THE PENANCE AND REINTEGRATION OF KEVIN PIETERSEN

It was an innings of unambivalent, unarguable genius. He hadn’t played such a knock for, oh, some four whole Test innings.

In the three days following his frenetic, panicky efforts in Ahmedabad, Kevin Pietersen managed to overhaul his modus operandi against spin (as this most diligent and streetwise of batsmen has repeatedly demonstrated the capacity to do), then get himself in with quiet authority and a clear mind, before flourishing in a manner few can aspire to, let alone pull off. Indeed, he never looked like he was in anything but total control – either of his emotions or the threat from the Indian spinners. It perhaps helped him that Shane Warne counselled him to “back his technique”, but self-belief isn’t enough. You need method. Decision making.

Facing his apparent nemesis, Pragyan Ojha, purveyor of the left-arm spin that was deemed to be his Achilles heel and who had twice dismissed him in the first Test, he looked absolutely rock solid. From ball one. Firstly, he moved late into position (having picked up length quickly). Secondly, when defending on the front foot, he let the ball come to him and thus did not thrust his hands out or break his wrists, be that turning to leg or playing a ‘curtain rail’ to try and run the spinning ball out on the offside. Everything was synchronised, aligned.

Defending off the back foot – to begin with, at least – he shortened his backlift, a method that was not that of ‘looking to attack but if it’s not there, defending’ routinely advocated in the more macho cricketing lands, but committing absolutely to defence in circumstances where, initially, you need to play back as much as possible (because the ball was frequently jumping) and, as a result, introduce the danger of being undone if the ball skids through. Ask Sachin.

Against the offies, he employed this same technique – a shorter backlift in the early stages – but, crucially, was very light on his feet and opened up his shoulders as the ball spun and bounced, and occasionally spat, ensuring that he didn’t get closed off and into the sort of positions where you nick it on to the thigh pad and into short leg’s hands. 

Once initially settled, he used his feet to pressurise the bowler’s length, but didn’t overhit. Finally, when truly established, he brought out the audacious, the extravagant, and the barely conceivable en route to his third truly special Test hundred of the year, following his efforts in Colombo and Leeds. After a chastening few months, the banished genius was smiling again – a subdued smile, perhaps, but also, dare it be said, a more authentic and unselfconscious smile.

Predictably, Twitter was quickly thick with flippant comments ridiculing the idea that Pietersen had needed to undergo the process of “reintegration” at all, thus implying that everyone should simply have got on with things, as though the breaking of trust in a group environment is not a matter of the gravest importance. It doesn’t matter if we have doubts about Old Archie’s trustworthiness on this job, because he’s the best darn safecracker in the business... Not all of these remarks were throwaway, either. Many were delivered by professional writers, for whom the concept of teamwork scarcely impinges on the texture of their work and for whom it is therefore easy to be dismissive of such notions as seeking a background ambience of collective harmony to their endeavours.   

With no little disingenuousness, it has thus been averred that the problem – the issue – was nonexistent, imagined, unmanly, and that, quite apart from scoffing at the notion that Pietersen’s presence in the dressing room was toxic and potentially ruinous to morale (in such a way that would affect performance rather than the barroom banter), the process of reintegration has been of no consequence whatsoever. Perhaps it hasn’t as far as KP’s batting is concerned; but it it would be difficult to believe that it hasn’t affected – in a positive way – Alastair Cook. At the very least, he wouldn’t have to endure that selfsame press pack continually asking him about KP’s absence in the event of sub-par team performances. 

But surely anyone who has lived for an extended period of time in the same group – i.e. anyone who is part of a nuclear family – must acknowledge that life is generally easier when there are no bad atmospheres, no repressed animosity, no bad blood. So, a time-honoured process of contrition and forgiveness was set in motion. No dramas. 

The team’s celebration of Pietersen’s century seemed genuinely warm (as opposed to at Headingley, when, playing across the faces of the ‘politburo’, there were a few stitched-on smirks for a traitor headed for the pogroms) and his own celebration was in keeping with the relaxed tenor of his innings. Maybe he had eschewed the literal Red Bull for the metaphorical Valium, swapped stimulant for sedative; there was certainly a serenity, an equanimity, in his eyes between balls, whether those be defended under duress or cuffed imperiously to the boundary. 

In some ways, that relaxed demeanour might be precisely because his wings had been clipped (his Red Bull wings, you might say). Gone was the air of studied mateyness, the cloying awareness of brand KP, the suspicion that all was done to the end of positioning himself for IPL riches.

He has remembered the importance of his statistical legacy and a place in the game’s pantheon. And this is not to denigrate that outlook at all; it is merely to point out that he needed the threat of its removal to be reminded of the stakes, and his ultimate dependence on others to realize hs personal ambitions. He has truly learned the value – in a non-monetary sense – of Test cricket (for England) to him. And we know this not because he has said so in some PR platitude (which he has), but because he has not dug in his heels (as would have an overly defensive and intransigent ego) and because he has bent over backwards to salvage his Test career. This is genuine humility, it would appear.

And perhaps Andy Flower needs to be congratulated, for the outcome is surely vindication of his handling of the affair, his apparent willingness – all brinkmanship aside – both to do without his best player, push come to shove, and to welcome him back once he was satisfied that the ethos of mutual respect would not be fatally compromised. Demanding a sincere apology isn’t so punitive now, is it?

