Andrew Strauss breeding mental toughness

Mental toughness in cricket

Strauss in action

According to Jim Loehr the environment in which one trains is very important for developing mental toughness.

Andrew Strauss makes a similar point in an interview with the Financial Times last weekend:
“You start playing cricket in England and you think ‘Ok, I’m Barry Big Pants’ and you’ve got your shiny tracksuit and your bats… the system doesn’t produce battle-hardened cricketers. It’s one of the issues that prevents us from being the best side in the world.”

When, as an adult, he returned to play in Australia, he was struck by the contrast.

“Almost by default they think you’re crap unless you prove otherwise. I’ve never been sledged as badly as I was playing club cricket out there. Though the one thing that really got me was that they weren’t interested in excuses. Whereas in England you go the wicket wasn’t playing very well today – and your teammates would go Yeah, it was pretty tough, I don’t know how I even got the runs- the Aussies would go He was crap, he should have got a hundred, or something along those lines. It’s a very different kind of mindset.”

Have a think about that next time you see some players and coaches wandering around in their shiny tracksuits, squandering big budgets on external fripperies and allowing mediocrity and excuses for failure to become embedded into their culture.