New thing. Most Fridays I’m going to send you something short.
Three things you can actually do before you play. Two things that were said to me in a professional environment that I’ve never let go of. And one question.
That’s it. Four minutes, then go and get your kit ready.
One.
Stop eating at half seven tonight.
Not a diet. Just timing.
If you’re still eating at 10pm, your body is working on that while you’re trying to sleep, and the sleep you get is thinner than it looks on paper. Sleep is the single biggest thing sitting underneath tomorrow, and it’s free.
Eat earlier tonight. See how you feel in the morning.
Two.
Pack your bag this evening.
Not in the morning.
Every minute you spend tomorrow hunting for a spike key or a clean shirt is attention you don’t get back. It’s low grade stress and it follows you to the ground.
Do it tonight while you’re watching something. Then tomorrow morning is just your routine, the way you want it.
Three.
Put two hand towels in your bag.
Hot, dry weather changes what you can do with the ball, and most of it happens at your fingertips.
Sweaty hands and you lose the seam. You lose feel. You lose the wobble, the cutter, all of it, and you won’t always notice it going.
Two small towels. One in your pocket, one by your mark. It sounds like nothing. It’s the difference between having your skills available to you and not.
One.
Steve Kirby, on the outfield.
I was coaching a bowler and I said something like, don’t bowl it there to this batter, bowl it here instead.
Steve pulled me up on it. Tell them what you want. Not what you don’t want.
It sounds small. It isn’t. Say don’t bowl it there and the only picture in that bowler’s head is there. You’ve just handed him the thing you were trying to take away.
The mind doesn’t sort out the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. It just runs the picture you give it.
I’ve thought about that every time I’ve opened my mouth on a training ground since.
Two.
A car journey to Worcester.
Quarter final. I was in a car with a batter who’d played at the very top of the game, a legend, and he told me how his dad brought him up.
Every Sunday his dad gave him a book. He had to read it. And on the Thursday his dad tested him on it.
Not whether he’d finished it. What was in it. What he made of it. What he’d take from it.
So reading was never the point. Digesting it was. Being able to do something with it was.
His dad had worked out early that books are other people’s experience, good and bad, sitting there waiting for you. You just have to actually take something out of them.
I’ve never forgotten that, and I’m aware of the irony of putting it in a newsletter.
Forget the outcome for a minute. Forget the runs, the wickets, the average, the selection.
What’s the one thing in front of you today that would move you a bit closer?
Go and do that one.
Stuart
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