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PIETERSEN, TEAM SPIRIT, AND THE LESSONS OF NONLINEAR THERMODYNAMICS…

weariness, and the philosophy of Steve Archibald

How do you make the multiple One?

This is not only the perennial problem of team-building but also that of government: creating esprit de corps or forming a body politic. It is also a problem that Alistair Cook will face regarding his best batsman now that Andrew Strauss has resigned the captaincy, citing a gut feeling that his “race was run,” his depleted resilience undoubtedly exacerbated by the Kevin Pietersen saga – which is not the same as claiming the latter was the sole cause of his captain’s exhaustion (and thus there’s no cause to be sceptical about the outgoing skipper’s stated reasons: unlike Iggy Pop, he didn’t want to be a passenger). For it is true, in both a trivial and a profound way, that the events befalling our lives always emerge from multiple causes bumping into each other...

Sometimes, as both Strauss and KP would confirm, these life-events are great headline-making ruptures and schisms; sometimes, an accumulation of tiny cracks and fissures that remain imperceptible in the large-scale day-to-day concerns of a life (until such time as they subsume it, if steps are not taken to forestall that occurrence), even if the decision to absent oneself from office is a single clean break on the ‘main line’. Cutting the cord rather than coming apart at the seams. And so it is that a fatigued Strauss, a threshold of lowered resistance crossed, no longer ableto tolerate what he’d put up with only the previous week, has gone – and to universal acclaim – while the KP issue, and the concomitant problem of unity, lingers.  

As is well known, when Team England and the ECB decided to omit Pietersen from the Lord’s Test against South Africa, even with the world number one Test ranking at stake, the behavioural code that Hugh Morris deemed him to have flouted through his shenanigans in Leeds the week before was a breach of the team’s “unity of purpose and action”. By taking such drastic measures against their star batsman, Andy Flower and the England management eschewed pragmatism for principle and, in so doing, ostensibly protected (or restored) the harmony of the dressing room and asserted the primacy of team spirit over all else during a time in which it appeared to have evaporated – if, indeed, it can be said ever to have truly existed at all…  

For, above the noisy hullabaloo surrounding Pietersen this last month, that old aphorism of the ex-Spurs and Barcelona striker, Steve Archibald, has fluttered across the airwaves on a high frequency, beyond the audible range of some yet loud and piercing to others. “Team spirit is an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory”. Cue slightly cynical titter and sage nods of heads, then move on to the next universal truism.

But is team spirit really just an illusion? And are those surfing the insistent and palpable highs and lows of team sport suffering some sort of collective hallucination? Was the MCG ‘sprinkler dance’ the addled reverie of poor delusional souls? Or could it be that the adage actually reveals more about Steve Archibald’s sense of detachment from the group than the nature of the latter itself? Or even, perhaps, could it be an oblique expression of the general cynicism and individualism of an age in which “rational self-interest”, the cornerstone of neoconservatism, has apparently been sanctified?

ebbs and flows (and sprinklers)

Superficially, of course, it would appear hard to disagree with Archibald. Team spirit does indeed feel at its strongest in the aftermath of victory: euphoria irrupts; a group buzzes; camaraderie is felt coursing through the collective body, an intangible yet conspicuous sensation that almost anyone who has played (voluntarily, rather than at school!) would have experienced at one time or other. Even so, it stands to reason that a group whose very existence and purpose is to participate in competitive sport will have its mood largely dictated by the result. Also, that an accumulation of victories will give this feeling more permanence still. This is not Harvard PhD stuff. But does that mean that the mood, the spirit, is wholly determined by the result?

The Archibald Hypothesis, if that is not too grandiose a description, appears to rest on a particular version of what philosophers would call ontological fallacy (that is, an error as to what type of entity something is, its nature), assuming that team spirit is like an object: something definitively attained or definitively lost; here today, gone tomorrow; now you have it, now you don’t.

A palpable, ineffable and fluctuating sensation within the collective body, team spirit is perhaps better thought of as what another pair of Scottish philosopher (of considerably greater influence than Archibald), Duns Scotus and later David Hume, called a “haecceity”: a “thisness” with the characteristics of an “individual”. Take the atmosphere in a room: demonstrably there, even if you cannot quite put your finger on its provenance or precisely gauge its lifespan. The same for the seasons: even if the precise moment of its arrival or passing are beyond accurate knowledge, we get enough of a sensation summer’s haecceity to know it is around (well, bad example…). Same for team spirit.

Like everything else in the universe, then, a cricket team (and thus its spirit) is a dynamical system. It has a discernible emergence (even if haphazard and chaotic, with those multiple causes), a distinct means of holding together (‘consistency’), and an ultimate coming-undone, a disintegration. Birth, life, death – everything from an entire species to its individual members, a continent to a thought. The Canadian thinker Brian Massumi summarises precisely what any structure – Team England included – comprises:

“A structure is defined by what escapes it. Without exception, it emerges from chance, lives with and by a margin of deviation, and ends in disorder. A structure is defined by its thresholds – the relative limits within which it selects, perceives, and captures more or less consistently (its margin of deviation); and the absolute limits beyond which it breaks down (chance, chaos). Order is the approximate, and always temporary, prevention of disorder.”

