Paddy Upton on why coaching is about encouraging
players to take responsibility and helping them
understand what is best for them
INTERVIEW BY NAGRAJ GOLLAPUDI
Nagraj Gollapudi is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
'In high-pressure moments the quality of decisionmaking matters more than skill'
"A traditional coach's skill is about the knowledge of the
game. To draw the expertise out of the players and create a
strategy based around what fits is a fundamentally
different skill"
Paddy Upton' gaze is direct. He can stare at you for long
without blinking. Equally bold are his thoughts on
coaching. Upton became prominent when, as assistant to
Gary Kirsten, he helped India win the 2011 World Cup
and also climb to the World No. 1 Test ranking. Upton
today is an established independent coach and earlier this
year led Sydney Thunder to their maiden Big Bash title.
Based on extensive research coupled with on-field
coaching expertise, Upton says cricket so far has seen
instruction-based coaching. The future, he says, will be all
about man management.
Is there a role for a coach in T20?
There is a definitely a role, but the role is not necessarily
the traditional role of coaches as you understand it. The
role needs to be adapted and better defined in the T20
format.
Are you talking about an established team moving into
T20 format, like an international or state team? That is
slightly different to a whole lot of different individuals
coming together to play in the IPL, Big Bash, CPL and all
such leagues. Here you need to establish everything from
the first base.
The challenge is different. For me the philosophy stays the
same, but the application of the philosophy is different.
What is your philosophy?
In the modern day, there is a fundamentally different
requirement of leadership, because the answers now sit
outside of the traditional model. Twenty years back
leaders became the CEOs of companies because they were
the persons who knew the most about the business.
Coaches became coaches based on their superior
knowledge of how to play the game. So their method of
leading, of coaching, was through instruction. That model
is fast becoming outdated. One needs to bring in an
approach - what I call harnessing the collective
intelligence that sits within the group.
Even if they might not have the experience, you need to be
creating a team based on a player's strengths and personal
preferences, learning styles etc. The way you do that is get
information from the players and structure the approach
around the players and the player's requirements rather
than the coach's preordained ideas. So that is one thing,
utilising the expertise that sits within the group.
You have spoken about the fear of failure players
suffer from. What is that?
Probably the single biggest mental obstacle to success is
fear of failure. Fear of failure is not something that sits
within our nature. It is something that is learned. And it is
learned when our seniors react negatively to a mistake or a
failure or something that goes wrong. In sports teams
people don't actually have a fear of failure as much as they
have a fear of repercussion from the failure, whether it is
from the media, from the coach, from the fans. When
coaches reprimand, shout, gesticulate when somebody
makes a mistake, when a captain gesticulates on a field at
someone who misfields or drops a catch, the player then
becomes terrified to make that same mistake. And when
you have become scared of making the same mistake, you
actually put yourself in a [state of] physical readiness to
make that mistake.
If we as coaches are responsible for creating fear of failure,
we also need to take responsibility for removing the fear of
failure by setting up a different relationship with respect to
mistakes and errors. In T20 there are far more mistakes
and far more errors that happen primarily because people
need to take far greater risks than they had taken before.
So we need to relate fundamentally differently to players
and teams making mistakes.
Playing to strengths is another one. Too often we have the
coach and video analyst analyse an opposition batsman,
for example, and realise that we need to bowl him wide
yorkers at the death because his strike rate is lowest
against that ball. And we set up strategies around that,
which is an old model of coaching. And very often what we
end up doing is asking a player, in the highest-pressure
period of the game, where games are won and lost, often
bowling to guys like AB de Villiers and MS Dhoni, to
execute on his weakness in an area where he doesn't have
confidence, because the coach and the video analyst have
dictated where to bowl.
"We don't really give people that much experience and
opportunity around making decisions because when they
make the first mistake, we withdraw that privilege from
them"
We need to be changing that and asking the player: what is
your strength, what ball are you most confident bowling
when you are under real pressure, particularly when your
fear of failure is heightened? You need to be doing what
you are best at, regardless of what the other guy is going to
do. So playing to a player's strength rather than playing to
the opposition's weakness is another philosophy I believe
in.
"One ball, six runs. How do you maintain your
focus and calm?" We are told this is the sort of
question you ask your players as part of your
preparations. Is this your way of making a player
confident and self-reliant?
