SPECTATOR SPORT
Test of psychology
Simon Barnes
I SEEM to have collected a few textbooks on sports psychology over the years.
The team must seek to widen and deepen the system by adding more loops where they rein- force emerging patterns, by breaking links which block or hinder change and by seeking out resistance so that it is able to build the concerns into the continuous improvements of its project.
You can't argue with facts like that.
Actually, the best material on adversarial psychology is to be found in three books by Stephen Potter, the gamesmanship man. I look forward to reading a doctoral thesis on the contribution Potter has made to the psychology, as opposed to the vocabulary, of sport.
If you're not one up, you're one down: a pithy Potterian phrase to take away as Eng- land escaped with a draw in the first Test Match against Australia early this week after Apocalypse Stopped Play. The cur- rent Ashes series is a ruthlessly compacted business, with the second Test starting this weekend in Perth. In the brief interim of aeroplanes, nets and sessions with coach, physio and, yes, team psychologist, the teams will have to work out the difference between one-upness and one-downness. And so, as the Little Hanses of sport lie on their couches and discuss their dreams the rest of us will ponder the eternal mys- tery of who wins most from a losing draw. There is nothing in sport so profoundly sat- isfying as batting for a draw, denying — or what feels like cheating — your opponents of certain victory, not with skill but with sheer bloody-mindedness. England won last summer's series for precisely that rea- son. South Africa, failing to exploit a posi- tion of one-upmanship, found themselves, despite their lead, in a position of moral one-downness.
It won't quite work with Australia this time, since it was the bloodiness of the weather rather than the English mind that did the cheating. And if any single person in the series is one up, it is Glenn McGrath, Australia's top fast bowler. A fast bowler exploits Potterian maxims more blatantly than any other practitioner in sport. The initial salvoes of any Test series are about his assertion of one-upman- ship over the leading batsmen. McGrath has achieved this over England's best batsman, Mike Atherton. He got Atherton twice, skewered between defence and defiance. That the rest of England's batting did not follow Atherton was cheering enough in the first innings. Unfortunately, they reverted to that ancestral pattern in the second. The psychologist will no doubt be working on ways in which the boys can deal with the traumatic loss of the father figure.
The phenomenon of groups clinging desper- ately to a failed strategy is termed 'group think'. It occurs when teams lose their sense of individual identity and become completely identified with the norms and culture of the team — an example of negative confluence.
Clinging desperately to a failed strategy: nothing save the Potterian maxim quoted above sums up the prevailing psychology of English cricket so well. Potter defines one- up as 'how to make the other man feel that something has gone wrong, however slight- ly'. Conclusion: at 0-0, Australia are cur- rently one up.
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