So, stability is only ever metastability: order within certain limits. And much as water freezes below a certain temperature and turns to steam above another threshold, a group’s staying-the-same only happens between certain limits – what a group leadership might call drawing the line – and with a certain expenditure of energy. Staying the same requires energy. It is negentropic. There are no closed systems. The outside seeps in, the inside trickles out. As the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (whose A Thousand Plateaus was translated by Massumi) wrote in a broadly political context: “there is no society that does not leak in all directions”.

Given the ebbs and flows of team spirit, it is little wonder, then, that the bonds within a group or team are sometimes referred to as “chemistry”. And this is only partly metaphorical, for in a very real sense that is precisely what leadership or management works upon: human beings’ moods, for each of which there is a corresponding admixture of hormones, a sub-personal neurochemical stratum to be stabilized. Not so much micromanagement, as molecular. Flower the chemist, rather than the alchemist?

no such thing as a closed system: tunnel at Rafah, Palestine

porousness, leakage

“Capturing energies that escape” is as probably as good a description as you’ll find of what team management is about. From this point of view, rule by fear and heavy-handed subjugation – and the concomitant attempt to seal off those creative ruptures, inventions and ‘escapes’ of the imagination that threaten to transform the identity of the group, to set it off on an adventure, a becoming-other – is less efficient than through empathy and consensus, since, with tyranny, there’s always more escaping energy to capture (for Deleuze and Guattari, every organ in the Imperial social body is “a possible protest”), something that all paranoid despots learn in the end.

Undoubtedly, Pietersen’s summer-long brinkmanship vis-à-vis his commitment to Team England’s cause over and against his apparent desire to maximise his IPL earnings lent credence to the view that he was jeopardising team “unity and purpose of action”, and even that he had been marginalised as a result of his behaviour: “it’s not easy being me in the England dressing room” he complained, infamously. Then came those text messages – no, those, you doos – grousing about his treatment at the hands of the Axis of Andy (an act easily interpreted from a psychological standpoint as unconsciously punishing his ‘persecutors’ by seeking to undermine the unity they have created) and at the time disingenuously spun as offering tips on how to dismiss Strauss out (“Can’t wait till you come round the wicket”). Finally, there was his extraordinary video, morsels of sincerity piercing the PR blancmange in a curious mix of contrition and self-justification, all attempting to position himself back within the group.

It goes without saying that a group of whatever dimension is beset by factors that undermine it from within (what the anthropologists like to call ‘scission’) and without. For cricket teams, there are not only the ravages of defeats, but injury, ageing and renewal cycles, salary jealousies and haggling over bonuses, selectorial issues, availability, personal rivalries, the purring and pettiness of the Ego, as well as events that blow in from the horizon potentially destabilizing the team (Mark Boucher’s appalling, career-ending eye injury could have had this effect on South Africa. In addition, there are unflattering or critical passages from current teammates’ autobiographies, which don’t appear to undermine the “unity of purpose and trust” within Team England as much as text messages. What was it Marshall McCluhan said about the medium being the message? Anyway, in the light of Massumi’s description of structuration processes cited above, these factors are some of the individual’s “margins of deviation” (the group here as an entity distinct from its component parts is an “individual”, a haecceity).

The underlying reason for such continual disequilibrium is simple: the desire to do as you please, the appeal of an unmediated life, is very strong indeed, much stronger than rules. Since the dawn of time, then, socialization can be understood as finding the means to bind the errant desires of its members to the codes, norms, or laws by which that society lives (always with struggle, always with leakage, always with molecular change). An ‘Us’ must be created, a sense of belonging, an embodiment of the group: a social body.* And a cricket team is no different.

Anyway, what is constant in all this is that, while a team spirit can be artificially induced – as paintballing is for the village side, so a visit to Gallipoli was for Steve Waugh’s Australians, and there are people who trade on this supposedly ‘scientific’ ability – its organic emergence, its crossing of a threshold, is only truly intelligible retrospectively (a haecceity: both unambiguously present and vague of provenance). And since this spirit is always already in the process of coming undone, it needs perpetual shoring up.

In a modern international team, the myriad distractions with sponsors and endorsements, untimely nights out on pedalos, persistent screaming at misfields, Twitter (with its potential breach of the sanctity of the dressing room) – all these are potentially ruinous to team spirit, all part of the vicissitudes of that intangible togetherness. Little wonder that, speaking earlier this year about the possible end of Chris Gayle’s exile from the West Indies team, Nasser Hussain – something of a lay expert in creating harmony from disparate elements – argued: “It doesn’t matter so much what he does at training or even on the pitch. It’s in the hotel bar at 11 o’clock that counts, with young impressionable players hanging on his every word…” Leakage.

But the means of creating order – and the sense of belonging and team spirit that will grow gradually from that soil – is not only top-down, implanted through managerial edict. There are also bottom-up mechanisms, thousands of tiny gestures and ‘local’ interactions (at times, so subtle and nuanced that the team doesn’t perceive them and which have already landed their blows on the spirit of the team before the team knows what has happened) that, like street-level social niceties, add up to the character of a community. Ultimately, that is what ‘banter’ is: a form of self-regulation within a group, clipping people’s wings, cauterizing overinflated egos, the wayward member either modifying his behaviour or risking ostracism. Part autopoietic, self-organizing system; part command structure.

