During the recess, after the morning session, I spent an hour chatting with the kids. I found that some of them are from very small towns and villages, but some others are from the bigger cities and have had some formal training.
These kids spoke of how the coaching they had thus far followed a pattern-- you jog around the grounds, and then you get into the nets and either bat or bowl. From what I saw today, you guys are not giving the kids much in the way of cricket practice, as we traditionally understand it. So how does this method of yours work?
GREG: Yes well, that is how the national team trains, too, or used to. The point to what we are doing is to give the kids a basic understanding of what the game of cricket is all about. Ian plays little games with them, we've got puzzles they have to solve. Cricket is a game of solving problems. The bowler creates a problem every time he bowls, and you have to find an answer to it, real quick, you don't have time to go away and phone a friend.
You have to solve these problems in fractions of a second, and you can do that only if you have confidence in your decision-making abilities. So we are giving them a whole range of experiences where they have to make a decision, and make it quick.
We make them do things they have never done before. Most of them have never skipped before, or juggled before; we did a cookout where the kids, in two groups, had to make a meal, and cooking is something they have never done before. Each time, what they face is a challenge, a problem, and they have to find their own answers.
Traditional coaching centers around batting and bowling, but there is no attention paid to the nuances of the game. There is not much about recognizing patterns, understanding angles. A bowler can spend an hour in the nets, but where in there is any sense of what he has to do out in the field?
On the field, the bowling he does is actually muscle memory. What he needs to do is solve problems: What are the conditions like and how can they best aid my bowling? If I bowl in this particular fashion, what options are available to a batsman, and how do I block those? All of this is a big part of the game, and you don't learn that in the nets.
And then there is the fielding. As Ian was telling the group, if you don't love fielding, you have to find a new game, because the nature of the game is such that you have to spend more time fielding, than you ever will batting or bowling.
Even Don Bradman spent three times as much time on the field, as he did at the batting crease, and if he didn't enjoy the work he put in on the field, he wouldn't have been the cricketer he was.
IAN: During my time I have spent time with the great players; I spent lots of time first with Gary Sobers and then with Greg, and what I realized is that great players understand the big picture of the game. They are able to see the game as a whole, see the patterns, the relationships-- and they learn to spot these patterns and to influence them.
We have gotten away from teaching the game as a whole, unfortunately; we have become very reductionist, we break things down into very small pieces. And that takes you into Humpty Dumpty territory-- you can train the hell out of these little pieces, but you don't learn how to put those pieces together when you need to.
If you did math at school, and if you didn't get the concepts, you likely never got your sums right. You can't practice addition by going on adding numbers, for instance, like hitting balls in the nets endlessly. You had to understand the concept of addition, and then you could just do it, no matter what numbers you were presented with.
GREG: That is how the brain works by the way, and that is something we have looked at very seriously over the past few years. We had a fellow called Charles Krebbs who we introduced to India, and everyone pooh-poohed the idea, but Charles is an expert in the field, one of the few in the world in his line. He has done considerable work on how the brain recognizes and solves problems, understands patterns and recognizes them.
Bradman understood it better than anyone else. There are certain things you have control over and certain other things you have no control over, and you need to learn to focus on the things you can control. And when you get better at them, you actually change the odds on the things you have no control over.
For instance, as a batsman, you have no control over the field the rival captain sets for you, or even for the line the bowler bowls. If you watch Bradman's innings, you realize he understood about manipulating the field, and so did Sobers.
Brian Lara learnt to recognize patterns in play, and to identify periods when you could spurt, score runs very fast - and in doing that, you transferred pressure on the opposition and you began to control the game.
I can think of other players, including some we worked with recently, who have no idea of that, and this is why they never became the players they should have become. So a lot about what we are trying to do with these kids is subliminally if you like, because you can't teach it, showing them how cricket is a game of patterns, and teaching them how to recognize those patterns, and influence them.
In conventional coaching, you put kids into the nets and you say okay, this kid can bat, that kid can bowl. But you will notice how so many talented kids fall away, once they enter the competitive phase, while some other kids go on, evolve, develop through their careers.
Why is that?
The trick to spotting talent is right there. It is never about the best kids in the nets. We have already seen with the first two groups here, at the start of the program you think you know who the best kids are, but halfway through the program, others have developed faster and run past who we thought were the best kids. And this is because the kids who make the running are the ones with open minds, kids who are prepared to take risks, put themselves on the line.
IAN: Another thing we learn in sport is you cannot know just by looking if the tank is full or nearly empty. Look at it this way-- you see a young kid and he is batting just great. You can recognize that. But how do you figure if he is running on a nearly empty tank, in the sense that he has already reached close to his peak and there is only so much more he can develop?
Against that, there is this other kid, he seems okay, so-so, but he might have a full tank in him, in the sense he has tremendous scope to improve. On balance, the second kid has more potential than the first, but it is not something you can spot in a net session.
I think that is the thing about Greg that I realized from working with him. Anyone with knowledge of the game can look at a dozen kids playing cricket and say, okay, this kid is good, that one is okay, this one is no good. What you are saying is, this kid is good today. What you do not know is, has he reached his limit, is his tank empty, or does he have enough under the hood to go on and become even better tomorrow?
The challenge is not to pick just talent, but potential. That is the key to picking talent, you don't pick the talent of today, but the potential of tomorrow, and Greg I have found is good at that, at picking kids who have the things that could be expanded on.
The top coaches in most sports are good at that. I spent time with Sobers and he had that ability too. He could look at someone and say, okay, this kid has the potential to become someone, where an ordinary coach will point to a kid and say, look how good he is today.
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