Ramprakash and the Bad Old Days

To them who wait.

Mark Ramprakash is my direct contemporary, born in the fabulous late-60s sunshine and condemned to make his entry onto the scene in the dog days of the early ’90s.

Now he has found second wind, and may be looking at a late-life call-up to the England Test team after many seasons of superb county form. He is Wisden Cricketer of the Year, and the pride of my nameless, featureless generation.

So what happened, Mark?

You have to remember just how grim the early ’90s were. For Mark, that grimness was compounded by his having come forward at a time when English cricket had far less idea than they have now of how to run an international team.

Ramprakash made his Test debut young, aged 21, famously in the same match as the Le Tissier of cricket, Graeme Hick. Both men made the same score in the first as in the second innings - Hick 6, twice, and Ramps 27, twice. Ideally, a player of that age who is clearly up to standard is given time to bed himself in, in the Australian fashion, form giving way to substance.

Not a bit of it. He was dropped after eight matches, 15 innings and 241 runs. It would take him another four years to double his appearances.

This is, of course, precisely the wrong way to introduce bright young talent to the top of the game. It is, however, a good way to kill confidence, sow doubt and extinguish potential. There would be good Test days ahead for Ramprakash, especially in two series against the Windies and Australia, but we’d have to wait until 1997-8 and 1998-9 for that.

Ramprakash paid for arriving at a time when things were bad in English cricket, but not bad enough. How he’d have loved to be 21 now and breaking into a proper England Test team with some experience and genuine cricketing success under its belt.

But 1991 England was a mixed bag - Gooch at his peak, a captain leading by constant example, making up for lost time; the young Michael Atherton, showing signs of the mental strength that he would need in spades later on; Robin Smith and, sometimes, Botham, left over from the 1985 Ashes team; Lewis, Defreitas and Lawrence bowling. It doesn’t look bad, looking back, but how often it wasn’t good enough.

Above all, it wasn’t a side that could do without developing Ramprakash. England had a deserved reputation at the time for cliquey, unfriendly dressing rooms and changing, inconsistent management. Whatever else has changed since 1991, that has.

English sportsmen still have to master the art of continuous top-level performance. Both the rugby and cricket teams went into steep decline after their respective triumphs, and the very recent return to grace of the rugby men is welcome but not before time. If Ramprakash is restored - and restoration should be the word here - let it be part of a return for our cricketers too.

Fear and the Fast Bowler

Experimental psychology is obsessed with fear. In purely scientific terms, rightly so: it’s easy to create under controlled conditions, which many other important feelings and emotions aren’t. Although they’re improving quickly, neuroscience’s tools of measurement are still almost unbearably crude. We need to restrict ourselves to what we have reasonable access to for the time being.

My subjective opinion of fear is that it isn’t one of the true core feelings or emotions - at least not in human beings. In lizards or smaller mammals, perhaps, but not people. Human metacognitions around fear contain deeper layers that directly influence our conscious experience of it.

Here’s what I mean. Most of us would agree that a phobia, properly understood, contains at least three crude elements. There’s the thing itself - snakes, spiders, heights, needles, rats, mice, public speaking - that inspires those astonishingly strong emotions in the sufferer, amongst which are shades of fear. There’s the sufferer’s intellectual opinion about whether or not the thing itself is really as threatening as it feels (usually, they’ll not think whatever it is threatening - but they’ll avoid it all they can, of course). Then there’s the sufferer’s opinion of themselves on account of having that emotional reaction to something they “know” isn’t so dangerous (usually, they’ll feel contempt towards themselves on the issue, guilty, ashamed, secretive about it).

Just as an aside, I think this is where some contemporary research on phobia goes wrong. It isn’t really about having a bad experience and learning how to avoid that in future. If your window was blown in during a gale, narrowly missing you as you came into the room, you may feel uneasy beside windows in strong winds and keep a safe distance. That uneasiness does not have the violent, irrational, uncontrollable traits of phobia. You’ll act on it, but it won’t spoil your life. Nor does it spread and deepen. It’s more likely to fade somewhat, once you’ve learned what you need from it. Phobia isn’t like that. I have had people consult me for phobias of mice, say, that were beginning to extend mysteriously to squirrels, the feelings around the issue mounting week by week until it became unsafe to open a magazine or turn on the television in case mice, rats, squirrels should come on screen. The garden wasn’t safe, nor was London Underground. Sometimes I have had to guess the subject of the phobia, because the sufferer is afraid that even mentioning it will trigger out of control feelings in them. In almost all cases of phobias I come across, the “traumatic triggering episode” is absent. Fear - caution - can be learned, and in fact, must be learned, as how else are you going to know not to put your hand into a gas flame? But what you learn is care, caution and avoidance. Phobia as I meet it in my consulting room is on a totally different scale and has a different flavour altogether.