There's two ways that one can approach the player. One,
you can approach him with the answers and tell him what
to do based on your so-called superior knowledge of the
game or studying of the opposition. The other way is go to
the player, ask him questions, enquire and find out what is
going to work best for him. I seek to understand players as
much as possible rather than fill them up with my
knowledge. I seek to draw their knowledge, their expertise,
their preferences out of them and then try and find a nice,
healthy match between the two.
I know that in real high-pressure moments in a game,
seldom is it the player's skill that is going to be the thing
that is going to prevail. It is normally the quality of the
decision they make under pressure. In all formats, in every
team in the world, every cricketer gets a lot of
opportunities in the nets to practise his cover drives and
reverse sweeps and slower balls and yorkers. So they are
practising their skills a lot, and, yet it is their decisionmaking under pressure that we are actually counting on.
We don't really give people that much experience and
opportunity around making decisions, because when they
make the first mistake, we withdraw that privilege from
them. So I want players to make decisions. I want them to
think. I want them to come up with ideas and actually get
used to making decisions for themselves.
Recently at Sydney Thunder in the Big Bash
League, you made players dive into the pool to see
how long they could hold their breath. What was
the purpose of that exercise?
I am always looking for ways to take the individual's game
forward. I don't believe that all the answers lie within
cricket. One of the approaches that I have come across is
called hypoxic breath-hold training. It is one of the most
direct feedback mechanisms that a player can experience.
As soon as he goes underwater and starts feeling short of
breath, the first thing that happens is a natural hiccup-like
spasm in the stomach. People panic. What we know is, the
amount of time you hold your breath up until the first
spasm, you can hold your breath probably that same
amount of time again, and endure spasm after spasm. Now
what happens usually is, people panic, and as soon as you
panic, as soon as you start worrying, as soon you start
overthinking, as soon as your mind goes out of the present,
within a few seconds your body forces you to pick your
head out of the water and take a breath.
However, when you keep your mind calm, when you keep
your mind present, keep your mind focused on the right
things, players find that they can keep their head
underwater for as long as they keep their mind in the right
place. So it is actually not a physical thing that gets you to
take the breath, it is mental.
What I must say here is, it is a very, very dangerous form
of training and can only be done with an expert, because if
you hold your breath for too long, you will have a shallow
water blackout and you could drown. At Sydney Thunder
it was done by an expert and there were very, very strict
precautions taken, and everyone was working with a
partner literally catching them
Can you talk about any positive feedback you got
from a player based on that exercise?
Chris Green said it was one of the most significant
interventions he had had in his cricket career so far. He is
a 22-year-old offspinner without any fancy deliveries, but
the way he was able to perform time and time again under
incredible pressure in the match, bowling to some of the
best batsmen, he actually turned out to be one of our main
go-to bowlers under pressure
"In all the research that I have done, players almost always
rate man management at least as important as knowledge
of the game for a coach, if not more important"
How much of T20 is about conditioning mental
skills?
It is no different to any other competitive sport.
The mental side is possibly one of the most important
aspects. If someone does not have the physical skills, they are
not going to be picked in the first place, but once you arrive
there and your skill has taken you to that level, the mental
side is the most important standout aspect.
Do you consider yourself to be a mentor or a coach?
I am certainly not a mentor strictly by definition because
a mentor is somebody who has content expertise in a very
specific area. For example, Allan Donald has expertise as
a fast bowler. Strictly, Allan can only mentor another fast
bowler. The way a mentor works is by saying, "When I
was in the same situation, this is what I did." It is very
domain-specific. Rahul Dravid can mentor batsmen. He
cannot mentor spinners, he cannot mentor fast bowlers.
He can probably mentor slip fielders.
Coaching in its pure form is helping somebody find their
own answers for themselves. That is understood in the
business world clearly. In the sports world what coaches
traditionally do is, they tell people what to do based on
their superior knowledge. That is called instructing,
dictating. But we confuse that in cricket with coaching.
What are you, then?
I am a modern-day coach. Fortunately we are changing to
more of an empowering approach. We are starting in the
cricket world to understand that coaching is not telling
people what to do. It is actually having a two-way dialogue
and discovering what is going to work best for the other
person and work best for the environment and creatively
coming up with the way that works best for everyone. With
an approach like that, you end up with a very good chance
of getting the best out of everyone.
At Chennai Super Kings, Stephen Fleming and MS
Dhoni believed in players taking responsibility for
their own preparation and performance, while
making sure all the resources they needed were
available to them. Do you subscribe to the same
method?
