I was recently introduced to the Emperor Galba (not personally I hasten to add) by an old family friend and classicist. AD69 was ‘the year of four emperors’ (not to be confused with AD1988 – ‘the summer of four captains’) and he was the first of them before, rather unfortunately for him, being decapitated and dismembered by a crowd of protestors who had gathered at the Palatine Hill (thankfully,  the same fate didn’t befall Mike Gatting after England fans discovered his transgressions with a barmaid…).

Anyway, I believe said friend and classicist was trying to draw parallels with the aftermath of the US election when he told me about Galba, ‘for whom Tacitus wrote the best, and most untranslatable, of all political epitaphs, ‘capax imperii nisi imperasset’ – capable of being an emperor, if only he hadn’t been one.’ My thoughts, however, as is their wont turned to Johnny Bairstow – capable of being a great test player, if only he hadn’t been one.

I was speaking to Phil just after Bairstow had been called up to the team in Sri Lanka, been roundly praised for his ability to play spin, and then promptly dropped for the first two tests against India. I made the point (tongue in cheek) that as Bairstow seems to thrive on proving people wrong, perhaps this was some psychological ploy by Ed Smith finally to get the best out of him (editors note: if that was the case, clearly it didn't work...).

However, on more serious note, I added that Bairstow would probably do better if he wasn’t always trying to prove people wrong – it is much easier, of course, to prove people wrong if you average 34 in test cricket and have only scored six centuries in 75 test matches than, say, if you average 50 with 15 – there are, after all, more of them who need persuading.

But, of course, that misses the point that Bairstow, who is the only batsman in the current England team to average over 50 in non test match first class games, and can lay claim to being the best one day batsman we have ever had, does seem to revel in ‘proving people wrong.’

Much has been made of limitations in his technique that have caused him to be bowled through the gate far more often than permissible for a top order batsman. There is also, I believe, an inference sometimes that he has found a technique which is highly effective in one day cricket where the ball does less and there are fewer catchers (to stay slightly leg side of the ball so he has more room to carve it through the off side) and is unwilling to compromise.

However, Bairstow has also made it abundantly clear that he wants to play in all three formats (and bat wherever he wants) and, with his talent, should easily be able to make minor adjustments to his technique which would allow him to thrive over five days without having to compromise what has made him so successful over the shorter formats. Unlike batsmen who have traditionally struggled to make the transition, he doesn’t seem to have an issue with the short ball.

Perhaps therefore the Bairstow conundrum is that this need to prove people wrong has become a crutch which, rather than driving him to success as empiricism might suggest, actually holds him back from being the player that he might be. The danger of course with empiricism is that we, as humans, find it very hard to disassociate causation from correlation.

Daniel Kahnemann – a personal hero of mine – has been able to show through his research that humans react far, far better to praise than to criticism. And while Thinking, Fast and Slow gave academic credence to this theory, others throughout history – often, in particular, those who have been the most successful leaders – knew this to be self evident.

As Nick Carraway states in the opening line of The Great Gatsby, ‘in my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.’ Or, as one of my favourite jokes attests, ‘before your criticise someone, walk a mile in their shoes – that way you are a mile away and they have no shoes.’

Indeed, it was this tenet that formed the basis of Dale Carnegie’s seminal work, How to Win Friends and Influence People, written during the same era as Fitzgerald was writing. ‘You’ll find examples of the futility of criticism bristling on a thousand pages of history,’ he says (most probably referring to Stephen Finn) and because of this, as William James points out – and this could perfectly well describe Bairstow – ‘we are only half of what we ought to be…[We are] in possession of powers which [we] habitually fail to use.’

However, while this idea may seem self-evident to some, it is often incredibly difficult to grasp – when I worked as a teacher, I was shocked at how effective others believed shouting was as a tactic of control. ‘It shuts them up’ they would say and my retort would be ‘but for how long?’ After all, as Carnegie states, ‘criticism engenders resentment…[and] we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of pride and vanity.’

I was lucky enough to learn from watching my father that, if you really want to get people’s attention, you do the opposite – you go slow and low. Failing that, you say absolute nothing – it’s extraordinary how quiet a group of boisterous sixteen year olds become as soon as the teacher stops talking.

Kahnemann describes his own travails at trying to persuade people this to be the case. While consulting with the Israeli air force he came across a general who, to paraphrase, told him that he could take his psychology and stick it. He had seen with his own eyes that fighter pilots performed better after being criticised and worse after being praised. Of course, what the general was failing to realise was that he only praised them after they had done better than expected and criticised them after they had done worse – this was not a controlled experiment and all he was actually witnessing was a regression to the mean.

I had my own very visceral experience of this while playing in a two day game for Durham University against Loughborough (who that year had four bowlers and two bowling all rounders all with county contracts). Quietly waiting my turn to bat – already feeling slightly aggrieved that I wasn’t batting higher – Graeme Fowler, sitting next to me, suggested that I should change my bat grip as it had a slight hole in it. Politely, I pointed out that it didn’t affect the grip because it was right at the bottom and it was my lucky bat grip.

For the next half an hour I was subjected to fairly personal stream of consciousness insults which could be condensed into that he had played for England (didn’t I know?) and had I spent five years at school a la Bart Simpson writing ‘I am better than everyone else’ on the black board?

Now, anyone who had seen me stick my middle finger up at Graeme in the dressing room as I brought up a 50 off 45 balls (fortunately perhaps, that group didn’t include Graeme himself who had been informed when I was on 47 that he had parked his car illegally) might have come to the conclusion that my anger had been the catalyst for my performance. This had been his plan all along, Fowler told me afterwards, although whether he believed it or whether it was a way of apologising without having to apologise I never fully ascertained.

But to come to this conclusion would be to fall into the trap of equating correlation with causation. And while I may have performed better than people thought I was capable – and they needed to rationalise this – the idea that, in reality, I had performed better than I was actually capable is a paradox.

And while I did often need a catalyst to focus – as I’m sure that Bairstow needs as well – I think it much more likely that this very need came from a lack of praise throughout my time playing cricket, which made me, when angry, want to prove people wrong, rather than from the effectiveness of the criticism itself.

One wonders how successful Bairstow might be playing Test Cricket if he stopped constantly looking for external factors to fire his competitive juices but, rather, concentrated on what internal struggles predicate that need. After all, he doesn’t appear to need to prove people wrong in the one day game and he’s been pretty successful in that…