Daily Times

Cricket is a unique sport on many levels. On the one hand it is a team game played by 11 individuals who combine to form an effective fielding unit, where thinking and acting as one is the ultimate aim similar to many other sports such as football, hockey and basketball. On the other hand, cricket is an individual sport with the batter playing, in some senses, for themselves and their own individual performance. At the same time, though, cricket is also a contest between two individuals where the batter and bowler battle to try and get the upper hand in an attempt to land the knockout blow. This dual makes cricket a sport that brings with it many psychological challenges and demands that players must deal with to be successful. The constraints of the game, including the long duration, breaks in play for drinks, lunch, tea, and of course weather, all create a series of obstacles that successful players need to respond effectively to. In sum, arguably the biggest challenge to a cricketer is not the learning of the skills as most of the players have reasonable techniques. Instead, the biggest challenge is being able to deal with the many psychological factors that can affect thinking and concentration levels during a game.

A lack of concentration is a decreased ability to focus your thoughts on something. Concentration while batting, bowling and fielding is considered the fundamental characteristic of any player. The bad patch in a cricketer’s career is often resulted due to a lack of an ability which is rendered as concentration. This reduced ability or a lapse in concentration resulted in low batting and bowling averages and effect the players fielding ability and resultantly the players are usually dropped out of the team battling with the issue of concentration. A lapse in concentration is often referred to a situation where someone is caught in a low level of attention, intense attention to a single object of focus that makes him oblivious to events around him or an unwarranted distraction of attention from the object by irrelevant thoughts or environmental events. concentration problem can evolve behavioral mistakes. The problem makes a person to attribute the mistake to his hand rather than his self, because he was not paying attention. We are used to see our players caught napping when a ball comes towards them or while batting they fail to capitalize a good start and in bowling they are brilliant in one session but appear in total disappointment in the second spell. The clinicians diagnosed this condition as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression. The person suffering with these symptoms have to pay the price of such mental condition, but, if you are a cricketer, it cost you a lot sometimes the career.

So let’s explore what performance-related psychological factors will be at play for when our cricket team is out to play against their opponents. The foremost is self-efficacy or the confidence. When you have the confidence you feel like you’re never going to lose it, but when you haven’t got it, you feel like you’re never going to get it. Due to the many uncontrollable factors in cricket like playing conditions, umpiring decisions and the fact that statistically cricketers fail more times than they succeed, the ability for cricketers to regulate and maintain confidence is crucial for success. When out in the middle, a cricketer’s confidence can change from situation to situation as they are faced with different batsmen, bowlers, playing conditions and match situations. It is important for the players to have an awareness of how confidence level is influenced, and their most important sources of confidence information. They must develop strategies to regulate confidence or concentration level among themselves throughout a game, test series and season.

Empirically, data indicates that confidence to be a strong and consistent predictor of individual athletic performance. Confidence levels are proposed to impact sport performance by determining levels of motivation that will be reflected in the challenges individuals undertake, the effort they expend, and their levels of perseverance. Confident judgements have also been shown to influence certain thought patterns (e.g. goal intentions, worries, causal attributions) and emotional reactions (e.g. pride, shame, happiness, sadness) that influence motivation. Typically, people exhibiting high confidence levels work harder, persist in the task longer and achieve at a higher level over and above those who doubt their own capabilities. In the neighboring country cricketers having their batting averages in higher fifties get a chance to be selected in the national squad while in our country their batting average is in lower thirties to become a part of selection process. This clearly reflects in the results achieved by both contemporary sides. Our players lack confidence because they lack consistent longer periods of concentration to perform at any level of the game.

Our Cricket Board is trying to cope with the situation by hiring foreign coaches, physiotherapists, computer analyst and by bringing specialist coaches for every department of the game. But, the problem persists as we are not trying to find the real reason behind the issue. The problem of low concentration can be witnessed in the earliest stage when the children get into schools. It is a mental condition in which the children experience low levels of attention and frequent distraction. Only the teachers and parents can discover the problem as some children fail to concentrate for longer period of times in their studies or in the given task. The wise parents and teachers interfere with strategies that suits according to the situation to keep children interested in their studies by altering work schedules to make them shorter and having frequent rest periods. There is a need to appoint psychologist at school levels which can help the children to extend their concentration levels which is effecting them in their studies and ultimately in all walks of life including professional sports.

It is observed that majority of the mistakes committed by children are attributed as behavioral problem instead of treating them as concentration problem. There is no system to adhere this problem. We still believe that psychologist and psychiatrist are only meant to help mentally imbalance and insane people. Infect, we never consider this issue as a problem, so there is no one to help our teenagers in schools or in our hospitals. Our sports centers and the cricket associations are also not inclined to have the services of psychologists.

These experts can help to build confidence, considered an important factor for success in any sport, a variety of psychological strategies like modeling, feedback, imagery, self-talk and hypnosis have been used by sport psychologists to stimulate athletes’ regulation of confidence levels and it improve their concentration level as well. Typically, these strategies are suggested to be effective by influencing one or more sources of self-efficacy in formation which in turn influence expectations and then behaviour. To illustrate, observing competent models successfully perform actions, or the self-modelling of actions, influences self-confidence by conveying information about the sequence of actions one should use to succeed. Self-modelling in cricket may involve a player recording their own performance (either in practice or competition) as they successfully complete a series of cricket tasks or skills (e.g. playing a particular shot or taking a catch in the slips).

The writer can be reached at malikmasud@hotmail.com