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Cricket can be a very tough game at times and consistent success doesn’t come easy.

One thing for sure is that all players no matter their skill, experience or level struggle for form at some stage of their careers. When this occurs it is very easy to make excuses and feel sorry for yourself, however the tougher and more worthwhile road is to accept the great challenge that cricket presents and tackle it head on.

A key element in succeeding in the face of the challenge that struggling for form presents is to remember to enjoy the challenge.

After all when you enjoy something you do it well, so feeling upset, uptight or thinking that the game of cricket has got it in for you won’t work! When we play well we enjoy it and when we don’t play well we tend not to enjoy it, after all not performing isn’t much fun.

However while form may be temporary class is permanent and as such it is very important to continue to enjoy the game despite a personal lack of success in the short run. If you let a lack of short-term success destroy your enjoyment of the game you simply won’t play well.

Key tips for enjoying the challenge.

• Remember what you love about playing the game
• Think back and remember how you play best and how good it feels when you play well
• Enjoy the challenge of getting back to form and when you overcome it this time it will help you to do it better when it occurs again
• Realise everybody misses out from time to time and this is a natural part of the game
• Enjoy your teammates success and keep contributing to the team effort

Good luck

Mark

Getting nervous is a positive sign.  It is your body’s way of telling you that you are ready for action and that you want to do well in a situation.  Nerves seem to affect people in different ways, sometimes they make you feel sleepy, sometimes they make you quiet, sometimes talkative and I’m sure the’re many more reactions than these! 
 
One thing that is for sure is that everybody gets nervous! Which means you are not alone, even though nerves can sometimes be a bit daunting before you perform but even the guys who look very calm and relaxed are probably just as nervous about their performance as you, maybe more!  In fact I would say the time to worry before a game is when you don’t get nervous!
 
As I said before, getting nervous is your body’s way of preparing you for a performance and means that you want to do well. The other side of wanting to do well is fearing failure.

Good luck.

Mark

‘In all things, success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure’ - Confucius

An expression you often hear around cricket is ‘back yourself’.

What does it mean to back yourself?

Some of the things it means to me are:

• Trust yourself to perform
• Be confident in your own ability

In order to trust yourself and be confident about your performance you need to be prepared, for example if you lived in France and studied French for ten years you would probably face a basic exam on how to speak French very confidently - in fact you might even enjoy the opportunity to apply your skills!

However, if you know nothing about the language, have never studied it, but still need to pass the exam you wouldn’t enjoy or face the exam with any confidence, in fact you’d probably expect to fail…and you’d be right!

Confidence comes from knowing that you have done everything you can to be the best you can be in terms of your planning, physical preparation and mental and technical skills.

Backing yourself to succeed goes hand-in-hand with confidence and as we see with the French exam example above, your confidence is related to the quality of your preparation. The trick is to know what to do in the situation before you get there, this is where your planning and practice comes in and is where you pay the price for your success with hard work and as Justin Langer says he’s never met a successful person who hasn’t worked hard!

Playing against a high quality opponent is as much about knowing what to do as doing it! Excellent players will test your technique and temperament. If you have done the work in preparation you will have a solution (that works) for the challenges you are facing and will have practiced your skills to the point where you can execute them in a match. You can confidently face the competitive challenges and enjoy them, however if you don’t have the answer and haven’t done the work, you will be unlikely to play with confidence and more likely to fail!

If you plan and prepare to the best of your ability and commit to the discipline of the hard work required to achieve excellence in your game, then you will earn the confidence you will need to succeed and can back yourself when the going gets tough.

Good Luck.

Mark

An expression that I often use in the batting coaching context is ‘don’t make a good ball into a bad one’. Boony rarely, more so than any player I have played with, attempted to hit a good ball for runs. If you bowled him a good ball, he would respect it with a fortress like defensive stroke. However, if you bowled to Boony in one of his key scoring areas, cut, drive and off his legs, he would pick off runs with machine like efficiency. This was part of the skill set that allowed him to play 106 tests in Australia’s top order against teams including the then formidable West Indies.

Boony’s greatness as a batsman was not brilliant strokeplay or rapid scoring (not that he didn’t play great shots or score at a good pace), his key strength was an understanding of what he needed to do to make runs against the world’s top bowlers and the discipline and courage to execute it.