So, you have a feeling in response to some kind of environmental stimulus, and you have an opinion about whether that response is appropriate and socially accepted, and you have an opinion about yourself with regard to your feelings in response - would a proper person react in this way?

What if the environmental stimulus was Jeff Thomson?

Lancashire batsman David Lloyd averaged 42.46 in his 9 test matches for England, including a fine 214 against India in the second test in 1974. Lloyd was and is an enthusiastic and loyal man with a strong sense of duty. Captain of his county and capable of coaching England, Lloyd was a notably brave close fielder.

The 1974-5 Ashes tour of Australia was a disaster for England. Lloyd’s Test career was ended there, shattered by the heart-line bowling of Lillee and the rookie Thomson. Mike Denness was captain that year, and remembered Lloyd returning to the dressing room after a bad time in the middle:

Within seconds, the whole of his body was quivering. His neck and the top half of his body, in particular, were shaking. He was shell-shocked, suffering from the effects of never having to move around so quickly in all his life.

Not quite shell-shock: if you want to know what real shell-shock looks like, visit this site and search under “neuroses”. But it doesn’t take much imagination to work out what might have been going through Lloyd’s mind.

He’d gotten through something genuinely alarming and frightening. Or was it? His colleagues wouldn’t tell him. Had he done well in the circumstances, had he done badly, what was the right way to behave, the right way to think about what he’d been through? Is it OK to be scared, or is that a mark of weakness? Am I alright with everyone? Have I let my country down here? Tradition demanded that he treat it as water off a duck’s back, but there at the back of his mind was the sense that he might have been really badly hurt.

It used to be said that the lack of acknowledgement of our experiences and feelings from other people made it difficult for us to properly process them ourselves in conscious terms. Many of my clients find the simple experience of being listened to stunning, almost frightening, and they don’t trust it, expecting it all to go away in a minute as it always has done in the past. Realising, finally, that it isn’t going to go away this time, that I mean it, that it’s for real, makes it safe for people to acknowledge experiences, feelings and emotions, not so much to me, but to themselves - and they can finally process it all, see how it fits into the hitherto distorted story of their lives. The discovery of “mirror neurons” - neurons which fire, not just when we do something, but when we see someone else do that same something (think “monkey see, monkey do”) leads me to wonder, completely off the cuff, whether that lack of acknowledgement creates a genuine neurological conflict. A genuine neurological conflict that might be between the amygdala and the consequences of activity in mirror neurons, that’s experienced as a classic emotional conflict that exhibits physically, in shaking. The amygdala demands one reaction: the mirror neurons, reading the behaviour of people around us, demand a different one. But that is off the cuff, and almost unbearably crude, and almost certainly not what’s going on. I’m excited by the prospect of a better, well-grounded explanation though.

1968: My Year

It’s tax return day, so this is merely a reflection in video on some of the sporting events of the year I was born: 1968.

It was an Olympic year - Mexico’s:

It was a good year for Manchester United, too:

Jackie Stewart beat Graham Hill in the German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring in the most astonishing conditions:

It was a year that allowed you around Le Mans with Stirling Moss in a Ford GT40:

Here’s the actual race:

It was a good year in aerosport, too:

But that wasn’t a patch on the cricket:

The year saw the sad death of Jim Clark at Hockenheim:

And the boxer Jess Willard passed away. Here he is knocking out Jack Johnson:

Sport Changing Over Time IV

By the first years of the twentieth century, the sporting world we’re now familiar with had all but taken shape: the whig historian of sport would peer through the Edwardian era much as he/she would a telescope struggling to come into focus. The non-whig, correctly in my opinion, would regard the sporting forms of the era as sufficient unto themselves. And indeed, much of the criticism of the Football Association operates in whiggish hindsight. The FA’s “failure” to “respond”, let alone facilitate, the “development” of the game abroad in the first three decades of the century is exaggerated. The English did seed the game abroad - they did so as individuals; no sport had ever spread in any other way up until then, and centralized action from the FA would have been not only innovative but politically revoluntionary. The FA’s attitude to the World Cup has to be seen in the context of two and a half decades of astonishingly easy victories for England over continental opposition: where, you might ask, were the signs that football would ever become a serious, properly organised sport outside of the United Kingdom? England’s first defeat to continental opposition didn’t come until 1929, where they lost 4-3 to Spain in Madrid. The game came at the end of the domestic season, and the England side had had to claw their way across Europe by train from other fixtures in France and Belgium, a much more severe journey then than now. Rumours of hangovers amongst the English players on that day persist. Two years later, England would win the return game 7-1. But this is a larger question, worthy of a book to itself.

Putting Butterfieldian prejudice to one side, we can still take interest in features of sporting development at this time and seek to understand them.

Let’s return to the Crystal Palace and Bradford City’s 1911 FA Cup triumph. Here’s a series of thumbnails (click for a larger image) of the kick-off.

In the modern game, the side kicking-off will have two, at the most three, players level with the halfway line, and, having satisfied the letter of the law by nudging the ball forward, will then move it back into their own half in the interests of retaining possession.

Here, Newcastle have at least five men forward - one on each wing, and three in the centre circle. Here’s what they do next:

Off goes the winger! And then:-

Ignore that spectator who has moved into the camera’s line of sight (that doesn’t happen on Match of the Day, does it?). Notice how two of the central forwards have also begun galloping forward. Two seconds after kick-off, then, we are left with this:

I’m reminded of rugby by all this - and in 1911, the games had only been separated for 50 years: many, many men still played both, and clubs would field sides in both codes (and cricket in the summer). But that comparison might be false: five men up front was to remain the norm into the 1960s.

I’ve been “watching” a lot of Edwardian and Georgian games frame-by-frame recently, and although there’s only so much one can gather from such short, low-quality clips, I can’t help concluding that Chapman’s views on the subtlety and skill of the Edwardian game are borne out. Like today’s game, in Britain at least, it’s fast, exciting stuff, and I find myself envious of the long-dead crowd who got to see the whole thing. There are plenty of good touches; there are body-swerves (so much for Jimmy Hogan’s view that he invented the swerve); the game is played on the ground no less than today, and relatively few passes go astray. It was good, in short, and I don’t think the British game has come a great way since then.

Switching attention to cricket, now, let’s go to Old Trafford. It’s 1901. The next two thumbnails are for Mark Holland. Sometimes, it DOES feel like a long time ago. Watch that train in the background as the umpires leave the field.

It looks like a toy, but that was urban mass transit back then. Many trams of the time were still hauled through the streets by steam locomotives.

What follows took place at Old Trafford on the same day. It stems from Matthew Turner’s discussion of redundant bowling styles. We are going to be looking at a fast bowling action, that of Arthur Mold. Mold was at the very end of his career at this point, and his best years were well behind him, but in his day he was one of the most feared - and most controversial - bowlers in England. In 1892 he was one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year, something which gives an idea of his stature and an idea of how well-formed cricket was as a sport by then: Wisden is still plugging away with its cricketers of the year, interrupted since only by war and not always then. To cut a long story short, Mold was accused of “throwing” in 1900 and 1901, not for the first time, and this last occasion would effectively end his career on a bitter note.

Here he comes, bowling under scrutiny, trying to clear his name:

It doesn’t look like first class bowling, but in the next thumbnail, I think you’ll agree with me that there’s something about the wrist action that gives the game away, that shows Mold’s pedigree - and shows the enduring influence of the round-arm action that dominated cricket until the 1870s:

Here he is again, seen from behind, this time. He was accused of bending his arm, Muri-style, but there’s no hint of it here.

He was, after all, bowling under extreme pressure - and under the eye of the camera. Film was only five years old at this time. Imagine how that must have felt. You can’t see it here, but he shies the ball well wide, and his opponent’s beautifully straight bat is wasted.

