What an Australian sheep farmer can teach our boys about choking: Exploring the impact of EQ on the mental game.

Ahead of the 2022 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, Cricket.com lays out the discography, if you will, of the South African team and the unfortunate losses that cost them major tournaments. It’s a heart-wrenching read, and a sobering one, seeing it all laid out like that.

The ‘Choker’ Label

South Africa is arguably one of the best cricket teams in the world, but the prestigious ICC cricket titles have eluded them for many years. Having been given the “choker” label, the question must be asked: is it all in their heads? Has the collective subconscious of the team created a shared mental reality of “Our team is just not good enough to make it,” or “We don’t actually believe we can win”? And if that’s the case, how, neurologically does that even work?

The Mail & Guardian framed the problem this way: “The problem with expectation that commingles hope and dread is that it is exhausting. Few can sustain both expecting the best and the worst in a single sitting, and T20 cricket, which is quick and improvisatory, magnifies these facets of our national sporting psyche.”

Insights from an entirely different sport

To give us some insight and perhaps answer the above-mentioned questions, let’s take a look at a story from a different sport entirely – ultra marathon running. There was a famous ultra-marathon in Australia, the Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra-marathon which was started in 1983. It is a race that covers a distance of 875 kilometres. It takes a lot of training, and it’s not the kind of race that you can do unless you are a full-time, professional ultramarathon runner who has time to train and sponsors to support you.

Of course, the athletes who did this race used the latest science to calculate everything. The perfect pace, how many calories should be consumed, the number of hours they should sleep, and exactly how much food and water to have before, and on, the big day. And exactly how long the race should take. (About 7 and a half days by the way, in case you were wondering).

Enter the sheep farmer

One year, on the morning of the race a 63-year-old potato farmer called Cliff Young arrived at the race. No one had ever heard of him. He had an old pair of running shoes, had holes cut in his pants for “ventilation”, and he had one friend as support crew.

The officials asked him “What are you doing here?” And he said he was there to run the race. Of course, they laughed at him. But he said that he was used to herding the sheep on his farm in his gum boots and could really run for a long time. They couldn’t refuse him from entering but he was literally the laughing stock of the race. As the race started, he became even more ridiculed when people saw the strange shuffling kind of way that he ran, as you can expect, all the other runners left him behind very soon and he was hours behind by the end of the first day. 

However, by the next morning he had caught up with others in the field and by the following day, he was ahead of everyone. By the fourth day, it was clear that no one was able to catch Cliff. He finished the race in five days, fifteen hours and four minutes. This was ten hours faster than the second-place athlete and almost two days faster than the previous race record.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

You see, no one had told Cliff about the scientific research: about the optimal pace, the right amount of rest and food. All he knew was that he was there to run and that’s what he did. There was no benchmark in his mind that he was comparing to. All the professional athletes were locked into their own ideas of how long it would take and this created what psychologists call a self-fulfilling prophecy for them, to which they responded.

When we have a reality in our minds as to how an event will go, we then live out that mental reality in our actual experience of the event. This is true in many areas of life, it’s the way the mind works with our experience. But perhaps sport has been the sector of society that has most effectively understood and embraced the connection between our psyche and our performance, in recent decades. The way we think about the race, or the match or, indeed the test, is a powerful force for how it will turn out. But so often the way we think about the event itself is fueled by identities we hold about ourselves. and these identities also become self-fulfilling prophecies for our performance.

Being labelled a choker is not fun

On the topic of the self-fulfilling prophecy that seems to be continually lived out by the SA cricket team, Forbes.com rightly remarked, “Fair or unfair, being labelled a choker is not fun. Every sport has its infamous candidates. In cricket, South Africa carries the unfortunate label and that is amplified as the World Cup approaches. Ahead of every World Cup, South Africa’s mental psyche is examined by cricket pundits who collectively turn into shrinks.”

What most don’t know is that our psychological identities are actually neurological wiring that gets “wired” quite negatively. This negative wiring can result in psychological realities like low self-esteem or being more naturally negative in the way that we see things. This negative way of seeing things also impacts the way we do things or our ability to perform at optimal levels.

During his captaincy Faf du Plessis made a comment alluding to the effect of this continual negativity on the team. “One step forward and two steps back is not a good team. The guys are playing with low confidence and making the same mistakes. It just rolls on, it’s such a snowball effect,” he said.

These words from the former captain, speak to the immense emotional toll that repeated failure can have on teams. In that, the choker narrative has resulted in a lack of confidence that the team cannot seem to shake. 

Shifting the narrative

So what can be done to shift this narrative?

Believe it or not, we can change the neural pathways in our brains and strengthen those that we want to keep while weakening those that we want to lose. Ultimately, the more you develop your emotional intelligence, the more control you will have over your mind and the more you will be able to engage positively with the reality of those around you and even improve your ability to perform in highly pressurised situations, whether in an ICC tournament or in your work and home-life. 

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This article has been written by Mygrow, a scientifically back Emotional Intelligence Platform. All views expressed are theirs, but we are an affiliate of Mygrow, so we may receive compensation for any purchases on their site.