High Challenge, High Support: Building Mental Toughness in Cricket with Stuart Barnes

Host David Charlton, Sports Psychologist and Mental Toughness Practitioner

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: Warwickshire County Cricket Club Bowling Coach

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist:  Please provide some background information to the viewers about yourself and cricket and your cricket journey.

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: So I’m 55, currently living in Birmingham, been coaching since 1998 at various levels. Started off in primary schools, and I’ve coached at every level – been very fortunate, but learning all the time, even now, looking for ways to be a better person, husband, dad, and coach. That’s 27 years coaching people – male, female, all ages and abilities. Currently bowling coach at Warwickshire, working full time with them, with the men’s squad. Looking forward to this conversation, seeing where it goes.

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist: You mentioned learnings based on the conversation we were having prior to this. What’s one of the key learnings currently, at the moment with the busyness of the schedule?

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: The challenge is definitely the schedule and the travel. To give yourself and people listening a bit of insight: we finished the four-day game last Wednesday down at Brighton, travelled back after the game, got back 11pm. We had Thursday off. Friday night, we were playing a T20 at Leicester, got back at midnight Saturday morning. Coached up to Durham, played them yesterday, lost, travelled back, got back late last night at midnight. And here I am today.

This schedule is pretty brutal, I’ll be honest – for coaches as well as players. The players have got to go out there and make all those decisions that go into the rhythm of any sort of match. Physically and mentally, it’s becoming more and more of a challenge.

When I think back to the start of my coaching career, we had seven-month contracts that quickly turned into 12-month contracts. But we had a long period of time over the winter for those players who are based in the UK to break their performances down – not in a destructive way – and then build them back up so they were better for the following year.

The schedule at the moment is pretty brutal, and it feels like there’s a couple of challenges. One is when you step back, it can become clear that on occasions you are surviving as opposed to thriving – and that’s for coaches as well as players. But our responsibility as coaches is to create a high challenge, high support environment, while understanding that they are going through exactly the same as we are as coaches, and maybe even more so because they’re in the middle as well.

It’s a pretty interesting space at the moment, which is why I think coaches really do need to take those opportunities to chill, to have a balance between the game and outside interests, but also to constantly find ways to keep evolving and growing themselves as well.

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist: You touched on a high support, high challenge environment. I’m intrigued – as a coach, how do you go about ensuring that takes place on your watch?

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: I’m fairly certain, if you ask the players, that wouldn’t always be the case! But high challenge, high support – the kind of questions at training more than anything else, and match reviews. There’s lots of clichés that get talked about at every level, and I think my challenge would be digging a bit deeper.

“Well, how do you know that was good? What are you working on here? How did you choose to work on that? Why don’t you look at something else? What does success look like here in these next six balls? How do you know that’s success?”

It’s more around questions for me. It’s not necessarily about giving answers, although I would always go into a training session with some sort of thought on what that individual might need to work on – whether it’s scene position, whether it’s rhythm in their run-up, or whatever it might be.

High challenge would be just more questioning than anything else. We’re not winning every game, so how do you know that’s going to take you towards getting more wickets, bowling more dot balls, doing better so your bowling partner at the other end might take the wickets? How do you know? It’s just digging a little bit deeper, really, and listening to the language that they respond with.

The support area would be empathy – having some sort of idea of direction that they would need to go down. Because some players don’t have a clue. They just rock up and do what’s asked of them. So helping them understand that actually it’s their career, they do need to have an idea of what they want from the session, even if it’s the wrong thing in my mind, and there’s other areas they could look at to get the most from that training session.

High challenge and high support is an area that we’ve discussed needs tweaking. We’ve been more challenging than in the past – we’ve been very supportive as a coaching group, and the players came back at the end of a review at the end of last season saying that they wanted more challenge. So we need to become clear on what that looked like in the winter and during pre-season and in-season, because they’re all slightly different.

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist: Can you expand a little bit more on how it’s different in pre-season compared to in-season?

