I remember when I was in school, the head of the physical education department was frustrated with me. He once told me that I had an instinctive aptitude for sport, cricket, badminton, soccer, whatever; that I would very quickly learn it, become socially good at it, even go on to play it competitively-- but that I would equally quickly hit a plateau, beyond which I would likely never grow.
I shrugged it off then, but now I wonder if this is what you were talking about empty tanks? My sporting tank had a very limited capacity, say?
GREG: Absolutely, that is exactly what we are talking about.
IAN: That describes what we are talking about perfectly. Everyone hits a plateau. I know I did, I am sure Greg did, I am sure every cricketer hits a plateau at some point; some hit it early and some hit it late but we all hit it. The great players are the ones who can go beyond that plateau.
And to do that, it is not so much about learning new skills, for instance, when you were playing cricket, and came to where you hit your plateau, it was not about discovering new strokes to practice. It was about stepping back, learning the patterns of the game, learning to recognize them and to influence them.
That is what the great players are about; that is how they overcome their plateau; I would say you didn't go that route or get led down that route, and so you remained on your plateau. Basically, you learn a game twice: the first time you are learning it for the first time; then you come to where you become decent at it but seem unable to go beyond that, which is when you have to be able to step back, and learn it all over again.
GREG: in international sport, everyone reaches to the top largely on the basis of what we call natural ability. But the ones who survive and prosper are the ones who learn the new game. There are two games, the outer game and the inner game, and the ones who prosper are the ones who learn the inner game.
The good players train the basics better than anyone else, and apply better than anyone else, and the ones who are talented but lazy, the ones who don't want to do the hard work but are always looking for short cuts-- I could name you a half dozen players in the Indian team that are that way, always trying to find short cuts-- fail to understand that the point is you cannot survive on short cuts.
The point of it all is, there are no short cuts, no matter what endeavor you chose, journalism, business, sports, whatever. There is you with your intrinsic abilities, there is the goal you want to get to, and there is a process that bridges that gap, a process to being successful. And the people who succeed recognize the process early enough, and focus on it.
IAN: Look at Bradman, he only played five games of organized cricket before the age of 18. Think about it, just five games. But he did a lot of the training, with a golf ball and a stump against the wall. You talk to the great players and you find you have to go beyond the physical to become a great player, in terms of the whole visual side of this game, and you will find that the great players start out very physical but by the end of their careers, they are very cerebral.
In fact, they find that to train more is a hindrance.
The great players have been involved in the game more than the average player. I can talk from my own experience, which in a sense is like yours-- you hit a block and didn't go further, and there were too many stoppers in the way for me to go beyond those blocks too. You have to get past those blockages when you are younger. If you identify this only midway through your career, or even later, it is just too late for you. My tank was empty at that point, when I was 19 or so.
I spoke to Brian Lara once, I asked him why are you a great player? He said it was because he had taught himself to make runs, no matter what the situation was or who he was playing against. He did that by recognizing patterns, learning to anticipate them and therefore influence them.
Why is Wayne Gretsky a great hockey player? Because, as he once told me, he doesn't go to the puck, he goes to where the puck is going to be. That goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about getting to where you can instinctively recognize patterns-- what some call reading the game.
The great players read the game, not just the game being played out but the emerging patterns, the way the game is going to go, and they intercept the game at that future point, shape it the way they want it to go.
GREG: The thing that India needs to understand is that you cannot teach this. The emphasis on coaching in India is generally in the wrong area. You could bring Don Bradman back to life, and he couldn't teach a kid to play cricket.
IAN: He says so in his book. He says I can't teach you, what I can do is be a friend and talk to you. Fascinating, it was in 1934 that he wrote that, in his book How to Play Cricket.
GREG: And he was right, what you can do is not teach but inspire, guide, be a friend; a coach can give you the confidence to understand your own skills, and the patterns of the game, and to use those skills to influence those patterns. What we are aiming to do with this academy is to create an inspiring environment, where the kids who are likely to prosper will prosper.
I can't each someone to play cricket. I can't take a kid who has never played cricket and turn him into a cricketer. What I can do with the help of people like Ian and others is to create an environment where someone who has a love for the game, a passion for the game, has some basic abilities, some basic skills, is athletic, can learn to play the game better than most.
The modern game demands athleticism. We will be looking at a lot of young kids over the next few months, and the first thing we are looking for is athleticism. The second thing we are looking for is a passion for the game. The third thing is coachability, an ability to learn, because they have to learn for themselves.
When we finish with them after two weeks, they will go home, and one of the reasons we-- Lalit has almost a state of the art gym in that academy and we haven't even been in the door, and that is because these kids don't have access to that sort of stuff when they go back to their village or their town.