Yet by the same token, banter itself must be conducive to harmony, since it too can disrupt the equilibrium – as, for instance, when it becomes bullying, the systematic harassment of a marginal figure (often unconsciously pursued, ironically, as a means of strengthening collective bonds, or at least those of a sub-group within a group). And in the process of becoming-ostracised – apparently the topic of Pietersen and Matt Prior’s heart-to-heart conversation in the lead up to the Lord’s game, after which the former said he was feeling “great” – this perception can induce the worst paranoia, wild accusations and violent lashing out as one struggles over one’s status (the serenity of one’s Ego).

This, of course, is the obvious explanation for the excesses of Pietersen’s behaviour – his perception, recently underlined, that someone in the England dressing room was unambiguously lampooning him from behind the cover of a parody Twitter account: KPGenius. More specifically, his grievance that what went on inside the dressing room was in some sense being leaked beyond its confines, turning a private sanctuary into a public goldfish bowl and completely transforming the nature of the ‘banter’, affecting the relations between the individual players and thus the team as organism. 

Ilya Prigogine

KP, phase transitions, metastability

To return to a paraphrase of the initial question: How do you turn a heterogeneous molecular population (the organs) into ‘molar’ unity (the organism)?

Just as the team is an always open reality, a continual process of binding energies together, so its spirit is not static, but something that fluctuates. Nothing is ever fatal or irreversible (it was Prior who instigated the clear-the-air conversation), even though the continual effort to make the multiple One, to build a team, undergoes these often imperceptible molecular leakages and escapes – the criticisms, the selfishness, the arguments, the glances – that are felt as a perturbation in the ‘molar’ circuits, a disruption of (metastable) order, a dissipation, leading to paranoiac accusations and heavy-handed wing-clipping alike.

Deriving as it does from physics, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of molarity – turning the parts (which never cease being parts that subsist) into a whole, the same body of matter considered as two regimes – is one that nevertheless perfectly captures the abstract dynamics of social processes: i.e. turning a loose agglomeration of bodies into a unity, giving it an identity. Perhaps, finally, it is by drawing out the earlier parallelisms between socialization and nonlinear thermodynamics that we will best grasp the misconceptions around the notion of team spirit, and, by dint of that, the misunderstanding regarding the allegedly heinous or terminal nature of KP’s peccadilloes.

One of the prime figures in nonlinear thermodynamics, Ilya Prigogine, demonstrated – particularly in his book Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Discourse with Nature, co-authored with Isabelle Stengers – that physical systems, under the influence of “attractors” (like poles), tend to self-organize toward an optimal distribution of energy. But – and this is the crucial lesson for team cultures – he also showed that, pace classical thermodynamics, not only are all structures open, to the extent they are linked to an energy source or involve the infolding of the aleatory outside (our bodies need light and water; our societies need food, electricity), some complex systems are “dissipative” (i.e. far from equilibrium) and thus there are several metastable states that a system can attain. In sum, he repudiated linear determinism and simple cause and effect – for instance, sneeringly telling your teammates that they weren’t capable of dominating the world’s best bowling attack necessarily spelling the end of your involvement with the group…

Schematically, and bearing in mind the author’s resolutely non-expert understanding of these matters, we note that water in a pot under the influence of heat (i.e. an intensive difference between outside and inside temperature) leads to different patterns of molecular activity, activity that may look chaotic but about which mathematical modelling reveals strict patterns, or order (“unity of purpose and action”). At a low temperature on the stove, the difference in temperature evens out through a simple, uniform dispersion of heat: conduction. If the temperature is increased, bubbles of hot water break free from colder water and accelerate upwards towards the surface of the water before turning back in a circular motion: convection. Finally, if the temperature is increased further, a system of nested vortexes and eddies – turbulence – increasingly usurps the order of circulating water. Two things: (1) the capacity to ‘fall into’ these three patterns of motion is immanent to the fluid medium, a potential, the crucial thing being the thresholds at which the medium switches from one pattern to another, its “bifurcations”; (2) this matter-energy system self-organizes into an orderly form through local interactions that are ‘ignorant’ of the global system (the molar individual).  

If we persist with the analogy, a metastable state for a cricket team can be attained (for a short time at least) with a high level of molecular activity – that is, with ‘creative tensions’ between its constituent parts – or it may be at a very low-intensity (all players of similar background and disposition: a public school sixth form team, say) with many hypothetical states in-between. In order to assess the nature of team spirit (as a metastable state), what needs to be elucidated is the system’s precise history, its bifurcations points or “phase transitions”: a different form of motion immanent to the molar individual’s interrelation of molecular bodies, but not in any way determining, since these virtual states need to be actualized by another force: always multiple causes (an event is an encounter); no such thing as a closed system…

In this light, Pietersen’s behaviour at Leeds – a phase transition in the team dynamic – did not emerge out of the blue but had as a genealogy a slow, singular labour of causes and their interactions – both truths and perceptions, each of which is as potentially causally efficacious as the other. It was no doubt partly to do with having his head turned by IPL lucre and the moneys received by his globetrotting peers, as Andy Flower acknowledged. It was also, partly, about his difficulty in integrating with the team culture and entering the general mateyness of Swann, Bresnan, Anderson, Cook, Finn, Broad, Prior. As many commentaries have touched upon, this friction is far from fatal or unique in the history of cricket. As was said of Boycott: I don’t care for him but I like his runs.  