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: In the off-season, we would choose to have very tough sessions. That’s the high challenge – we would make decisions like: “Right, this session is going to be geared up to batting. You’re going to be batting for 18 balls, and we want you to have a strike rate of 140 at the end of your 18 balls in the nets – albeit it can be hypothetical to a certain degree with field placings and all this kind of stuff. That is your challenge. But before you do that, you’re going to go with the S&C coach, you’re going to be running sprints, you’re going to get fatigued.” And they wouldn’t know what they were going into during the session.

Players, being players, almost want every bit of detail before they go into the session. So the high challenge thing would be: “No, no, no. This is our session today. This is what you’re doing.” You can do that in the winter, you can do that in pre-season.

We went on pre-season to Abu Dhabi, but then you have the heat to contend with and different conditions, so you could do a little bit of that in Abu Dhabi. More so in the winter. But as you move closer and closer into competition mode, it does still become challenging, but less physical because when you’re in season, it’s more of a physical challenge anyway. So you have to get a feel for where people are at.

At the moment, we’ve got training tomorrow, we’ve got a T20 game on Wednesday night. We wouldn’t choose to have that high physical challenge tomorrow. We might choose to have a high decision-making challenge. For instance, we’d say to the bowlers: “You have to defend that side of the field. The wind is going that way. That’s a short boundary, so get your head around it. You’ve got two minutes to come up with a plan. Have a chat with your bowling partner. Come up with the plan, explain the plan, explain the reasoning for your plan, and then it’s about executing it.”

So we would choose that sort of challenge as opposed to a physical challenge.

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist: In terms of success – you talked about success a little bit earlier. If on Wednesday, what do you think the response would be if you’re asking the bowlers what success would be to them on Wednesday evening?

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: Ultimately, it’s winning against a good Lancashire team at home. That would be overall what success looks like. And then: “Okay, what’s going to help us do that? What happened in the last game? What did we take from the review?”

To give an example: we need to take more wickets in the power play. So how do we do that? What’s the wicket going to be like? What do we know about our opponents? Where can you shut batters down from hitting boundaries, and where can you apply pressure to build pressure, to take wickets and to make them take risks? So it would be about identifying our opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, where the opportunities are.

Then it would always, always come back to us. What are the things that we do really well against any opposition? It’s communicate. It’s prep well. It’s taking time out of the game – because T20 games move pretty quickly – and always taking those opportunities to take those five seconds if you need to. Bounce off your teammates, take time out. Slow the game down, slow the world down, slow your mind down.

Making sure at the end of your mark – one of the things that we talk about is, even if it’s wrong, any plan is better than no plan. Make sure you are crystal clear in what you want from that next ball, because ultimately, the simplest form of any game – what we’ve got in front of us in T20 – is you win the next ball. How you’re going to do that using what you know you’re good at, a strength of yours.

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist: I think that’s the key word, isn’t it? Process. What you’ve described there is how the vast majority of cricketers – be that the elite cricketer or even the schoolboy – success to them will be winning the match, taking wickets. But you’ve broken it down into that word: process.

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: They get confused about process, but that’s the key to all of it. I’ve been really fortunate to work with some high-quality performers on the world stage, and I would say the main difference between those who are consistent high performers and those who are equally as talented is: the high performers understand what their current process is, and they commit to it. Whereas the talented players might be looking to move to the next level without understanding what their process is.

It could be something as simple as making sure you walk back to your mark in a casual way, as opposed to a quick way. We’re talking about seconds here. It might take somebody three more seconds to walk back to the same mark, but in those three seconds, they’ve had a chance to review the previous ball. “What needs to happen right now? Okay, this needs to happen. I need to get that guy off strike. How can I get that guy off strike? I’ve got a big boundary there. I’m going to bowl this ball to get them to hit there, to get them off strike, because I know I’ve got an opportunity to get the guy on non-strike out.”

So slow your walk down, work to your process and your timing and your rhythm, be clear, and bang. I think consistent high performers understand that, and they get to a point quicker than most where they understand what their process is. It still isn’t guaranteed they’re going to win the next ball, but they’re okay with it because they’ve stuck with their process. They’re always open to tweaking what their process is because they understand that their opponents are evolving as well, so they need to evolve with it.