Football thumbnails once again courtesy of Freemantle Media. Cricket thumbnails from the Mitchell and Kenyon archive, British Film Institute.

Interview with Harrow Drive: Sports Psychology and Cricket

David Hinchcliffe of the excellent cricket coaching weblog Harrow Drive was kind enough to ask me some questions about sports psychology in relation to cricket. He’s incorporated my answers into a fuller article which you can read here.

David’s site is probably unique in terms of its reach and content, and it’s well worth setting aside an afternoon to work through it, especially if you are still playing or coach players.

The full uncontextualised text of the interview is below:

1. First of all, for those who don’t know, can you tell us a bit about who you are what you do for sports men and women?

In broad terms, I try to help sportspeople cope with, and overcome, both failure and the fear of failure. Everything in enjoying sport and succeeding in sport, comes down to that in the end, including even such mysterious semi-spiritual concepts as “the zone” and other Gallweyesque idealisms.
2. What inspired you to start your blog?

I wasn’t finding the kind of sports writing that I wanted to read, so decided to come up with it myself. Contributing to the material available online about sports psychology was only one part of my agenda in that sense. Fake heartiness, middle-class nostalgia for a fake working-class lost utopia, and a general British desire to be stupid when it comes to sport hamper all but the most intelligent sports journalists and writers. In modern British football in particular, no one is making any serious effort to track where the game is coming from, and the decisions being made now, which will shape the game’s future, are based on false assumptions. Proper historical writing has its disciplines, and much of what the site carries in 2007 will reflect those. With very few exceptions - even in cricket, which has always had the best literature of any sport - British sports writers see sport as soap opera, not as a serious professional exercise. They aren’t aware of it, but a couple of hours paging through continental sports magazines gives the game away.

3. How important is awareness and practice of mental training to club cricketers?

That depends entirely on what the individual club cricketer wants to take from his game. If what he/she is looking for is an enjoyable summer pastime to spend with friends, one that comes complete with an excellent social life and one that can be sustained into late middle age, but isn’t really worried about how well they play or if they improve - then they can quite happily ignore mental training entirely and be absolutely none the worse for it. Proper mental training has much to offer someone who wants to improve as a player, especially if they see their improvement as an enjoyable challenge rather than compensation for sagging confidence. I am particularly excited by a technique I have been working towards that offers players the means to recover confidence and composure under pressure and at speed - for instance, if you’ve just bowled the first ball of an Ashes series and it hasn’t gone quite to plan. For the club cricketer, both match and net time is limited, so mental training offers ways to practice and hone skills away from the ground or training centre that have been shown to be as effective in terms of improvement as actual physical practice. I don’t just mean “visualisation” in that sense. Visualisation is one of sports psychology’s favourite red herrings. Practically every book on the subject is crammed with top athlete’s tales of how they could picture every blad of grass, every inch of track etc. In fact, these athletes’ experience of creating images in their heads is no better than anyone else’s. Everyone’s mental imagery is fugitive, unclear, partial, muddy, incomplete, even slightly surreal - it has to be, or else we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between input from the senses and our own imaginations. Our mental imagery also carries information about our own moral/aesthetic judgements about whatever’s being thought about - and the way this is done, once understood by a player, can be used to their advantage (that, rather than the “clarity” of the image, is the headstart being enjoyed by the top athletes in the sports psych. manuals).

4. What sort of resistance to ‘mental fitness’ do you see in sport?

The football world is prone to mistake sports psychology for psychotherapy. No one likes, or should like, the idea that they need a mind doctor or shrink, and I’ve every sympathy for players’ reluctance in that sense. I’ve less for some of the journalists who perpetuate this error for the sake of a cheap joke (usually at someone’s expense). That error is the most common source of resistance to mental training. In Britain, we’ve inherited the attitude that the player knows best, and that brings with it resistance to coaching of any kind. That’s beginning to fade out now, in cricket and rugby more quickly than in football, and it’s gone altogether in athletics. In relation to psychotherapy, the real downside to resistance to mental training, and the only one that matters, is that when a player really does need psychotherapeutic help, the negative attitude to therapy is a barrier to their finding it. The mere existence of Tony Adams’ Sporting Chance Clinic has helped no end in this respect. It’s easier for players to approach experts approved by a former England captain who has trodden their path and won medals than to climb the stairs of some anonymous white coat on Harley Street. But that’s just the hard crust of the problem. Psychotherapy is often still quite self-deluding and useless. Paul Gascoigne’s recent autobiography “Being Gazza” is a dreadful saga of arrogance and malpractice on the part of therapy professionals. And the horrifying frequency of suicide in the game of cricket remains mysterious - mysterious, and neglected, which means we have more of it to come, I’m afraid.

