We Are The Professionals

“I'm trying my heart out to do this”

“I've got to start scoring runs as well, that can only happen with a lot of hard work.”

“he's desperate to keep on playing and wants to turn this around.”

“he's a fighter and we want people like that in the dressing room."

“I'm desperate to turn things around for England.”

“He knows he has been under pressure for a long time”

“He knows it is tough up here”

“He is up for the challenge”

“There's a group of players in there who are desperate to win for England.”

“It will take a lot of determination to turn this around.”

“International cricket is about tough decisions”

“It is meant to be a tough environment”

“I knew it was going to be tough”

Above are a few of the quotes from Alistair Cook and Peter Moores after defeat in the 2^nd Test to India. They betray the mindset of this current England side, and it can be argued, the English cricket mindset as a whole. The running theme is clear – it’s about pressure, it’s about fight, it’s about working harder.

To hear these comments come from a sports team is no surprise, and in fact is probably what you would hear from most sports teams. But this mistakes sport for a matter of life and death – the mindset is militaristic, demanding perfect discipline from the troops. The pressure is talked about and amplified, used as a further incentive to be disciplined. The demand for extra effort is incessant, the mantra to live by. It is about winning and losing, life and death.

Sport though is not a matter of life and death, yet part of the entertainment business. You do not hear actors talking about how desperate they are to perform well, musicians talking about fighting hard for their next album, authors talking about the tough environment that being an author is. If they did, it would be pointed out as the utter bollocks that it is. Being an entertainer, which sportsmen and women are, is not about discipline but expression – technical skills are simply a tool, not the end objective.

This mindset is seen in a number of sports and almost for a generation but it’s only now becoming obvious how detrimental this can be.

When England arrived in Australia we were told how hard they had worked, how fit they were – we are often told that this is the fittest and most professional cricket side ever. Fitness is important for cricket but not the most important aspect. It’s like being the snooker player with the most cue power – it’s useful, but nowhere near as important as hitting the ball where you want it to go.

The obsession with professionalism is even more damaging. England are a very professional cricket side – their players turn up on time, they train long hours, they wear the right clothes, they say the right things, they know all of the plans, they eat the right things and they behave in the right way. This is all well and good when the environment is under your complete control. The moment something unexpected happens there is simply no-one with the problem solving ability to come up with a solution. The plan is blindly followed when it works, and when it doesn’t, it’s followed anyway so that at the end of the game the plan can be changed slightly and if we lose, well, at least we had a plan. The plan by its very nature is highly conventional and cannot take into account the various complex factors that make up a game of cricket. That’s not to say a plan isn’t important – it is, but it should be like a movie script without dialogue, a general set of ideas where the players fill in the blanks.

When the plan doesn’t work, either for the team or player, the world becomes a very lonely place. The players will struggle, but far more fundamentally, they don’t understand why they are struggling and sure as hell don’t have any idea how to stop struggling. This England side is struggling badly, and until they appreciate that sport is not a war to be won, but a piece of entertainment to be enjoyed, and that blindly following over-prescriptive plans to get them out of problems that these plans helped create in the first place is self-defeating, then they will continue to play joyless, losing cricket.