Underneath everything else
The mind.
You cannot control whether you hit a six, take a catch, or win. You can only control what you do with your body and what you are thinking while you do it. Every single thing on this site comes back to that one sentence.
The mind
You cannot control whether you hit a six, take a catch, or win. You can only control what you do with your body and what you are thinking while you do it. Every single thing on this site comes back to that one sentence.
The only five things you own
There is a world out there, but you are in here, at a control panel with five levers. Get those in the right place at the right time and your mind goes quiet. Everything outside the shell is weather: it arrives, it bangs on the glass, it leaves.
Everything outside the shell is weather. It arrives, it bangs on the glass, it leaves. Your job is the five levers.
If I just concentrate on looking to score, my defence takes care of itself. I am at my most vulnerable when I am looking to defend. David Warner
Two seconds of total attention, then genuinely let go. Nobody can concentrate for four hours. Everybody can concentrate for two seconds, six times an over.
The reason this matters is stamina. Concentration is a bar in a fighting game and it does not refill while you are using it. Spend it on the two seconds that matter and you will still have some in the last half hour, which is exactly when games are won.
Chapter 1Getting ready
Down the left of each card: the thing itself, what goes wrong, what to do, how to win with it
Preparing
Practise the match, not the drill
Anxiety is the price of an unprepared mind. Preparation means doing the thing you want to do, over and over, before the day you need it, imagining the real situation right down to how it will feel. Twenty push ups once does nothing. Twenty a day for a year does.
Practising the match is the floor. The next step is making it worse than the match.
Make practice harder than the game
Mark Cosgrove's dad used to throw at him hard as a boy. Face something quicker and nastier than you will meet on Saturday, and Saturday feels slow.
Mark Cosgrove's dad prepared him as a boy by throwing at him hard. Face something nastier in the backyard than you will meet on Saturday.
Harder practice only helps if you are actually doing it while other people are not.
Do what most people your age are not doing
That is the whole advantage, and it is available to anyone who wants it. Nobody is stopping you.
Do what ninety percent of teenagers are not doing. That is the entire advantage, and it is sitting there unclaimed.
That is the whole advantage, and it is worth knowing what it is an advantage over.
Why Stuart Barnes did not make it
Stuart Barnes is honest about why he did not make it as a professional, and it is worth listening to precisely because it is not a highlights reel.
Stuart Barnes on why he did not make it as a professional cricketer. Worth listening to precisely because it is not a highlights reel.
Chapter 2How to practise well
Why, what, where, when, who and how
An hour in the nets is an hour. Whether you practised well, and whether Saturday is any different afterwards, comes down to six questions that most sessions never get asked.
Each of the six gathers up the cards already scattered across the site, linked at the foot of the answer, so you can read one line here or the whole of it where it lives.
Why are you at training?
Practice that feels good is nearly always practice at something you can already do. Twenty cover drives off a gentle feed is a nice half hour, and next Saturday will be exactly the same as last Saturday.
The only test of a session is whether something is different in a game. Nothing that happens in the nets counts on its own.
Filed here: Practise the match, not the drill, Why Stuart Barnes did not make it, and Do what most people your age are not doing.Knowing what a session is for still leaves you standing there with a bat and no plan.
What are you working on?
One thing. Pick the fault that is costing you the most and leave the rest alone until that one is gone, because you cannot think about five things while a ball is arriving at you.
Say it out loud before you start. If you cannot say it in a sentence you have not picked one.
Filed here: One cue, not five, and the clinic, which takes the four commonest faults one at a time.One fault picked, and now the place you go to fix it is the place most likely to hide it.
Where does it have to work?
The nets will lie to you. A machine and a throwdown mostly arrive at the stumps or the pads, which is exactly where a swing across the line pays, so the fault gets rewarded every ball for a month and then stops paying on a Saturday against somebody bowling at fifth stump.
Use a net for the groove and the middle for the decisions. If you only ever bat in a net you are practising half of it.