5. How do you deal with negative opinion towards what you do?

To be perfectly frank, I agree with most of it. There’s no point in denying that I have a very low opinion of the majority of my colleagues. Sports psychology is crowded with hucksters and inspiration merchants, and sport generally lacks the intellectual framework that might keep them off. No form of psychology or psychotherapy has been capable of attracting anything like the brightest and the best to its careers - rather the opposite, and that shows through in the relative lack of respect and status enjoyed by the profession. In the soap opera of British sport, the sports psychologist takes the role of fool, and, although I dislike the fact, the role is probably hard earned.

6. What kind of changes have you seen in sport psychology/psychotherapy since you began working in the field?

Almost none. I don’t think the subject’s moved an inch in twenty years, not since NLP began to be used by sportspeople (NLP, for those readers who don’t recognise the term, is a combination of cognitive-behavioural techniqes and hypnotherapy dating from the early ’70s. There are genuinely useful skills to draw from it, but I wouldn’t call it new.) Sports psychology is more of a presence in the UK now, but it’s still very much a peripheral part of the overall scene.

7. What is the difference in the mental approach of recreational and professional players? How crucial is this?

Less than you might assume. The kind of talent that permits a sporting career at the top is indiscriminating and is found across all personality types. There are plenty of recreational players who take their sport more seriously, prepare more carefully, and look after themselves better, than many professionals. But amongst professionals that I’ve worked with, there has been a small but distinct group - distinct - not just from recreational players, but from everyone else I’ve worked with. First of all, there’s the sheer aggression they possess, perfectly marshalled and disciplined. Secondly, the teak-hardness, the grip they keep on themselves. These qualities force themselves upon your attention immediately in a way I have never encountered in a “normal” human being. It’s a hellish way to be, in my opinion, and it doesn’t translate into “successful lives” as most of us would define them, lives marked by love and friendship. Every single one of this group has been at the very top of their sport. None of them has had any compunction of any kind about dominating other people by any means available - indeed, one gets the impression that sport presents them with a chance to crush the opposition that they enjoy and would otherwise miss in their life.

8. How important is the national sporting culture in defining attitudes to both the recreational and professional games?

I’d say that that culture is almost entirely defined by history. One of the most interesting changes in British sporting life in the last twenty years is the new willingness to learn from abroad. Football has never fully accepted that Britain is behind, and is in the process of reversing its trend, retreating to the old superstitions about “passion” and the obsession with heroic underdogs, but rugby and cricket are quite willing to learn from Australia and New Zealand. It’s a mature and realistic attitude. The recreational game has had its experience of this - Sir Clive Woodward’s first coaching role, at Henley, was characterised by his successful attempts to pioneer the use of the Australian flat back line. But the idea that having invented the games the world plays, that we have nothing real to learn from abroad and that our national “passion” and “inspiration” will see us through against superior skill and fitness persists. The sad fact is that Britain is not a place marked by either “passion” or “inspiration”: pessimism, suspicion and stoicism perhaps, but we have never been as keen on defeating Australia as they have been about defeating us. Of course, we invented those games, all those years ago, for our amusement - a distraction from the serious business of life. It doesn’t occur to British sport as a whole to innovate, to be the first to pioneer successful approaches - we’ll keep up, just about, by importing ideas once they are proven abroad.

9. What 5-10 general tips would you give to amateur club cricketers who recognise they want to improve their mental game but don’t know where to start?