So we have tried to create an environment that is very basic; any of the exercises you saw this afternoon, they can do those anywhere. You don't need fancy equipment, you need trees, you can climb over things-- a lot of contemporary research is telling us that the exercise you do in a gym is useless.
What we will see out of this program is that these kids will go away after two weeks, and we will bring them back after a couple of months, and we will see who has done the work and who has improved on his own and who has not.
Thing is, you could pick out a kid, say he is the best cricketer in the group right now. But if he doesn't do anything over the next couple of months, there will be ten kids who will run past him. And quite honestly, we are not looking for him, for this kid who is good today-- we are looking for the ten kids who will run past him tomorrow.
There is no sense to just taking these boys and teaching them to play cricket, teaching them to bat and bowl. It will not work, it has never worked in the history of the game, it doesn't work in any other sport, in any other endeavor.
You pick the best guys, the champions, go as far back as you like in any sport you like or any endeavor you like, and you will find it came from their creativity. It didn't come from a book, it didn't come from someone sitting them down and saying this is how you become a genius, it came from their own imagination, and we are looking for kids who have an imagination.
IAN: And the good bit is, we have very good raw material to work with. The kids have been impressive, and at the academy here, the coaches I have come across, in various disciplines, I would say are as good as any in the world.
GREG: We spent some time at the Australian Institute of Sport before we came here, and I can tell you I didn't see anything as impressive as some of these coaches at the RCA complex. The coaches in Australia are caught up in the science of it; what the blokes are good at is they have lived in the environment, the boxing coach is a boxer, he has trained a whole bunch of boxers and worked with a whole bunch of other boxers, and he has worked out the practical side of it, he has figured out what works and what doesn't, and he has brought much of this knowledge to the table, when he worked with the kids in the two groups we have already handled.
You know, that bit I told you about encouraging kids to work things out, to solve problems for themselves. Look at Dennis Lillee, in the first half of his career he just ran in and bowled as fast as he could, it took some years and an injury that almost crippled him before he realized that the trick to this was not speed, but to bowl in the danger zone all the time.
Once he solved that problem, he became twice the bowler. Good balls, good overs, good spells is what it is all about, it is not about running in hoping to bowl the occasional magic ball.
IAN: Actually, think of Dennis and think of some other bowlers who were faster than him but not a fraction as successful. What was the difference? It was just that Dennis went to the next level, took his game to the next level. It is something that clicks in your brain, provided you are willing to think things through, to stop pretending that it is all about going out there and playing by instinct and natural skill.
Fair enough, but I don't see how a coach can stand outside of me and make that happen...
IAN: No, but the coach can provide the atmosphere for that to happen. For instance, all sport is about patterns and cricket is no exception. Those young kids out there, they are all about going out there and hitting the ball or bowling the ball, and that is important but that is just the first level. Now if you can teach them, without boring the hell out of them, that cricket is about patterns, if you can teach them to recognize those patterns, they will go to the next level.
But if you are constantly keeping them in the level they are at, through constant nets and things, they will play their entire lives with maybe decent personal skills, but without ever learning to put the game together. And the thing about the great cricketers is they put the game of cricket together, they become experts in their domain, they have learnt that these are the patterns that will occur, and they are actually influencing the patterns of the game, because they have learnt to recognize them ahead of time, and that anticipation allows them to preempt those patterns.
We can as coaches have an impact, as long as we are teaching the bigger picture of the game.
GREG: Everybody in their career comes to what one guy called the tipping point. You got to it when your coach said that to you. That is when you were at the tipping point. You had the choice-- you could accept what the coach said, shrug, and say what the hell, he has a point, I will only be this good at it and never better so no point wasting my time.
Or you could say the hell with you, coach, I am going to do better than you think I can. But if you want to go down that second road, you better believe that it is long and it is hard, it is a grind and it is not for the faint hearted. You have to find your own reason for doing that, you have to find your own fuel, and you have to it on your own. The best coaches will provide the environment for you to do it in, they will even point to the path, but you have to walk it alone.
IAN: I would say that our entire program can be understood through three quotes. The first is from Dr Barry Bloom, a renowned expertise researcher, who said "We went looking for exceptional youngsters, but what we found for talent identification success was exceptional conditions."
The second is from Forbes Carlile, the legendary Australian swimming coach and sports scientist. He said "Our aim is not to produce champions, but to create an atmosphere where champions are inevitable."
3. Bela Karolyi, who has coached Nadia Comaneci, Mary Lou Retton and other champion gymnasts, said his secret was "Create an environment where every participant is treated like a star-- and stars will be the outcome."
We are working, here, to create that kind of an environment; it is early days yet and we still have some environmental pieces that we need to put in place before what Malcolm Gladwill called the "tipping point" kicks in-- but it will happen and when it does, look out India!
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