Likewise, the departure of Strauss potentially marks a new bifurcation of the previously dissipative system; a possible search for a new equilibrium. Where there’s a will… Apology and penance is of course a social mechanism that compensates the disrupted equilibrium and can in time restore the harmony and seal the breaches. In the sage words of Andrew Strauss prior to the Lord’s Test: “Cricketers are a pretty forgiving bunch. But we need to bring stuff out in the open, we can’t just have it swept under the carpet and I’ve got no idea at this stage how that’s going to work out… I think if we are going to resolve these issues, everyone’s got to take a bit of a long hard look at how things have developed over the last couple of weeks in particular and say, ‘Have we all done everything we can to avoid this happening?’ …But it’s not going to be resolved overnight. If we’re going to resolve those issues we need to do it face to face, away from the media spotlight and away from PR companies.” 

spillage, spirit 

Such ups and downs in the life of a team provide the most compelling argument against Steve Archibald’s hypothesis. Given that the maxim elides the supposedly illusory team spirit with good team spirit, does this mean that, in the case of a poor result, the corresponding dejection is equally false? Surely the flipside of Archibald’s claim would be that there is never team spirit in defeat, which for many who have been involved in team sports might border on the offensive.

Team spirit is not the same thing as elation. It is always there: good, bad, or ugly. It is nothing less than the precise resilience of the bonds permitting a team to dress its wounds and ride out the good and bad sessions, good and bad days, good and bad weeks. When Strauss asserted prior to his hundredth and final Test that “you learn more in defeat than in victory” he was, in a sense, tacitly endorsing the notion that team spirit encompasses this full spectrum of emotions and that the exhilaration of victory is merely the highest plateau or pitch of intensity that it attains.

Most crucially, although it is intangible, it is not supernatural, not at all transcendent as the word spirit perhaps implies. Far from being in some netherworld beyond, it is the potential immanent within an ensemble of bodies to bring forth these intensive states of togetherness in which concerted action pushes the component individuals to great collective achievements, that gets something more out of them.  

Even if team spirit is not felt in all corners of the dressing room in quite the same way, to quite the same degree; even if some people may be part of a team but not fully part of its spirit, that doesn’t render it some dizzy fantasy of collective togetherness. The mutual care for those struggling through tough times, looking out for your mates, creating a supportive environment, singing not only when you’re winning – all of that is real as a bruise on the inside thigh.

Fragile? Perhaps. Precarious? Certainly. Susceptible to a sudden collapse? Without doubt. But just because no-one has ever seen or touched something, that doesn’t make it illusory.

* Simplifying to the extreme, for a long time this attempt to forge a sense of belonging was mediated by custom, belief, and meaning. In ‘primitive’, kinship-based society, it was done through social rituals and marking in bare flesh (tattoos were more than decoration then) so as to fashion a memory for man of obligation, mediation – what Nietzsche called a “cruelist mnemotechnics”. In State societies, the sense of belonging was elaborated principally through symbolic representations of the higher unity (Law, tax money, official language – all substitutes for the distant despot that no-one saw), but these transcendent Ideas must also be continually hewn into the social body, whence flags and anthems. In ‘civilized’, market-based society, the unity is achieved through contractual relations and normative behaviour operates around honouring those contracts – meaning and belief are entirely secondary.

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MIND GAMES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JEREMY SNAPE

By the end of the summer of 1998, a season in which he had failed to make a single first-class appearance, it is fair to say that Staffordshire-born cricketer Jeremy Snape was meandering through a modest, largely unfulfilling career at Northamptonshire. However, a timely move to equally unfashionable Gloucestershire gave his career take-off: he quickly became a vital, point-fielding, middle-order-scrapping, off-spinning cog in the well-oiled and highly successful limited-overs machine that was being assembled there by John Bracewell, as was later recognized by his selection for 10 England ODIs. In 2003, he took his considerable know-how to Leicestershire, where more unlikely team success followed in the shape of their victory in the the second Twenty20 Cup (2004). Snape’s innovative captaincy and development of a rhythm-disrupting ‘moon ball’ in their 2006 repeat triumph earned him another England call-up for the first Twenty20 World Cup in 2007.

For all that, Jeremy was, by his own admission, a fairly limited cricketer and it is really in retirement that his profile in the cricket world has taken off. Having attained a Master’s Degree in Sports Psychology from Loughborough University, in 2005 he founded a consultancy, Sporting Edge, while still playing for the Foxes. The catalyst for this second career came with his recruitment by Leicester-based Jaipuri businessman, Manoj Bedale, to act as psychologist to the franchise he had just bought in the fledgling IPL: Rajasthan Royals. It is now well-known that, under the inspirational, imaginative captaincy of Shane Warne (a man previously known for his outspoken contempt for – or, being slightly kinder, scepticism of – the perceived need for support staff such as Snape, once describing the coach as “what you travel to the ground on”), the rank-outsider Royals were shock winners, and that Snape’s work impressed their other high-profile import, Graeme Smith, to such an extent that a job with the South African team was offered.