Boony had a simple plan (defend the good ball and score off other opportunities) that allowed him to succeed and he was able to consistently execute it.

Keep it simple!

Good luck.

Mark

Like it or not, negative thoughts are a part of the game, everyone has them!

No one will hand you 5 wickets or 100 runs on a plate. It is natural to have negative thoughts from time to time and you will need to learn to deal with these to overcome the adversity you face from external challenges, such as competitors and conditions, and from internal challenges i.e. your own thoughts.

A critical mental skill is to be able to turn your negative thoughts into positive thoughts.

Negative thoughts aren’t all bad as they help to make us aware of the things that can go wrong in a performance and tell us that our performance is important to us, making us aware of the consequences of failure. However, in order to be the best you can be, you will need to manage your thinking.  If negative thoughts take control of you they can become overwhelming and lead to you being defeated before you even get into the contest!

An important thing to realise is that you control your thinking and that your thinking does not control you! You need to take responsibility for your thinking including managing and controlling your negative thoughts.

By turning a negative thought around into a positive one you can turn an obstacle into an opportunity. Ask yourself ‘What is the opportunity here?’ For example, if you are concerned that you will perform poorly due to a recent run of poor form, instead of being resigned to another failure, look for an opportunity.  A batsman faced with a wicket where the ball bounces and moves, assisting the fast bowlers may be worried about nicking the ball.  An opportunity here would be to use the bounce and movement the wicket offers the bowlers to leave the ball alone and frustrate the bowlers into bowling to you in your scoring areas.  A bowler may be worried that he won’t get a wicket because the pitch is very flat and offering no bounce or movement.  This is an opportunity to bowl the best line and length of your life and to see how well you go in tough conditions.

Next time you get a negative thought, will you let it control and eventually erode your performance or will you take control and seize the opportunity it presents?

Cheers.

Mark

Although many of you will be knee deep in football of varying codes through the off season, this period can be used very well by cricketers wanting to be the best they can be, as it offers an opportunity to work on correcting technique and developing skills away from the competitive environment which can be a great chance to experiment and expand your capabilities.

This period is also a great time for an evaluation of your game to ask yourself key self-development questions such as: What did I do well? What can I do better? And… What do I need to do to get better?

I would invite anyone who may want to discuss developing a strategy to become a better player to contact me by phone or email for a chat and you may like to check out my article entitled Off Season Coaching Program on the website.

HIGH PERFORMANCE INDIVIDUAL COACHING

Our High Performance Individual Coaching program focuses on acquiring and mastering critical technical skills to optimise performance.

• Great for building confidence in your own game
• Learn, improve and hone new skills away from the pressure of match play
• Correct bad techniques (particularly those that may cause injury) before they become an integral part of your game and are difficult to change
• You can book for one session or as many as you like however we recommend a minimum of 5 sessions over consecutive weeks to enable a stronger understanding and knowledge of your game
• Our High Performance Individual Coaching program will continue during the winter months at Gladesville and Five Dock.

To book a session call Mark on 0422 787 727.

Cheers

Mark

What does it mean to be mentally tough?  It means making the effort to think of and develop a game plan that gives you your best chance of success and then having the commitment and discipline to carry out your plan under any circumstances.

To develop a plan for success, you must have a very clear understanding of how your game works and this includes knowing your strengths, weaknesses and how you play best.  The odds are that if you have ever performed well in the past you carried out a process to help you achieve success. In general, consistently repeating your individual process for success you will give yourself your best chance of success. 

Great players understand their game very well, right down to tiny details, which allows them to know exactly what they are doing at every step of their performance and also to self-correct rapidly if required.

Once you have established your plan for success, you need to carry it out and this takes discipline and commitment.  There are many distractions that will take your mind off doing your job successfully (executing your plan for success) if you focus on them.  Remember that any time you are not focussed on implementing the steps you need to take to be successful, is a waste of effort if you truly wish to succeed in achieving your goals. 

It takes genuine toughness to commit to focussing on your success process in the face of challenging and uncertain conditions but remember, giving up or not thinking are easy and don’t work. The hard road of being mentally tough is difficult but the effort is worth the reward,  if you have the desire to succeed.

