked his magic on his No. 1 leg-spinner.
‘In the meeting we discussed Graeme Hick,’ says Mushtaq. ‘He was the in-form batsman. He was dangerous and everyone was worried about him because he can smash you any time. Imran Khan said to me in the meeting, “Mushy, if Graeme Hick comes to the crease, you make sure you bowl to him.” I said, “Hang on, the guy who has been the cleanest hitter of the ball – and he can hit a long way – and I’m bowling to him!” But the way Imran said it, I could see the passion in his eyes. He was telling me I was the guy who’s responsible to get him out. That makes my imagination go! Before the World Cup final I was imagining getting him out. I’m lying down in my hotel room, imagining if I bowl two leg-breaks, then I bowl a straight one, then I bowl a wrong ’un, maybe he can try to play a drive and go through the gate and I can bowl him and we can win the World Cup. And it happened. It was the highlight of my career.’
Back, one last time, to Snape. ‘I did an interview with Glenn McGrath that I show in my consultancy. I started off by saying, “So you don’t use a sports psychologist”, and he said, “No mate, that’s bullshit.” For the next twenty minutes he told me everything about his elite performance, and it was all deeply seated in sports psychology. It was fascinating, and he came out with a quote: “The transition from first-class to international cricket is 90–100 per cent mental.” The interesting thing for me was that one day I was playing for the Gloucester team and we were doing quite well. We’d get a few spectators in and I’d do OK and that’s great. And the next month you’re playing in front of 120,000 in India. No one’s given me a magic stick and said, “There you go, there’s all your wealth of talent and experience, go out and enjoy yourself.” I’m the same bloke who was bowling at a cone in the indoor nets in Bristol when it was pissing down with rain two weeks ago to try to simulate the atmosphere.’
The answer, though it pains me to say it, lies within. And it lies in the ability to empty the mind of all bar the essential. George Headley once told C.L.R. James: ‘When I am walking down the pavilion steps, going in to bat, if I met my father I wouldn’t recognise him. And once I am at the wicket I am concerned with nothing else but seeing the ball from the bowler’s hand . . .’ David Steele told Tony Francis that the secret of his success against the 1975 Australians was that ‘Once I took guard I was in a world of my own. It’s the best I’ve ever felt mentally. Time didn’t mean anything.’ And in case you think this is a case of a cricketer talking out of his backside, here’s the answer Pete Sampras gave to a journalist who asked him what was going through his mind when he closed out the 1999 Wimbledon final with a second-serve ace against Andre Agassi: ‘There was absolutely nothing going through my mind.’ Sometimes the truth can be tediously simple. But then sport contains more rudimentary emotions than people care to admit, especially when England are playing Australia . . .