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist: What I’m hearing there is self-awareness is key for the player, and being introspective and considering what their process is. You talk about it evolving naturally. It’s human nature to get comfortable as well, and you need to keep adapting and evolving, otherwise things aren’t going to work.

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: I think comfort is the enemy of growth. As an ex-player myself – I was a professional for two years, talented, but didn’t have anywhere near the conversations that we’re having here today. I didn’t have those conversations back when I was playing, but I was comfortable. It wasn’t because my teammates didn’t want to help me – I chose easy options, and before I knew it, my opportunity had gone.

That is undoubtedly part of the reason why I get really frustrated when players I’m working with want to make easy choices and easier decisions when I know that’s what I did, and that cost me a 12-15 year career. I only had a two-year career because of that.

“Is there a different way of doing this? Is there a different way that’s more challenging?” Because we need to fail to really find out what we could be able to achieve. “Why don’t we just have a play about with that?” It’s in a safe environment where they can fail and it’s okay, but actually, on the other side of that failure could be something that they could use to grow themselves.

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist: How much do you think fear or self-sabotage plays a part in that?

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: I honestly think that some people fear success, because if somebody gets better as a player and they refine their skills and add another skill, the expectation then is they execute it in a game when pressure is on. If they execute it in a game, the expectation then is that they’ve got to deliver that thing consistently.

Let’s say it’s a yorker – simple thing to execute under pressure. Pressure could be your opponents need four to win off the last ball, 1,000 people watching in the crowd, massive buzz, atmosphere, noise, all that kind of stuff to win a T20 Blast tournament. You know the yorker is something you’ve practiced and executed in previous matches, but now the expectation is you have to execute it. Fear can let you down.

That is why I think some people fear success – because then the expectation from people they’re surrounded by is that success has got to be consistent. So the easier option would be just do what they’ve always done.

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist: I guess that takes us back to the self-awareness and what you talked about earlier, about having two or three seconds to slow things down, to reset. In that period, you probably put some distance between you and what’s going on in your head, bring your heart rate down a little bit, and then make much smarter decisions when you actually go in to deliver the ball.

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: The whole thing about the world speeding up really interests me, because that’s when people can lose their process. What you just talked about – breathing. One of the things I really enjoy is seeing high performers at the back of their run-up use an anchor. An anchor might be just throwing a ball up, and it gets them into their performance state where they’ve been before. They can think, feel, see, smell where they’ve been before, where they have executed under pressure.

Whereas people that allow the situation to speed things up miss that opportunity to get into the right performance state. Before you know it, they’re looking to get out of the over as quickly as possible, as unscathed as possible. But normally when that happens, they’re going out the park for boundary after boundary.

I really enjoy watching people that learn the art of playing at their tempo as opposed to what the game is trying to get them to play at.

David Charlton, Sports Psychologist: On that note, what would your advice be for the bowler who has been smashed out of the park? In T20 cricket now, it’s probably happening on a regular basis. What’s your advice for that bowler who’s just seen the last over go for 24 or 30 plus?

Stuart Barnes, Cricket Coach: I have grown to respect and appreciate my fellow coaching staff members, one of which is the team psychologist. I would want to work with them leading into that moment you’ve just described. I would want to work on an ongoing basis.

“Tell me when you performed at your best. I want to see the video. I want you to describe it to me. I want you to describe how you felt. How did you feel before it? How did you feel after? How did you feel about executing that yorker that didn’t go for a boundary and you won the game? The adulation from the crowd, the interviews afterwards – I want to know everything about what I was seeing from the other side of the boundary, as well as what they were feeling.”

Because what I’m seeing from the other side of the boundary, I want to match with how they felt when they were performing at their best. I’m working with the team psychologist to get to that point as well. What should I be seeing? Because if I’m not seeing it, there’s an opportunity for me and their teammates to understand: “What’s the one thing that my teammate needs to be doing or talking about that they can help with on the park in that moment?”

There’s a piece of work leading into those highly pressurised moments, because you’re talking about player bonuses. They could be playing with mates who might be in debt or want to pay off their mortgage or buy a new car – whatever it might be – and it all relies on that one moment that they’ve got.

But there’s work to do understanding what “good” looks like with the player, with the team psychologist, to build up a template before that moment happens.