A helpful way to self-manage the execution of your plan, is to firstly know your plan and your job (your job is to implement your plan) and secondly, some simple self-questioning in the middle while you are playing can help focus your mind on the job at hand.  A good question to ask yourself is, ‘What is my job’, this will not only bring your mind back to the present, it will help you to focus on what you need to do now to succeed.  We often get distracted thinking about past or future events, for example what happened the previous delivery or how you will perform at the end of the day.

If your can leave the past in the past and understand that the future is only influenced by the next ball, it will help you to know that the most important thing you ever do in cricket is deal with the next ball the very best you can.

Good luck

Mark

Discipline is a word that is used a lot in sport and in this article I will explore how I think discipline applies to cricket.
 
Cricket is a game full of challenges.  Every time we go out onto the field we face skilful opponents in a range of challenging conditions.  For every ball you are out on the field you face tough competitors whose main interest is to stop you doing well!  As a batsman you have 11 members of the fielding team aspiring to take your wicket for as few runs a possible and as a bowler you have batsmen aiming to make sure you don’t get any wickets and that they score lots of runs from your bowling!
 
In other words, as a cricketer there is something at stake every ball. There are risks in that something can go wrong for you at every stage of your performance.
 
Discipline is a critical weapon for you as a cricketer to ensure you combat the risks you face to the best of your ability.  By this I mean having the discipline to do what it takes to succeed in an innings is critical in establishing a good performance. Having the discipline to do what it takes over a season and a career is the key to strong and consistent performances in the long term. 

The discipline to succeed comes from  your desire to succeed, as this desire will drive you to do what is necessary to succeed.  Remember that this is not an easy road to travel, but nothing worthwhile (including runs and wickets) comes easy.  However, making the effort to have the discipline to do what it takes will be worthwhile if you really wish to achieve your goals.
 
For example, the major risk a batsman faces is getting out.  The most likely forms of dismissal statistically speaking are bowled, lbw and caught behind the wicket.  These forms of dismissal occur from balls that are challenging the stumps in terms of line and length.  A batsman can take a major step toward managing this risk by playing straight, that is hitting the ball on the line of the stumps straight back down the pitch with the full face of the bat, as this will maximise the surface area contact with the ball while significantly reducing the possibility of missing the ball (bowled and lbw) or an edge behind.  This is a simple tactical concept, however the real challenge after you understand the tactics involved is to have the discipline to carry out this process ball after ball over an innings, game, season or career.
 
Consistent actions lead to consistent results, so if you have a plan, your tactics are good and you have the technique to back them up (you should have!), maybe an area you should explore is your discipline. 
 
Have you got the discipline to do what it takes to succeed ball after ball and season after season?
 
Good luck

Mark

The aim of a batsman is to score as many runs as possible as quickly as possible in order to provide their team with the runs to set a total to allow the team’s bowlers with the maximum amount of time in which to dismiss the other team or to chase the opposition team’s score.

In order to achieve this aim, a critical skill that a batsman must master is to understand the characteristics of the ball (line and length) and then to play the best possible stroke in response.

How does the batsman obtain the information about the ball? The batsman watches the ball out of the bowler’s hand to determine its line and length. Consequently, it is fair to say that visual skills play a very significant role in the success of a batsman. If you don’t know where the ball is, how can you play the right stroke in response?

Given the critical importance of visual skills, I would take this opportunity to parallel another daily life application where you need to use visual skills to interpret and understand precise information: reading!

What does your body do when you read? It remains stable. I believe we do this to enable our head to be still to allow our eyes to follow the letters and words on the page. This has a significant implication to batting as, if you agree that your eyes are critical to obtaining the important information when batting, it makes sense that a batsman remains as stable as possible to provide the eyes with the best possible opportunity to sight the ball, just as you do when you read.

This means that a batsman should hit the ball from a stable base. Although footwork is another vital component of batting, your eyes are more important, as your feet cannot see the ball! Your footwork must enable you to get into the best position to see the ball. If your feet are moving when you are trying to hit the ball so are your eyes! You don’t see people running down the street reading books! Additionally, when you have your force stabilised you also allow your power to be channelled through the bat.

Conclusion: A stable or balanced hitting position provides you with the best opportunity to watch and make judgements about the ball and delivers maximum power to the stroke. Balance demonstrates a greater degree of control of the quality of your skill execution. How can you expect to control the ball if you can’t control your own movements?

Good luck

Mark