Recently, while undergoing 10 days of self-isolation, I’ve been reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the autobiography of Carl Jung. In one early passage, he describes his struggles with learning algebra as a young schoolboy. ‘The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted,’ he writes ‘but I didn’t even know what numbers really were.
‘They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils [and while] no one could tell me what numbers were…to my horror I found that no one understood my difficulty…All my life it remained a puzzle to me why it was that I never managed to get my bearings in mathematics when there was no doubt whatever that I could calculate properly.’
However, while Jung might never have been able to grasp the intricacies of algebra (unlike his ‘classmates [who] could handle these things and found them self-evident’), I would posit that it was this exact inability to accept something as fact because one is told that it is, even 70 years later, that allowed him to make such huge strides in our understanding of human psychology. Indeed, it reminded me of a New York Times article from 2015 which explored why child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses.
The conclusion in the article, written by the aptly named Ellen Winner, is that ‘child prodigies master an adult domain that has already been invented.’ They become very focused on developing a specific skill and, therefore, they don’t learn to be original.
Perhaps more importantly though, they find it incredibly hard to return to a time before they were highly proficient at that skill and, as such, are unable to challenge the original premise. They might be highly successful in a certain field but they won’t change our understanding of that same field.
Daniel Kahnemann talks about this a lot in Thinking, Fast and Slow, describing what he named as ‘theory bias.’ The idea that so often our understanding of a particular topic starts from a theory we have learnt at some point in the past and, as such, we are unable to return to a state of mind whereby we might challenge that theory. Indeed, he had personal experience of this as it led to him winning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002.
Ironically, it was the very fact that he had never studied economics that allowed him successfully to challenge Expected Utility Theory, a 200-year-old staple of high school economics. Having never learnt this theory previously, and therefore not fooled by his own heuristics, its flaws were glaring when he first came across it – namely, that, for humans, loss and gain are not symmetrical in manner.
Personally, when I first read Kahnemann, it changed the way not only how I saw the world but how I saw myself and, perhaps even, how I actually thought. I was introduced to the world of heuristics and biases. They’d always been there, I had always felt them but I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling. It was like when I first started wearing glasses and everything which had been fuzzy was suddenly sharp. Ironically, a book about confirmation bias confirmed the biases I had about bias.
However, more profoundly, it was an encouragement to pursue a way of thinking that so often we are actively discouraged from pursuing – a deference to authority and experience leaving us unable to challenge the way things are done; something to which I have long struggled to reconcile myself (and rarely successfully).
Furthermore, I needn’t have looked far for examples of its veracity – a world-renowned biological chemist who had never studied biology as a father and a world-renowned historian of medicine who had never studied history or medicine as a mother.
Indeed, before his death I asked my father what he felt had made him so successful as a scientist, particularly as – a deeply modest man – he felt himself unpossessed of any particular intellectual ability. Like Jung, he too struggled with mathematics.
‘Most scientists,’ he told me, ‘start an experiment with certain expectations of the results that they want and are very happy if those results are achieved. The problem is that they also want to discover something new and these two ideas are completely incompatible.’ My father, on the other hand, was much happier if an experiment ‘failed’. That gave him an opportunity to explore why.
Indeed, his greatest breakthrough, which led him to move away from being a theoretical scientist, came after a junior colleague had failed to turn up to work on Monday, on account of a hangover. When he eventually arrived into the lab on the Tuesday, a gel-like substance had appeared in a test tube he had been overseeing and it was from here that a practical implementation of protein misfolding was born.
So what, one might ask, has this got to do with cricket? Well, much like Hans Rosling describes in Factfullness with regards to our understanding of the world, it has often struck me that our understanding of cricket technique has changed little since the 1960s in spite of so much evidence to the contrary.
Now, clearly things have changed since I was learning to play the game. No longer, I would imagine, would the coach cancel an entire practice session in the aftermath of me having the temerity to hit a reverse sweep for four.
Yet, in terms of rhetoric, it strikes me that while innovation has certainly been encouraged (mainly due to the IPL), ‘fundamentals’ remain largely unchallenged. There is a certain way of doing things, prescribed by the MCC textbook, and any deviation of this is successful in spite of said deviation rather than because. ‘Don't forget! It is, after all, a side-on game!'
Cricket, unlike other sports, seems to label outliers merely as outliers – their unique skills allowing them to overcome their unorthodoxy. Rarely is there an article about Steve Smith which doesn’t seem to mention, apropos of nothing, that anyone who tried to replicate his technique would be a walking LBW candidate or provide a contrast with, say, Joe Root – one has perfect technique and the other is the best player in the world. But can you imagine someone describing Ronaldo or Messi thus?
Lara’s high back lift only worked because of his ‘incredibly fast hands’, they say, without ever really exploring what this actually means or whether it is true. Kevin Pietersen’s genius precludes him as someone from whom we might learn anything fundamental to the way we bat – a glorified slogger with a phenomenal eye. Mohammad Azharuddin and VVS had ‘wonderful wrists,’ allowing them to hit balls from off stump through the legside, devoid of any explanation of what this might actually mean.
Meanwhile, Shivnarine Chanderpaul is dismissed as a ‘limpet’, the limitations of his technique the reason he scored so slowly, while failing to mention his 69 ball hundred against the best bowling attack in the world. Fawad Alam was dropped for 11 years despite breaking every record in Pakistani first class cricket and promptly scored two wonderful hundreds on his return.
Might we not, rather, be better served looking to learn from these ‘geniuses’ rather than dismissing them as such? In my own cricket, it was something I always struggled with; confusion caused by an expectation within English cricket towards orthodoxy without any explanation of why, while secretly wishing I’d learnt to play the game in the Caribbean or Pakistan.
I wanted Lara’s back lift, his front foot planted as he went back and across – akin to a back foot drive – to scythe good length balls through the offside. I wanted to take balls from outside off stump and flick them over square leg where no fielders lay in wait. I wanted an open stance where I felt comfortable and my bat could remain outside of my hands, allowing me to present the full face of the bat to balls angling in, before bringing my bottom hand through to take the ball through or over midwicket. But, alas, these desires weren’t deemed attainable by those who mattered. ‘Don’t forget! It is, after all, a side-on game!’
In 2008 at Lord’s, a couple of years after I had stopped playing any serious cricket myself, Pietersen played perhaps the most outrageous knock by an English player, certainly in my lifetime (although one that has perhaps been subsequently overshadowed by conflation with his 149* four years later and the subsequent drama). In scoring 152 off just 181 balls, he was particularly destructive towards Makhaya Ntini (0 for 130 from 29), repeatedly smashing him through the leg side however wide of off stump he bowled.
But, rather than an example of Pietersen’s genius and outrageous hand eye coordination, was this not perhaps an example of his ability to understand the game at a level unmatched by those around him? With Ntini coming wide of the crease, Pietersen got himself outside off stump and, with one simple move, had effectively removed the three most likely dismissals – LBW, bowled and caught behind. It’s strange – since Smith has started doing the same thing, he hasn’t done too badly either…
