Elite coaching and KP’s Donnie Darko moment

Donnie: Well, life isn’t that simple. I mean, who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keeps the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love.

Kitty Farmer: Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions.

Donnie: Okay. But you’re not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account here, like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can’t just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else.

(Donnie Darko, 2001)

Lancashire Head Coach, Peter Moores, was the keynote speaker at a business event I attended recently. He spoke for 45 minutes, fluently and engagingly, before taking questions from the audience.

I found Moores particularly interesting on the subject of strengths and weaknesses. He recalled how when he first asked a group of players to identify three strengths and three weaknesses, on average, the players came back with two strengths and four weaknesses. Moores’ approach is to develop strengths, rather than correct weaknesses. He gave the example of Alastair Cook’s preference to score on the leg-side. Moores argued that too many coaches have tried to get Cook to develop his off-side strokes, which don’t come as naturally. Cook, he believes, should invest that time in refining even further his leg-side shots.

Moores’ topic was elite coaching and perhaps at that level, a batsman’s weakness, if not causing regular early dismissals, can be parked to concentrate on what the player is really, really good at. I have read since that Graeme Smith came to the same conclusion about his own reliance on leg-side scoring shots – capitalise on it, don’t qualify it.

Moores’ precepts were generally positive and humanistic. I didn’t detect the micro-management of his players that some observers report as the stifling influence of the Flower years on English international cricket. He expressed his conception of the coaching process as being ‘inside out’, not ‘outside in’. Players learn and develop because they have the will to do so – to which the coach contributes through enthusiasm. But learning doesn’t happen because the coach decides to apply it (from outside) to the players.

“I love words,” the former England Coach explained. I am pretty fond of them, too, but it was from that point that I started to wonder, to question what it would be like in that changing room. Maybe I just want a cricket coach to declare his adoration for on-drives, or flighted off-breaks. Or, maybe, it all just started sounding a little bit psycho-religio-motivational.

Moores had made an off-hand comment about England’s Ashes defeat, while acknowledging his lack of privileged insight, being because they “knew the rewards of victory, but had forgotten the consequences of defeat”.  Complacency, which I take this formula to mean, could well have played a part, but it’s the sort of unproveable theory that can be applied to any side that loses unexpectedly. Perhaps, I am being harsh and he was just being tactful in avoiding more specific criticisms given the possibility that he may be asked to re-join Team England?

The Lancashire Head Coach hadn’t mentioned the cricketer whose resistance had ended his period as England Coach. But questions from the audience meant that that day wouldn’t be one when Moores could avoid talking about Kevin Pietersen. KP, Moores suggested, had crossed a line that breached the team’s culture  in Australia, just as he had five years earlier.

I inferred, from the strength of Moores’ attachment to a particular usage of the words he loved, where that line may have been. Moores provided a series of ‘opposites’ that he argued elite coaching had to navigate. The ‘opposition’ that seemed most critical to his way of working was between ‘belief’ and ‘doubt’. “Belief is the enemy of Doubt.”

I am not an elite performer. I readily accept that those that operate at the very top of their professions tend to have great confidence. Simplification and clarification may be crucial to keeping their minds sharply focused on the task at hand. But with the luxury of my mediocrity comes a distaste and distrust of interpreting experience through adages. Moreover, doubt can be a good thing: it leads us to challenge accepted truths, driving us into new and interesting ventures. Belief, on the other hand, so easily closes the mind to learning.

Moores’ formula might work for the majority of elite performers in his teams, but it’s too rigid to take account of everyone’s needs. There’s even psychological research into sports performers that finds some self-doubt is associated with success – more than confidence is.

You can’t just lump everything into these two categories and deny everything else.

In the eponymous movie, Donnie Darko, sensitive, troubled teenager, was reacting against the spread within his school of a simplistic, self-help liturgy, peddled by a televangelist-like salesman.

Imagine now, a singularly talented cricketer, edgy and awkward, prone to expressing himself insensitively, questions a tactic used by the team. He’s told that “doubt is the enemy of belief” – or whatever team maxim Andy Flower insisted upon. Does the cricketer keep with the programme, being told what to believe and what not to doubt, when he knows that if he scores a three hour hundred he can turn around his team’s fortunes?  Donnie Darko, when told to place everything on the line between fear and love, told his teacher to shove it up their ass. Perhaps that’s where the Ashes tour menu book ended up as well. Donnie had his contract terminated, too.