Late last year, I caught up with Jeremy – an old Staffs Juniors teammate off whom I once spilled 3 catches in an over-and-a-half against Shropshire at Lilleshall (I was keeping; he was bowling nippy inswingers) – and asked him not only about his experience with South Africa but also about some more general aspects of being a ‘performance coach’ with an elite sports team…

Can you pinpoint a precise moment when the desire to move into sports psychology first took hold?

I guess I always knew that the challenge in my own game was more mental than technical – sometimes even changing technique under pressure – and the fear of failure that came with that made it a very difficult place to be. So I knew that the mental game and my ability to change and adapt, take on different techniques, bat in different positions, and bowl in different styles was always going to be driven by that attitude. That’s what I found so fascinating through the twenty years that I played.

        Obviously, the highest position I got to was playing for England. In front of 120,000 people in India I managed to build a sort of psychological routine that helped me to cope with that and shut out the noise of the screaming locals. That was a big step forward for me. I realized that I could actually create my own zone, as it were, to perform in, and I think that was a good thing.

       I did see a few sports psychologists around that time but I never really felt that anyone had had the experience of playing in high-level pressure, so I took my learning mainly from the practical side, which were the players and the coaches, and their philosophy on things.

That was my next question, actually: whether there were any people from the cricketing world – players, captains, or coaches that you’ve either played with or against – who have been especially influential on your thinking as a cricketer or sports psychologist, be that directly, through advice, or indirectly, through example.

Well, someone like John Bracewell approached the game in a very much more scientific way than I’d seen before and that really appealed to me. I guess coaching is a blend of the science and the art and John Bracewell seemed to do that quite well, whereas a lot of coaches I’d worked with had got quite a haphazard way of doing it. There definitely seemed to be some kind of system [with Bracewell].

       Other influences would be players themselves, people like Nasser Hussain, and [other sportsmen like] Martin Johnson, who lives locally. People like that who lead by example, who just get on with it and lead from the front. That’s a great thing to learn from. But then there are also people like Michael Vaughan who are a bit more relaxed about it but who also have the same sort of steeliness under pressure. That also taught me that there wasn’t only one particular way of doing things and that you could find your own way. So that made it all the more exciting to try and find out what that blueprint was.

I noticed that your official title with the South African cricket squad was described as both “Performance Coach” and “Mental Conditioning Coach”. You’ve said that the role combined cricket coaching and psychological training. Perhaps you could explain a little about how flexible or circumscribed your role is in and around a group, how your role dovetailed with other leaders in the group…

This very much depends on the context that you’re working in, on the philosophy of the leader in the group. When I was working with South Africa under Mickey Arthur there was a lot of freedom to address a wide range of issues, whether it be at a team level, small groups, or one-on-one. Part of the job was to pre-empt situations down the line and help to put coping strategies in place for that, organizationally. Also to support him and Graeme [Smith] in their own decision-making, with selections and press conferences – not necessarily to pick the team, just to help them to have an objective sounding-board to keep them on track with their longer-term aspirations and things – and just linking in to the management team to make sure that everyone was being effective, really. So, I’d often get involved in various areas with other members of the management team where they were struggling to get a player on to the physiotherapist’s bench or in to the fitness schedules or whatever. 

       More recently, with Corrie van Zyl, there’s been a slightly different approach. Mickey’s English-South African, while Corrie’s Afrikaans-South African. With him it was more of a focussed psychological role looking at mental skills, psychometric profiling and one-on-one sessions that were targeted for specific changes rather than a perhaps more informal, counselling-style approach [under Arthur].

       So, yeah, the way you work within an organization would be dependent upon the brief, really, and the way the management sees your role. And that crosses over into business in the same way.

Talking of the ‘transferability’ of your techniques or method, it seems to me that your general principles are fairly straightforward (which is not to say that putting them into practice is quite as easy!!). For instance, you have continually stressed the importance of remaining focussed on processes rather than outcomes, of giving team members clarity over their roles, and of replicating hostile environments in training scenarios in order to make players accustomed to producing under pressure. Sporting Edge also works with businesses, which implies that your methods or techniques are applicable to any domain in which there’s a premium on high performance within a competitive environment. Is that fair enough? Are your principles so easily transferable from cricket to business, or between different sports?

Well, obviously there are some very generic principles in both leadership and team development. For example, in team development, the stages of change, or stages of development, are well known. There are various models but one of them is ‘forming, storming, norming, performing’. Teams go through various dynamic stages where there’s in-fighting and alignment and people moving towards their goals. So those can be linked very clearly to sports teams and business teams, because it’s just human interaction.

        And then the other thing is this idea of leadership where you’ve got to get a balance of the three main skills of a leader: challenging people, supporting people, and inspiring people. And again, they are generic enough to be understood by both coaches and business leaders but the way they use those in the practical sense is very much domain-specific.