Yes, I do. The principle is pretty much the same. It is not
necessarily leaving it to the player to take responsibility. It
is encouraging the player to take responsibility and having
a close dialogue with him to help him ensure he
understands what is best for him. What has happened is,
because of the history of instruction-based coaching, you
have a lot of players on the professional circuit who
actually don't know what is best for them. They are so used
to other people making decisions directed at them,
deciding how much they practise and what they practise.
But there are not many players who have a true
understanding of what they actually need.
Take fitness training. The fitness trainer dictates across
the board to every player. Does the player understand his
body and understand if he needs to rest or train today?
They are never asked to understand. They are conditioned
to follow the fitness trainer's instruction. The player ends
up being a robotic follower of instructions who does not
have the ability to think for himself. What happens then is,
on the field, under pressure, they are not able to make
good decisions and they get emotionally and mentally
hijacked.
"Too often employers and fans think that if you are
winning, the team is great and if you are losing, there is
something wrong within the team. That is not the case at
all"
Michael Hussey writes in his latest book about an
incident where you two are talking about coaching
at the outset of the Big Bash last season, and
talking about how to help Thunder turn a corner.
"Paddy said we could set things up. There's a
traditional way, where we would have our head
coach, our batting, bowling and fielding coaches
and the usual legion of support staff. Or he said
we could have none. I must admit I was a bit lost
for words. It was counter-intuitive to everything I
had experienced in elite cricket." Do you recollect
saying that?
I truly believe that [what Hussey said]. But it does require
a coach who understands how to facilitate getting or
extracting the expertise from within the playing group that
other teams would ordinarily have on the coaching bench.
That is a fundamentally different coaching skill to what
you learn in Level 1, 2 and 3, where they teach how to pick
up a bat, hold a ball, bowl an inswinger, schedule and
manage a practice session. A traditional coach's skill is
about the knowledge of the game, about batting, bowling,
fielding, etc. The skill of being able to draw the expertise
out of the players and create a strategy based around what
fits within the playing unit is a fundamentally different
facilitation skill. It is about drawing out of the team rather
than putting knowledge into them.
This is what I said in my first ever interview for a head
coach's job, which was with Rajasthan Royals. Clive
Woodward, the former England rugby coach, wanted to
know how I felt the dynamic would have played out if I
had more experienced [specialist] coaches under me. This
was in 2013. My answer was, if you give me the job, I want
no batting coach, no bowling coach, no fielding coach, and
I actually want no fitness trainer. Woodward has a
business relationship with one of the Royals owners, and
was pulled into the interview. They looked at me with this
dumbfounded silence.
I explained that if you give me the job, you are going to
give me 25 players from five different countries who have
played under probably 20 different coaches and 20
different captains and collectively have over 1000 matches
of T20 experience. That is the expertise I am going to use
to build this campaign. In reality you will find no three
coaches anywhere in the world that collectively have more
expertise than that which sits within the team.
You were the head coach at Pune Warriors. Why
did it not work out there?
My philosophies are largely based on having a fertile
environment for them to take root. In a more conservative,
instruction-based, dictatorial environment my approach
will not work because it will be squashed and suppressed.
The involvement of the ownership in the team did not
allow for this approach to really have a chance. Within the
team leadership there were some individuals who were
very, very threatened by letting go of power, ego and the
need to dictate and control. Some individuals I had in that
brains trust group just did not buy into [the philosophy]
and were not prepared to let go of their own power and
control. It is quite a threat to a more traditional,
authoritarian, power-hungry type of leadership
Do you think the idea of a T20 team as something
you can build over a few years is unrealistic?
No, it is not unrealistic. Take the Sydney Thunder. In my
first year, which was 2014, when I brought in this new
thinking, even someone like Michael Hussey, who I have
spent a lot of time talking to, was busy trying to get his
head around it. As he said, it was counter-intuitive. It
takes players a little bit of time to come around and
understand before they start to work within that system.
By the second year, when they start talking to new players,
even the new players are prepared for what they are
entering into. Team culture is a direct result of the
leadership. When people come into the team, they already
know what is expected of them, how we operate, what is
going to work, what is not going to work. While your
personnel might be changing through auctions, injuries,
you can certainly maintain a culture where people come in
and settle quite quickly.
