Well-structured coaching dehumanizes cricket. Here is what we should do instead Sport

I believe that cricket coaches should have an oath that is no different from what Hippocrates set out in Of the Epidemics: “Do Evil First.”

At a time when the role of head coach with Australian cricket is in the spotlight, it’s worth looking at the role of coaching in the game more broadly.

Developed cricket countries have lost natural environments that were much of their developmental structure in the past. In these environments, young cricketers learn by looking at good players and imitating them in pick-up matches with family and friends.

In general, all instructions received were rudimentary, and the absence of adults was generally minimal. In these unstructured environments, players developed a natural style while learning to compete against older players, during which time they learned critical coping and survival skills.

There are still many cities on the Indian subcontinent where coaching facilities are rare and young people play in the streets and empty areas without the disruption of formal coaching. Here, many of their current stars have learned the game.

MS Dhoni, with whom I worked in India, is a good example of a fight that developed its abilities and learned to play that way. By competing against more experienced individuals on a variety of surfaces in the early stages of his development, Dhoni developed the decision-making and strategic skills that have distinguished him from many of his peers. He is one of the sharpest cricket minds I have ever encountered.

In England, on the other hand, there are very few such natural environments and their players are produced in a narrow crowd of public schools with an emphasis on coaching manual. For this reason, their strokes have lost much of their elegance and elasticity.

Games invented and played by young people are dynamic and foster creativity, joy, flexibility in technical implementation, tactical understanding and decision-making, which are often lacking in batting at the highest level.

Environments in which the stroke is intended to reduce the control of the technique and to divide it into several distinct parts reflect a misunderstanding of how complex the stroke is.

Without exception, when an adult participates with children playing cricket, they break down the game and kill its energy by emphasizing the right technique. This reduces the dynamic, immersive learning environment to a smooth and lifeless exercise that does little to improve the beat in games.

The growth of structured stroke coaching has not only taken the strokes forward, but has actually led to a drop in strokes. Highly structured environments and excessive focus on teaching players to perform the “right” technique dehumanize cricket.

The environments in which an attempt is made to reduce the punch to control the technique and divide it into several distinct parts reflect a misunderstanding of how complex the punch is. A quality beat requires good imagination, creativity and the ability to recognize and respond to challenges in matches.

To solve this problem, we need to change the training of coaches. Instead of educating them as a source of all wisdom, we need to give them the opportunity to become leaders in creative learning environments where young cricketers learn the game with minimal attack and adult harassment.

In this approach, the work of coaches involves creating the conditions for learning by engaging in a physical learning environment – which requires some degree of awareness and decision-making.

There are a couple of significant challenges in this coaching status quo. One is the transition from the idea that a coach owns all the information he passes on to players as passive recipients to a coach who facilitates and guides players to build their own knowledge as active learners.

I hear those who believe that batting is all about technology ask how these “free range” cricketers become technically savvy, but I would remind them that during the first 100 years of test cricket, the best were bred this way.

Don Bradman wrote in his stunning book The Art of Cricket, published 64 years ago: “I’d rather tell a young player what to do than how to do it.” I would take this further by suggesting that good coaches should also help them learn when and why.

Training must focus on improving game play by placing learning in contexts that reproduce game conditions to varying degrees so that training improvements lead to improvements in matches.

This doesn’t just mean playing cricket instead of training. It means designing and managing modified games and activities that aim for specific outcomes that match the skills, attitudes and motivations of the players, as well as the desired learning outcomes – either for children learning to play or for the highest level batsmen.

The best coaches ask questions to get players to think and work together to solve problems. The purpose of the questions is to get players to come up with solutions to the problems presented to them.

This does not ignore the technique, but instead develops it by allowing players to learn and improve the performance of the technique during the match. This develops decision-making, flexibility of implementation, awareness, and the ability to adapt to the challenges faced by assaults.

The best perpetrators developed their abilities over a long period of time by playing and learning in creative, informal learning environments from an early age, without being overly focused on complementing someone else’s understanding of what the ideal technique should look like.

It would be good for England to look at their coaching methods and how the best bats develop their skills as part of the review they begin after their second drastic defeat in Australia. The English punch was classless, imaginative, and lacked flexibility throughout this tour. If I were in charge of English cricket, I know what I would do first – but I don’t give that information for free!

If they don’t do something dramatic, they are accused of behaving as in the aphorism often misdiagnosed to Albert Einstein: Insanity does the same thing over and over again and expects different results.