Ken Borland

The mental weaknesses of the Proteas cricket team, especially on the subcontinent, are well-known with even coach Mark Boucher pointing to them in the last week as an ongoing problem following their 2-0 Test series defeat in Pakistan. And Jeremy Snape is a former England cricketer turned sports psychologist who is well-acquainted with how it feels to crumble under pressure.

Snape, an off-spinner and useful lower-order batsman, tells the story of how he became interested in sports psychology.

“It was at Eden Gardens in Kolkata in front of 120 000 fans playing an ODI for England in 2002 and I ran out Freddie Flintoff. My mind just went blank in a tight run-chase; there were all those people screaming at me and not for me, but the voice in my head was still the loudest of all. That’s when I started to become fascinated with the psychology of sport,” Snape told Saturday Citizen.

He completed his Masters degree in sports psychology and one of his first jobs as a performance coach was with the South African cricket team, between 2008 and 2010. Which just so happens to be the time when Mickey Arthur and Graeme Smith took the Proteas to the pinnacle of world cricket; it is arguably the most glorious period in South Africa’s cricket history.

So Snape is well-acquainted too with the South African psyche. As someone who played in that triumphant 2008-2010 period, Boucher will also be aware of Snape’s philosophies.

The 47-year-old founder of the Sporting Edge performance consultancy describes the current Proteas as probably being too focused on the pressures of achieving a certain outcome rather than just focusing on the process.

“The mental game is the final frontier for cricket after improving fitness levels to those of real athletes and the era of analytics that has really made techniques transparent. Cricketers spend days after days in the nets practising their drives and pulls, but hardly any time on the mental game, and yet it is your mindset that defines your success.

“Cricket is the same as golf in that a round of golf takes four hours but you’re only actually playing, on the ball, for 22 minutes. But the key is in the routine as you approach the ball and it’s the time between deliveries that’s most important in cricket as well. The mental challenges are obviously what you don’t see watching the game and pressure does crazy things.

“It’s like when you lose your car keys and you start looking in the most stupid places for them; your brain gets scrambled and you can’t think clearly. And we need to remember we are dealing with humans, they are not computers wearing Proteas shirts. The humanity is what makes for the incredible stories of sport, but the frustrations as well,” Snape said.

As the old cliché goes: take it ball-by-ball.

“There’s a lot of emotion in South African sport around the outcome of matches and that incredible passion fuels commitment and drive. But you need the players to be calm and in control, so it’s like two opposites. They need to focus on the process of what they’re doing rather than the outcome, they need to take the emotion out of it and then they will be much more in control and consistent.

“They need to be in a clear, objective state and not contaminated by their history on the subcontinent. The new challenge is just that one ball, the next ball. You need like a volume control that you can drop down, mental toughness is about being able to dial up and down. You still need an end target because that’s what winning is about, but it’s about zooming back and being able to manage what is important right now,” Snape said.

Being patient is also a key quality, especially when you are out of your comfort zone.

“On the subcontinent, the biggest threat is your own frustration. So I devised a practical exercise – a 10×10 matrix which was a grid of numbers, a bit like a bingo card. The numbers from one to 100 were randomly arranged and the players have to complete finding each number in order. The first few are found generally quite quickly, but then it takes more time to find the others.

“It’s a metaphor for Test cricket when runs are often hard to come by; times when you have to absorb pressure, be patient and over-ride your frustration. T20 cricket is obviously different – that’s about being able to switch between two rooms in your mind: your strategy room where you look at where the fielders are, the wind direction, the shorter boundary, but then when you step into your crease you are in the next room, you stop thinking and you just react to what you see,” Snape, who helped Shane Warne’s Rajasthan Royals to the IPL title, explains.

It would seem the mental side of the game is just as important for this current Proteas team to get right as the technical if they are to return to being a force in world cricket again.

*Jeremy Snape’s Sporting Edge consultancy provides keynote events as well as digital learning experiences through a series of videos and podcasts, that members can subscribe to, going inside the minds of champions. See https://www.sportingedge.com/