"The fitness trainer dictates across the board to every
player. Does the player understand his body and if he
needs to rest or train today? They are never asked to
understand" © Getty Images
I was involved in the PSL with the Lahore Qalandars [as
head coach]. It was such a short tournament. By the time
PSL was over, players were still trying to grapple and
understand what is expected of them. The first year is a
little bit more tricky with my approach. If I wanted to get
immediate results in the PSL, I would have needed to have
walked in and told players exactly what to do and directed
them like a herd of sheep, and we possibly would have
done a bit better. But in the medium-to-long term I know
the empowering approach works.
Even at Sydney Thunder, even when we lost four games in
a row I was nervous, I was on the edge, but I certainly was
not concerned. By the time we got to the knockouts, I
knew we were better set up to handle those high-pressure
moments.
Who are the modern coaches that you have time
for?
Gary Kirsten, Trevor Bayliss, Stephen Fleming, Andy
Flower. I have not spent much time with him, but there is
Daniel Vettori. One of the things that you see consistently
with these guys is, in order to use a more empowering
approach, one of the prerequisites is that the ego has to
take a back seat. The more you want your ego in front and
in the driving seat, the more difficult it becomes. I
certainly believe going forward the single biggest obstacle
to a coach's success is going to be their own ego.
Stepping aside from your holistic model, how much
of a role do analytics play in coaching?
Analytics are useful. I would say nine of ten times they
confirm what you already know. The tenth time they give a
little insight into something that no one has really noticed
before. Russell Domingo [the South Africa coach] nailed it
when he said, "Analytics is like a bikini - they reveal a lot, but
they hide some of the most important bits." For example,
stats can't yet accurately evaluate the critical factor such as
how a player delivers under pressure.
But you cannot ignore statistics, can you?
Without statistics you are shooting in the dark. It is the
foundation. But you have to study the whole book when
you sit for an exam. Even though they might not reveal
game-changing information, the stats just confirm and
ensure that we are on the right track. Winning does not
mean you are doing things right and losing does not mean
you are doing things wrong. Too often employers and fans
think that if you are winning, the team is great and if you
are losing, there is something wrong within the team. That
is not the case at all.
"When you have become scared of making a mistake, you
actually put yourself in a state of physical readiness to
make that mistake"
Do former players make the best coaches? Hussey
said it is a hard one to answer. What do you think?
Former players make very good mentors. I remember
listening to a lecture Graeme Pollock gave. He said, if the
ball is up, you play on the front foot and you time it into a
gap, and if it is short, you pull it, cut it into the gap - which
is wonderful knowledge.
There are two aspects to coaching. One is the technical, the
content knowledge of the game - batting, bowling, fielding.
So this is content expertise a hockey or a rugby coach
would not be able to come in and provide. But the second
part of coaching, the knowledge of man management and
creating a healthy environment that allows people to
flourish - in all the research that I have done, players
almost always rate man management at least as important
as knowledge of the game for a coach, if not more
important.
At the moment, in professional coaching the ability to
man-manage is a completely random skill - people either
have it or they don't. I spent a two-year postgraduate
degree studying the art, science, philosophy of man
management and understanding human beings. That is a
field that has really not emerged yet in education of our
coaches in sports.
A guy like Gary Kirsten is very good at managing people.
Stephen Fleming was really good at managing people.
Trevor Bayliss has a natural way of dealing with people
that makes them feel comfortable and open and relaxed to
speak. All the names I have mentioned are very
personable, easy to relate to, good guys. They have not
necessarily gone and studied that. They are arriving with a
natural flair to be able to relate to people. But we are still
waiting for that realisation to start bringing manmanagement skills and understanding human nature to
sports coaching. When you see that happen, performance
will improve. It will help also in the case of particularly a
number of players who have been marginalised or who
have left the sport or become discouraged from a sport
because they have been unhappy with the environment
because of the way their coaches led their team.
Do you reckon that if you are a successful T20
coach over time, you can graduate to coaching an
international Test team?
The answer is a resounding yes. If I take my example, it
would mean me finding the right people who I would need
to partner with in order to have a very successful Test
campaign. The success with the Indian cricket team was
possible because Gary and I had a very good partnership.
At Rajasthan Royals I could not have achieved what I did
without having such a close working relationship with
Dravid. At Sydney Thunder I had a close relationship with
Mike Hussey and Shane Watson. So it is having the right
people and the right partnerships that create a successful
environment for a team. A successful T20 coach, if he did
not do anything different, and just walked into a Test
team, it might not work. But if I am smart enough to pull
the right people to partner, of course it will work.