Filed here: Nets reward it, matches punish it, and Practise on a different track.A net is only worth booking if you are going back next week.
When, and how often?
Half an hour on a Tuesday and again on a Thursday beats three hours on Saturday morning. What you are building is a habit, and a habit is made of repetitions spread out rather than piled up.
Some drills also have a wrong week for them. The no pads drill is a Tuesday job: do it on Friday and you walk out the next day having just spent two hours getting hit.
Filed here: Make practice harder than the game, and The no pads drill.Twice a week is twice a week with somebody, and who that is decides most of it.
Who is feeding you?
Whoever is throwing at you is half the session. Somebody who only gives you what you like is company, and company is not practice.
Ask for the ball you keep getting out to. Then ask them to tell you what they can actually see from down there, which is the half of your own batting you will never watch.
Filed here: Being coachable is a skill, Copy on purpose, and Throwdowns from wide of the crease.They can tell you what they saw. This is how you tell yourself.
How will you know it worked?
Decide before you start what would count, and make it something you can see rather than something you can feel. Not hitting it better. The toe of the bat crossing the line on the ground on eighteen balls out of twenty.
Then write down the one that worked while it is still working, because in three weeks you will want it back and you will not remember it.
Filed here: Lay a line on the ground, Film thirty seconds from in front, and Write it down while it is working.Chapter 3Process, and being good at failing
Process, and being good at failing
Trust the process, get the prize
Judge an innings on whether you did the right things, not on the number next to your name. Did I watch it? Was I still? Did I play late? Answer those honestly and the runs arrive on their own schedule.
Rory McIlroy repeats it to himself like a chant: process over prize, process over prize. It is a way of pulling his attention off the outcome, which he cannot control, and onto the shot, which he can.
JJ Redick puts the same idea the other way round. Results do not create discipline. Discipline creates results. Everyone loves outcomes, and almost nobody loves the process that produces them.
Watch it · Rory McIlroy, via coachajkingsWatch it · JJ Redick, via coachajkings
Judging yourself on the process only works if you can live with the process going wrong.
Be genuinely fine with missing
If you never fail you are not attempting anything. Being okay with failing actually makes you fail less, because you stop spending the next ball thinking about the last one.
Jonny Wilkinson on being genuinely okay with missing: if it misses, let it be my miss, and the most beautiful miss there is. The freedom is what makes the next one go in.
Kobe Bryant on what to do the day after a bad one. The answer is boring and it is the whole answer: get up and go to work.
Top order Test batters edge or miss about eleven balls for every time they get out. Being beaten is normal at every level.
Being all right with one failure is a start. The bigger idea is what a run of them is for.
Losing is part of winning
Not a consolation, a mechanism. The people who win most have lost most, and have looked hard at every one of them instead of away.
Michael Jordan on losing being part of winning, not the opposite of it.
Giannis Antetokounmpo, asked whether a season without a title was a failure, refuses the question. There are steps towards a goal, and calling them failures is just a bad way to count.
Watch it · Michael Jordan, via Josh ChambersWatch it · Giannis Antetokounmpo
Knowing losing has a use does not stop you being frightened, so point the fear somewhere else.
Think about what you gain, not what you lose
Fear points at the thing you are trying to avoid, which is exactly where you then hit it. Point at what you want instead, and trust the technique you have practised.
Think about what you are going to gain, not what you might lose. If you feel fear, do not feed it. Trust your technique and your instincts, because they are what you have actually practised.
Pointing at what you want is easier as somebody slightly braver than you feel.
Your game face
A competitive persona you can put on deliberately. Two or three action words, sometimes with an animal or a player attached. It is not fake. It is a description of who you need to be once the game starts.
Dan Abrahams, on a Roy Keane interview: "It is an act. Of course I had self doubts, but I kept an act up."Roy Keane admitting the hard man was an act: "Of course I had self doubts, but I kept an act up." Dan Abrahams calls this a game face, and treats it as a technique you can build rather than a personality you are born with.
