For two years and 19 Test matches, Shane Watson was arguably the world’s best Test match opener, churning out 1696 runs at nearly 50 against England, West Indies, Pakistan, New Zealand and India.
Looking back on that period between 2009 and 2011, Watson happily admits this happened basically by accident.
Mark Wood (right) celebrates after trapping Shane Watson lbw in Watson’s final Test innings at Cardiff in 2015.Credit:AP
“That was a perfect storm,” Watson told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. “Technically a perfect storm because everything I’d done the previous seven or eight years was refined, working with Greg Chappell, all that was brought together to ensure I was technically as good as I’d ever been.
“But the mindset was around the circumstances with me being injured and thinking for a period of time ‘this is going to be done’. So when I got an opportunity again and opening the batting, it was ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this’, and it was really just a fearless way of playing. Opening the batting helped because for the first time I didn’t care if I got out because the rest of the team can sort things out if I get knocked over early.
“Those two things around opening and the lead-up where I concentrated on my batting because I couldn’t bowl, meant that my mind opened up. I was able to keep that mindset for a couple of years. But it certainly wasn’t me directing my mind there, it was just a good accident.”
Technically, yes, he had done a lot of work with Chappell to get his game in order. But mentally, Watson had no knowledge at the time of how he had got into such a constructive mindset, nor how to regather it if things eventually went awry. They did.
Over the remaining five years and 32 matches of his Test career, Watson made only another 1778 runs at 30.13, shuffling through various batting positions and bowling roles, before having the wind knocked out of him – like everyone else in the game – by the death of Phillip Hughes in 2014.
“Because I didn’t know why I was doing certain things or why I had that fearless nature when I was opening, I didn’t know how to recreate that,” he said. “So when things started to go south, then I had no understanding of how to turn it around quickly or at all.
“That’s why I had a great period then a down period that kept going down and down. Technically I was always chasing that, but mindset wise I had no idea what I was trying to chase.”
It was only in 2015, the final year of his time in the Test team, that Watson connected with the mental skills expert Jacques Dallaire in the United States, that he came away with a framework that allowed him to know what his best performance mindset was, and how to locate it amid the hustle and bustle of a cricket career.
Shane Watson’s new book.
Watson has told this story in his book Winning The Inner Battle, fusing his experiences with a mental skills framework that melts down much of what he learned with Dallaire about how the mind works and how to coach it into more productive places.
“The power of understanding that was something where I wish I knew this information as a 15-16 year-old and I could’ve started to build really good mental skills before games, during games, ball by ball,” Watson said. “Good habits that would then become a default when things aren’t going as I wanted.
“But I was so desperate to get the results I was dreaming of that I’d end up suffocating myself because I had no awareness of the mindset I needed to be chasing. I felt fortunate to at least learn this stuff while I was still playing.
“I had four years of working through exactly how that works and how my mind was working, so I wasn’t just left to go ‘well I think that would’ve worked’.”
In those latter years, Watson was one of the leading performers in the Indian Premier League, although he does wonder how his Test career might have panned out differently with the benefit of additional mental skills. Primarily, the problem of converting innings into hundreds, and then avoiding the repeated lbw dismissals that became a social media meme.
ACA chief executive Todd Greenberg, alongside president Shane Watson.Credit:Sydney Morning Herald
“I wish I’d known more about the mental energy side of the mindset playing Test cricket. I would’ve loved to really test that out,” he said. “It would’ve made a big difference to how things turned out batting wise – scoring more hundreds and batting for longer periods instead of just burning my mental energy out getting out a certain way.
“I’d beat myself up and then only look at technique, go straight up to the computer, dissect how I got out technically, then going to the nets and working on that. I want to help other people so they don’t have to go through the same thing and from a younger age they can implement these really simple skills.”
If there is a complexity to this story, it comes from the knowledge that Hughes’ awful death was the catalyst for Watson to go searching for answers to mental questions rather than physical ones – he had already taken on the help of personal physios in Victor Popov and John Gloster.
“All of a sudden, as soon as people started facing fast bowling again, some people were OK, because they had coping mechanisms or let it flow through their mind,” Watson said. “Whereas with other people, it affected every ball people were facing. It certainly did for me, and I could see it from a distance with other teammates, battling with the same things as well.
“I battled with that for a long time, until I was fortunate enough to meet [professional racing driver] Will Power, who’d been through a similar situation in a different sport that he had to work through and navigate his way through to be able to get back in the car and perform again. I certainly wish that wasn’t the catalyst and everyone wishes Hughesy was still alive, of course, but that event was something where it was a stark contrast with where I was before that, after that and then how I got educated on how my mind was working.”
As president of the Australian Cricketers Association, Watson has one of the more influential places at the top table of cricket conversations in this country. And he is adamant that administrators across the world should take the time to learn a bit of what he has, and commit some time to the idea that mental skills are the game’s next frontier.
“There’s quite a bit of scepticism but also bureaucracy around it, people protecting their own patch,” Watson said. “And also around the mental side in general, people are pretty sceptical on ‘how is that really going to help me, and I don’t want to be seen to be looking for it, because that can show weakness, and people might use that against me’.
“We’ve certainly pushed the physical limits, we continue to monitor it over everything that CA and state contracted players have done over the last 15-20 years with AMS [athlete management system]. But nothing’s ever been done to really look at the human mind.
“In cricket we’ve had our heads in the sand a lot and gone ‘oh we’ll be OK’, but we’re not, and that’s the next way players are going to be able to push how good they can be.”
Then, Watson argues, streaks like his own personal peak as an opener can become much more like the norm than the exception.
Watch the Twenty20 World Cup final between Pakistan and England live and free on 9GEM and 9Now on Sunday from 6.30pm.
News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.