The longer I’m involved in either sports psychology or psychotherapy, the less I am impressed by generalised “tips”, simply because everyone’s situation is unique to them and has to be addressed as such, but what follows will do more good than harm.
a. In the company of a good coach, identify and isolate your game strengths and weaknesses. Find out what you can do well, and what you can’t. Don’t do what you can’t - if that is play a particular shot, then don’t play that shot if you can avoid it. If you can’t bowl a particular kind of ball, eliminate it from your repertoire. The consequence of this is that you will be able to trust yourself on the field in everything you take on. You won’t punish yourself for your inability to do what you can’t do. You’ll play with confidence - justified confidence, based on a realistic analysis of the kind of player you are.
b. Again, in the company of a good coach, set yourself realistic, challenging goals. Make sure that they are things you can achieve regardless of your team’s progress - setting out to score x runs in a season, and then finding yourself running out of partners every week, is self-defeating. Goals focus your mind, heighten your interest and build your real strengths, resulting in heightened, justified confidence.
c. You need to relax completely for at least 20 minutes every day to maximise your body’s recovery from exercise and activity, so combine that with some useful mental training. Pick a strength, not a weakness, to work on. Flop in a comfortable chair with your eyes closed, and let yourself relax. Then imagine in your own way - don’t worry about clear visual images as you don’t need them - the scenario in which you use your strength, and play it through again and again in your head. Imagine yourself getting things right - change things around until you are - and rehearse it all in your head. This is the most effective form of mental training you can do, and it’s that straightforward.
d. Pay attention to your body language - your body posture and facial expression have a prevailing control over your state of mind. Watch Shane Warne in the field - how he walks, how he holds himself, and adapt what he does to your own style and personality.
e. From any decent NLP textbook - “submodalities” and “anchoring” are both directly useful to sportsmen of any kind and worth learning about.

10. Is there anything unique about cricket as a team sport that requires different mental disciples compared to, say, football or rugby?

Cricket is a unique team sport, but two differences stick out. One is the sheer length of the game. Cricket demands concentration over enormous periods of time - you have to maintain attention, to be ready to react in a fraction of a second to situations that might come once in two or three hours. Secondly, to impose yourself on a game of cricket - especially 3 and 5-day cricket - requires every ounce of your effort over that entire period. Shane Warne is able to use every part of his body language, his wit (in its widest sense) and his, ahem, verbal felicity, to bend his opponent to his will - and he keeps it going all day when in the field. It must be shattering - like undergoing a series of eight-hour public exams day after day - in hot sunshine, more often than not, and under the scrutiny of the world - but he’s succeeded in doing it for fifteen years and more.

11. Finally, you told me you know how to solve the Ashes conundrum. Can you tell us how?

Putting to one side the scapegoating of Fletcher and Flintoff that all of the armchair generals are indulging in, I can see two main things I’d have done differently.
a. I’d have taken a leaf out of Clive Woodward’s book and taken the team to the pub after the first test defeat, and kept them there until they’d got the game off their respective chests and started to enjoy being in Australia. Repeat to fade.This isn’t one of those playboy England touring sides that doesn’t care - they care far too much, and the nerves and fear that engenders is pulling their game to pieces. More and better distraction is the key - the WAGS were a nod in that direction, but clearly not enough.
b. Australia are technically the better team, and our hope of retaining the Ashes, especially with our diminished squad, lay in Australia underperforming. The pressure on England has not been to perform at our best - unless Australia blew up, that would still end in defeat for England - but to play beyond what they are actually capable of. Kick Harmison hard enough, the thinking goes, and not only will that somehow bring his confidence back, but turn him into a young Glenn McGrath. All that tells Harmison, a fast bowler, but never the straightest even at his best, that what he can do will never be good enough - and that is what collapses his confidence. There’s nothing mysterious about it. Likewise poor Geraint Jones, who was called upon to bat, not like Geraint Jones, but like another Ian Healy. This has been happening across the team - and as a result, they’ve been abandoning their strengths, however limited, with the disastrous results we’ve seen. Absurd to ask the press to take a player to one side and say that too much is being asked of him - that all he has to do is be Harmison or Jones G. or Mahmood S., that that is all that can be (sanely) asked of them and no more. I’d have done it, and reminded them of their real strengths with a pile of DVDs etc. whilst I was at it. Stick to your strengths, guard against your weaknesses, just be yourself, don’t be a hero - old lessons, that we all have to relearn sometimes. It’s not lack of passion or commitment, in this instance, that’s done England down - far from it. It’s lunatic demands for the impossible, the constant calling for heroes, for finest hours, for saviours and miracle workers. In 2005, we played to our capabilities, no more - that’s all you’ll find on the scorecard. Australia didn’t, but had they done so, we’d have lost.

