A new batsman comes to the wicket. He surveys the field,
making a careful note of the fielders’ positions. After blocking a few
deliveries, he starts to play some more expansive shots, and hits them,
unerringly, straight to the fielders.
From a ruck, the ball is passed to the first receiver who
runs forward a couple of steps before being driven back in the tackle by two
defenders.
A succession of crosses and corners fail to beat the first
defender. When the winger does finally manage to locate his centre forward, the
latter isn’t able to generate enough power in his header to trouble the
goalkeeper.
What’s going on? The answer is that each player is telling
his subconscious brain to pay attention to the position of the opposing players
(or his own player in the last example). The brain is then told what skill to
execute. The task is then carried out using those visual cues as targets.
Even if you told your brain something like “Don’t hit the
ball to the fielder”, the subconscious brain, which doesn’t understand spoken
language very well, just hears “hit – ball – fielder”.
The answer, if you’re a coach, is not to tell your players
to look for where the fielders/defenders are, but to look for where the gaps
are. So a new batsman would survey the field looking for those gaps, and maybe
start visualising hitting the ball into those gaps. In net practice, you can
put markers on the net to indicate fielding positions. But if the batsman
doesn’t seem good at avoiding them, you might want to highlight the gaps between
them using coloured markers.
You might also want to remind your players that cricket,
rugby and football pitches are pretty large compared to the size of even
adults. If they were a bird flying over the ground they would see lots of gaps.
So in cricket, if there are few gaps in a ring of close fielders, they need to
think about how they could safely hit the ball over them into those gaps.
Imagining they were high above the ground looking down might help them.
In sports such as football and rugby, the task for coaches
is to get their players to think of themselves as “space invaders”.
David Donner
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