I remember when I was playing professional cricket, it used to get quite hectic at times where I had to continuously play throughout the year. Firstly, I’d had to work extremely hard for many years in order to play first-class cricket and then continue with this work ethic to retain my contract and position in the game. I had to think about performing every single time I went out to bat. We had to play for four to five months in a season and I was away from home, family and friends for long periods. After that, I started coming to the UK as an overseas professional cricketer, brought its own stresses at times as well. Because of these experiences, I can relate to many cricketers at all levels of the game and across a wide range of ages, as I am sure almost all cricketers go through periods of not enjoying the game.
One result of being able to successfully handle all the pressure and stress would be that life could get quite hectic at times – if you’re performing well, then everybody around you praises you and raises you up onto a pedestal, making you some kind of superstar, but equally, if you’re not performing well then you can get isolated. This can happen at any level, but it’s magnified in the professional game. Cricket can quickly become your identity and everybody knows you only as a cricketer – in some situations, wherever you go you are only spoken to as a cricketer, even if you don’t want to, you still have to tell people about your performances and talk about the dame. At the beginning of a career (or a lifetime playing the game), this can be fun and exciting – at the very top of the game it has multiple benefits – but after a period of time it can start to get on your nerves! You can’t get away from it at all and everyone starts following your stats and performance and of course, they have an opinion on everything.
Because of the nature of cricket, which is a team sport but where each player must also perform as an individual during a game, you are always under some sort of pressure of performance – even if you’re a batter who doesn’t bowl, you have an important role to fulfil in the field, no matter the format. As an individual, there is an expectation on you to always make runs, take wickets, keep well, take catches or save runs in the field – some or all of these actions may contribute to winning games. On the other hand, the match win success rate in cricket is less then 50%, which means that you have to face failures more than success.
For an individual (or individuals) who perform well enough to win a match for their team, there will be corresponding players on the other side who end up losing. Just take the England vs New Zealand Test Match in Nottingham last week – the upper hand in the game changed hands many times and for long periods of the match New Zealand were on top – Boult was superb with the ball and Darryl Mitchell again excelling with the bat, but they were on the losing side due to brilliant individual performances from Root, Bairstow and Stokes. Even the best players in the world have to go through tough times where they don’t know what to do – stand-in NZ captain Tom Latham said the team would take a few days away from the game to get over the result.
It’s easy to see why a lot of professional players go through a ‘burn out’ stage where they stop enjoying the game and only play because they don’t have a choice due to external factors such as money or contracts. Players of all ages stop because they fall out of love for the sport, but we have to remember why we started playing cricket in our childhood – why we enjoyed it so much and why we just wanted to play… being with our friends, being competitive, staying fit and healthy – whatever it was. So now the question is how can we exchange all the pressures of competitive cricket with enjoyment, specially when we are going through a bad patch?
How can we still enjoy the game when we’re not in the winning side, or when our own performances are not impacting matches in the way we would like? If we’re out of form, the temptation is to want to practice a lot to get back in form again, but we need to have some perspective and space as well just to relax a little. If it’s a long period without success, there could be a deep negative cycle which bad performances inevitably bring with them, so stepping back could be a good way of re-setting our focus and a short break may re-kindle our passion for the sport. I have found out myself and know of many successful athletes around the world always who have other interests and passions outside of their own sport. Some like to do other sports, travel or read books to put their mind away from all those stresses – we even saw the England players completing Sudoku puzzles on the balcony during a Test Match!
Fairly obviously, if you’re not playing particularly well and your performance graph starts to do down, you are unlikely to enjoy cricket. If this continues over a long period, you might not feel like playing at all. It’s therefore very important to not only find ways of enjoying cricket when you’re not in a winning team, or are not performing well personally and remember why you started in the first place. Secondly, it’s equally important to find ways to switch off from the game; personally, I have found that going out into nature refreshes me and gives me a lot of energy, helping me think clearly and re-focussing if I need to – what will you do to ensure you always enjoy your cricket?