The game face gets you started. This is what it feels like when it is working.
Flow, and getting back to it
Flow is not luck. It has conditions: a clear task, no scoreboard in your head, and complete attention on the thing in front of you. You can rebuild those conditions on purpose.
Jonny Wilkinson on recapturing flow. It is not luck and it is not mood: it is a set of conditions you can deliberately rebuild.
Jonny Wilkinson on force versus power. Straining harder produces force and noise. Power comes from sequence and timing, which is why the relaxed player hits it further.
Flow has conditions you can build, and so does the skill underneath it.
Copy on purpose
If somebody in front of you is doing it, physics says you can too. Watch their five levers, then move yours the same way. Roger Bannister ran the first four minute mile in May 1954, and John Landy did it 46 days later. Knowing it is possible is most of the job.
Copying somebody is one way to be taught. Being told is the other, and it is harder than it sounds.
Being coachable is a skill
It is a skill exactly like the cut shot is a skill, and you can get better at it. It is also much rarer, which makes it worth more.
Being coachable is treated here as a skill in its own right, trainable like any other, and rarer than the physical ones.
Chapter 4Finding your way back
Form
Form is the most mysterious thing in cricket and the one nobody teaches. It is worth having a picture for it, because the picture tells you what to do when it goes.
Michael Clarke: every batsman can score when he is in form, and the great ones find a way to do it when they are not. That second half is the whole skill.
Stay on the track as long as you can
When you are in form, you have a clear view of what is coming, room to move, and time to see the danger. Do not wander off it casually assuming you know the way back.
The trouble is that the track you practise on is not the one that counts.
Practise on a different track
The nets are a different track. Useful, but there is only one track that counts, and that is match day. Stay on it as long as you can, and enjoy being there.
Sooner or later you come off it anyway, and that is the moment to have a plan.
Know your own way back
When you get lost, it is hard work hacking out of the scrub. Remember how you got back last time, and go to the five levers. That memory is the most valuable thing a batter owns.
Michael Clarke: battling your way through poor form is the true mark of a champion.The way back is much shorter if you wrote it down when you were still on the track.
Write it down while it is working
The day it all feels easy, stop and write down what you were actually doing. Where you stood, where the bat was, what the plan was. Cameron Green calls his a time capsule, and he wrote one after a Shield hundred because he knew months of short format cricket were coming and that he would have forgotten by the time he needed it. Memory is the thing that goes, and it goes quietly.
Cameron Green, on the notes he made after a Sheffield Shield century in March 2026.Write it down, enjoy the day it came from, and then go back to work.
Pleased, never content
Enjoy a good day properly. Then go back to work, because the weeds started growing the moment you stopped looking.
Novak Djokovic on how he thinks between points, which is really about how fast you can put the last one down.
Chapter 5The people around you
Team
You win and lose as a team
Everybody does something they wish they had not, and that is fine, because the greatest do. Don Bradman was bowled for a duck in his final Test innings, needing four runs to average a hundred.
What being a great team mate actually looks like, in behaviour rather than in slogans.
Bradman finished with a Test average of 99.94 and was bowled for nought in his last innings.
Winning and losing together only means something if you are actually saying things to each other.
Talk, constantly
Between overs, between balls, from the non striker's end. Information nobody says out loud is information the team does not have.
Ben Stokes: communication, and communicating regularly, is so important to a winning team.Talk is what a team does hour to hour. Standards are what it does over a season.
Standards, stacked daily
Culture is not a speech. It is a small number of standards that everybody actually keeps, repeated until a hard day feels normal.
Curt Cignetti on building a team through standards, accountability and stacking consistent good days, so that pressure in a close game feels like an ordinary Tuesday.
Standards are easier to keep in a side where nobody is auditioning.
Trust first, not last
Ricky Ponting told every group the same thing: you do not have to earn my trust, you have it until you lose it. Be yourself, play your way, and feel good about yourself every day.