Two days back, Yashasvi Jaiswal, after his very measured innings of 87, turned up for the press conference. It was a knock where, for a brief moment, he had shelved his wide array of strokes when the English bowlers were bowling tight lines. When they couldn’t sustain the pressure, Jaiswal would be back to his attacking self. As the last question of the press conference, the young opener was asked to explain the complexity of changing gears and how his limbs listen to the mind.
“How do you know when to defend, when to pull the trigger?” asked a reporter. Jaiswal smiled. It had been a long day, the topic was worthy of a book. Jaiswal struggled for words but did come up with a short and simple answer: “I don’t know … it is just a feeling. I think I practiced too much, too hard. So when I am batting, I know what is the better option and I try doing that”.
The ‘feeling’ that the frightfully consistent 23-year-old with unreal numbers – 20 Tests, 5 hundreds, 2 double tons, 10 fifties – talks about is a state of mind that is the destination of most sporting stars but only the geniuses reach there often. This certainly has to do with meditative focus on match days but it is more to do with the hours sweating out under the sun on non-match days. Good batsmen train hard to develop muscle memory to automate their shot-selection. The best in the business train harder, they are at a higher plane, for them decision-making is a call of the subconscious.
Listening to that inner voice isn’t easy, since on most days the body doesn’t listen to the subconscious. Outside voices and pressures drown that voice. At times trying too hard can also be a hurdle on the path to achieve that Zen mode.
That’s the problem Shubman Gill was dealing with before the England tour. After his historic 269 he spoke about it. “I felt my batting was going well. I was scoring 30-35-40 runs consistently in Test matches. But at some point, I was missing that peak concentration time. A lot of people say that when you focus too much, you sometimes miss your peak time,” he said. So how did he deal with this fragile and complicated frame of mind? “So, in this series, I tried to go back to my basics. I tried to bat like I used to in my childhood.”