       So that’s the key, really, I think: to understand the practical context that people are working in and to be able to fit those [principles] to the organization you’re working with. I think that’s been one of my strengths. Because I’ve come from a practical background and then moved into research, I’m able to look at problems from that angle, rather than being led by research and thinking how I could make that fit the environment. I think the ability to make things fit is crucial. Lots and lots of psychologists know lots and lots of information and lots and lots of theories, but unless you can make that real for the people that you’re working with and get them to adopt it as their new style, then you’re going to get a blockage.

I wanted to ask you about how you carry yourself when around a group with which you’re working – when you are in a dressing room environment, or even socialising with team members, do you have to be ‘on guard’ at all times?

It is difficult to manage that sometimes, especially when I’d probably be at a similar age to a lot of the guys that I was working with. But it’s something that you develop over time and, as I get older, I’m sure that sort of distance from the team will be created naturally as they’re in their twenties and I get into my forties.

By extension, then, does a conflict ever arise between telling the truth and what might be called an ‘emotional tactics’ or ‘psychological massaging’ that you have to perform in order to keep players’ moods positive? White lies.

I think the key thing is being authentic. Positive rhetoric doesn’t get you anywhere, really, especially in high-profile sports teams. They want the genuine belief that the players and team can progress. Sometimes you just have to be very honest and say “Guys, we’re struggling here”. But you’ve also got to be slightly more aspirational and slightly more positive than the group in general because you’re ultimately trying to lift them all the time. So whether you’re using something quite negative to motivate them or something quite shiny and bright to motivate them, that’s your job to work out what that is and move them forward.

        I think that knowledge and skills are very important to psychologists, but the relationships within the team are critical, and if the players know that you’re on their side and care very deeply about their individual performance and team performance then, to be honest, you’re half way there to being able to make an impact. That was a barrier that I faced early in the South African job – especially because it was a tour of England. They were trying to work out whether I was a spy in the camp. But after two years now I’ve got some strong relationships and I’ve been able to make some strong impacts.

On the subject of impacts, it seems to me that – in sport and in life – people may fail to realize their potential for a number of reasons: there are uncontrollable external events that derail a life (the death of a loved one, a car crash, financial ruination, illness, etc), events which might – as far as realizing one’s potential is concerned – be definitive, utterly beyond the scope of a psychological intervention. Then there are ‘natural’ barriers formed by someone’s levels of talent, which similarly cannot be radically altered by psychological means (let’s call this the ‘silk purse, sow’s ear’ theory…). Beyond these barriers, however, a psychologist must see a large sphere of potential intervention and influence. So, do you think there is an intrinsic limit to the scope or effectiveness of an ‘intervention’ by a sports psychologist, a barrier perhaps provided by either an individual player’s ‘character’ or by a culture? Or can these be eroded away?

Often, certain teams will have a particular mindset and a receptiveness to change, as do individuals. Again, that depends on the leadership – have people been talking about growth and development and learning and personal change? Or have they been talking about talent, intelligence, and skill (which are very much entities that you’ve either got or you haven’t)? I think the healthiest environments and the healthiest individuals believe in growth and development, and that’s something, obviously, that can bring in specialists and challenge people to move toward their potential.

        So, there is a case that teams have barriers or resistance to new information and psychology but, again, you’ve just got to back yourself to get to understand the people and, generally, after a period of time, you do get to know what drives the people individually and that’s when you can start to make change. But it’s better to be with people for longer periods of time, and longer contact time, because then you see them in work, outside work, on highs, in lows, and you get to know the behavioural profile of people so that you can start to pick your time. And that’s one of the biggest skills of a psychologist: to know when just to be a psychologist, and when to do psychology. Sometimes it’s actually best just to sit back and watch, and not say anything. When you feel like you’ve got a lot of passion and information that you want to give, it’s sometimes difficult to do that, but I think people respect you when you stay quiet, let the guys be, and sort of think through it a little bit.

Inevitably, I have to ask you something about the phenomenon of choking, a charge thrown at the South African team ever since the Klusener/Donald run out at the 1999 World Cup and then with the Duckworth/Lewis fiasco at the next that caused their elimination. Firstly, do you think it’s too simplistic – perhaps even malicious – to ascribe this trait to the South Africans, as though the label “choker” encapsulated some sort of national characteristic, particularly when there could be perfectly good cricketing (i.e. non-psychological) reasons for some of their high-profile defeats?

I actually don’t think it is a fair tag. I’ve looked into it and there’s no particular pattern, especially with the South African team. There are just so many different variables that you could look at, with tactics, selection, preparation, individual thought-processes at the time… And it’s also very difficult to say when a game was lost, you know. It might be that people say that somebody choked in the last over of the game, but actually the more ‘criminal’ mistakes might often be made earlier in the day in cricket. So, it’s very difficult to pinpoint whether that was choking or normal underperformance.

        But there’s no doubt that a finite tag like that has quite an impact on a team and it’s something that they have to shake off at some stage and, ultimately, the performance mindset of an individual and a team has to be very specific and optimistic. You’ve got to know your game, know your plan, be very aware of where the game context is at that moment and do what’s…not necessarily do what you planned, but do what’s effective at the time, and I think that if you can keep that mindset quite open and also commit to that plan once you’ve re-jigged it or stuck with it, then that’s probably the most important thing in terms of execution of your skills.