Simon Barnes on the Ashes

Short of any thoughts of my own, I step aside for the master:

I have worked out the real reason why England have — barring the . . . etc, etc — lost the Ashes and am prepared to name the real culprits. Stand up and be blamed, Ricky Ponting, Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne. It’s your fault that England have been beaten. You have let England down by playing some wonderful bloody cricket.

It has become one of those unmentionable things. When England lose a match in any of the leading sports, every possible reason for failure is debated except the most important one of all, that the opposition played better. So hear a shocking truth — there is no rule in sport that says the opposition are not allowed to do so.

And that has been the truth of the matter. England have made mistakes, and we shall come to them in due course as the series continues to unravel, but the fact is that Australia won because they are better at cricket. They played better when it counted.

Defeat is not entirely a moral failing of the England cricketers and their coach. England have been up against three of the best ever to play the game: Ponting is in the form of his life and McGrath and Warne, in their declining years, are better than most other bowlers at their peak.

Grit your teeth and admit it, it has been a privilege to watch them. If you didn’t feel enriched by seeing this trio in action over the past three matches — three men on a mission to set things right after their defeat in England in 2005 — then you don’t really have sport in your soul. Only partisanship, and that is a poor thing on its own.

Hear, hear.

Thoughts on the Ashes

Now that England have gone 2-0 down in the series, the usual scapegoat hunt is well underway, with Duncan Fletcher in the firing line and Freddie Flintoff’s captaincy being questioned by those who think that remembering Ian Botham’s short-lived tenure is a sign of age and wisdom.

For once, I think that the debate’s overcomplicated. We’re losing for two reasons.

1. Half of the side is either out through injury or is playing injured. In the last Ashes series, we suffered our first loss through injury in the last test of the series. Australia were less lucky - this time, the boot is on the other foot. Fully fit, and on form, we can match them. We’re not, and we’re not, so we’re not.
2. Because we won last time. Our national preparation for sport has improved over the last ten years to the extent that we can now, when suitably determined, actually make it to the top, once. Both the Ashes win and the Rugby World Cup were built up to with a long series of confidence-building wins and a long run of luck with injuries. We use the latest methods and techniques and break with the past. Once victory is ours, we assume that it actually came as the result of good old English virtues and everything else was ancillary. We relax and celebrate. (I don’t see much wrong with this, so long as we are honest about ourselves when we lose next time and keep the lynch mobs at home).

None of our major sports, even athletics, is set up with long term international success in mind. What we do have, at least up to now, are thriving domestic games in which huge numbers of people participate. These produce average-to-good international sides, which the public want to win rather a lot - more than they want to create the conditions in which that winning might take place. If we created those conditions, we’d do so at the expense of the “traditional values” that we celebrate when victory does come. And we might like that rather less than we expect - we might love those winning teams less than we think we would.

In the end, “loving the underdog” and “setting loose the lynch mob” seem to go hand in hand in English sport. Perhaps it’s the price we pay for keeping our sports under the heading of “serious fun” rather than “serious business”. Worth paying? What do you think?

McGrath and Monty Panesar

Norm flags up Glenn McGrath’s comments about Monty Panesar’s sessions with sports psychologist Steve Bull, which are intended to help Panesar cope with barracking from Aussie crowds:

“If he`s seeing a psychologist already, then I think it`s a bit premature and a bit ridiculous.

“When we go to England, we cop a hard time, we don`t see a psychologist beforehand. It`s just the way it is,” said McGrath.

“I think it`s just media build-up, probably the English media, saying he`s going to cop a hard time over here,” he said.

“To me, that`s just cricket.”

Well, perhaps…

“There are four major performance skills for all elite sportsmen and women, these being technical, physical, tactical and mental. The latter skill is one that can make the crucial difference for athletes performing consistently to their abilities. Sport psychology has played a significant role in the understanding, training and ultimately the use of mental skills for peak performance.” John Buchanan, Australian Cricket Board National Coach

… or perhaps not.