The mind games have already begun. Harbhajan has fired the first real salvo targeting an individual: Bradley George Hogg!! As an isolated act, it sounds pretty cute. Here is a finger spinner who has not been among as many wickets as he would like, but before he is picked out by the Aussies as the fall guy in the visiting party, he goes ahead and dishes out a bit of Australian pie in anticipation!!
I was and still am a firm believer in the futility of mental disintegration which is almost doctrinal in the cricketing fraternity in Australia. This doctrine was first brought out of the closet in its cheapest form by Mr. Steven Waugh who, if truth be told, would have had a lot more success as an army strategist than he had as a captain. His success as captain had more to do with his team of Galacticos and feeble opponents than with his purported nous as captain and master strategist. Nevertheless, his techniques, especially the doctrine of mental disintegration (which was given full support by the Psych. arm of the ACB for obvious reasons!!), rode on the success of the Australian cricket team and rose up the pecking order of mandatory skills to be possessed by a cricket team.
Teams all over the world fell for this ruse. They started giving credibility to tactics like sledging by following the Australians. Let me quickly add that on-field verbal exchanges have been a part of cricket and most other sports since their inception. However, accepting them as a necessary skill in a cricketer's armoury is not only ludicrous but shameful too.
In cricket, like any other sport, there is an internal locus of control and a much bigger external locus of control. A sportsman can perform tasks in his locus to the best of his ability. Nothing more, nothing less. Out in the middle, every great batsman will tell you to let the instincts take over. It is quite the reverse of mind over matter, yet, it is necessary and true. Steve Waugh might disagree, but we all know where he was rated on Mr. Warne's hall of fame!!
I was and still am a firm believer in the futility of mental disintegration which is almost doctrinal in the cricketing fraternity in Australia. This doctrine was first brought out of the closet in its cheapest form by Mr. Steven Waugh who, if truth be told, would have had a lot more success as an army strategist than he had as a captain. His success as captain had more to do with his team of Galacticos and feeble opponents than with his purported nous as captain and master strategist. Nevertheless, his techniques, especially the doctrine of mental disintegration (which was given full support by the Psych. arm of the ACB for obvious reasons!!), rode on the success of the Australian cricket team and rose up the pecking order of mandatory skills to be possessed by a cricket team.
Teams all over the world fell for this ruse. They started giving credibility to tactics like sledging by following the Australians. Let me quickly add that on-field verbal exchanges have been a part of cricket and most other sports since their inception. However, accepting them as a necessary skill in a cricketer's armoury is not only ludicrous but shameful too.
In cricket, like any other sport, there is an internal locus of control and a much bigger external locus of control. A sportsman can perform tasks in his locus to the best of his ability. Nothing more, nothing less. Out in the middle, every great batsman will tell you to let the instincts take over. It is quite the reverse of mind over matter, yet, it is necessary and true. Steve Waugh might disagree, but we all know where he was rated on Mr. Warne's hall of fame!!
1 comment:
The hallmark of a good cricket team is to not succumb to "externalities" like sledging. For long, the Aussies have only given. But when they were given a taste of their own medicine, it wasn't a pretty sight. Remember the on-field conversation between Sarwan and McGrath some years ago? McGrath started it, but then got all het up when Sarwan finished it for him. I agree the conversation was not what you might call "polite" but then hey... it was meant to provoke and it did.
Call me old-fashioned- but I still prefer my cricket to be a contest between he guile of the bowler and the batter's ability.
Steve Waugh's success as captain had as much to do with the team he inherited as with his shrewd cricketing brain (not to be under estimated). In my book, more credit to Border for painstakingly building a team that constantly improved on its performance. Not an easy task given the tatters the Australian cricket team was in in the early/mid 1980s after the Kim Hughes era.
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