        Often we see people holding back because of a lack of commitment to the plans and that can quite simply be because people have started to look at the distractions and what might happen if they fail.

So, could the “choker” label become a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’: the more it’s said (justifiably or otherwise) in the media, the more it penetrates the dressing room, the more it’s believed (privately or collectively), and thus the more it happens?

Again that just depends on the ability of an individual, first, but also of a team, to zone in on what’s important. And the ‘chokers’ tag isn’t important when the bowler’s running in to bowl, you know. The key processes of a player’s performance strategy and psychological routine are what’s important. And those processes make sure that you’re insulated against any distractions. It means that you probably deliver your best delivery, your best bowling. And if you do that then you’re more likely to win the situation. And if you’re more likely to win situation after situation, then you’re probably going to win the game.

        So, that’s the way you’d break down from the way the media talk about ‘choking’. You’d drill it down to an individual situation and you’d try and win the moments by people being focussed on what their job is and being aware of where the game is going.

You have said elsewhere that the last 15 years in cricket have been about working on players’ bodies and the next 15 will be about working on their minds. So, that should keep you busy…

Yeah, it’s an interesting field and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my first few years in it.

I have written in brief elsewhere on the “chokers” tag as being less to do with representing the truth of a situation as it is a pragmatic act designed to affect others’ behaviour: in short, a stick to beat them with...

[photo © Hannah Edwards] 

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DON'T MENTION THE "C-WORD"

A Hard Day's Night

By now – and excuse the pun – the word must really stick in the throat. Chokers… Powerful things, words, powerful enough to make you, well, choke. For sticks and stones do break bones, but names can also sometimes hurt. Indeed, a word – an insult – can be heard so often that, embedded in one’s most intimate thoughts, it eventually comes to be believed (“you’re nothing but a waste of space”). A self-fulfilling prophecy. But what exactly does the ‘chokers’ tag mean? And is it true? 

We should first acknowledge that meaning is a slippery thing – y’know what I mean? And yet, despite all the difficulties we get in to with language – not meaning what we say, not saying what we mean – people nevertheless tend to assume that meaning is pretty stable and transparent. All one needs to do is pull words from a vocabulary, a dictionary, either alone or in combinations, and apply them correctly to things or events in ‘reality’, right?

Wrong. Talk to linguistics professors (as I’m sure you often do) and what will become apparent is the lack of any consensus over how meaning and language work. One only has to consider such everyday words as ‘justice’, ‘truth’ or ‘beauty’ to realize that, even if the abstract meaning is agreed upon, there’s no simple, transparent correspondence between the words on the page, or our lips, and the things in reality (or ‘referents’).

Furthermore, the same referent can have more than one word – googly, wrong’un or Bosie?; lap, paddle, or sweep?; bouncer or bumper? – while what one culture sees as a single referent can be, for another, several distinct things, whence the Inuit having twenty-nine different words for snow!

So, rather than reflect a reality that’s there for all to see, words shape – and are shaped by – reality. They are tools for getting things done: promising, apologising, marrying; distracting, intimidating; not falling through a specific type of ice while hunting... And they are thus anything but neutral – quite often weapons, in fact. All the best sledgers know that you don’t have to be truthful to have the desired effect…

In order for slippery, specialised words to stick to a referent – the C-word to a cricket team, for instance – an authoritative source or expert is usually required. Labels must be correctly applied (it can sometimes be a question of life and death). So it was that, in the aftermath of the Proteas’ exit from the World Cup, the CEO of Cricket South Africa, Gerald Majola, confessed, in a manner redolent of a new inductee at Alcoholics Anonymous: “We've always had this chokers tag with us; unfortunately we've allowed it to stick. We have to accept the problem and then deal with it.”

For all Majola’s seniority and tangible patriotic heartache, perhaps his expert credentials are not so watertight. Maybe a more authoritative source is provided by the sports psychologist Jeremy Snape, former Performance Director with the South African team and still engaged with them in a consultative capacity.

Snape’s general definition of choking is “poor decision-making under pressure” and he draws a distinction between that and “normal underperformance”. Furthermore, he argues that “there are so many different variables you could look at, with tactics, selection, preparation, and decisions, that it’s impossible to pinpoint when a match was lost.” Perhaps with Klusener’s hero-to-zero performance in the 1999 semi-final in mind, he continued: “What is to say that failure to deliver skills in the last over was more ‘criminal’ than an error made at the start of a game?”

With a post-World Cup de-brief to conduct following his IPL commitments with Rajasthan Royals, Snape is still far too involved with the team to offer a public verdict on the latest disappointment but says that he would first look to analyse “the statistical evidence for par scores, percentage of games won chasing under lights, etc” before reaching any firm conclusions.

So, whether or not the C-word corresponds to a trait of South African sportsmen (a Rugby World Cup victory suggests otherwise), to this cricket team (again, chasing down 414 in a Test match in Australia is strong counter-evidence), or even just to a set of performances on a particular day, one thing is certain: they will only un-stick the label, only silence the braying armchair punditariat and journalists tipsy on schadenfreude, by producing a high-profile victory. And when they do, the monkey on their back and albatross around their neck will be delighted for a change of company. 

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