Tom Farrow
Uncertainty, magic, and why sport needs to remember the value of both.
“Thirty years ago, when I first began to study Zen, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as waters. Later, after gaining insight through the guidance of wise teachers, I came to the realization that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now, having attained true rest, I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.”
– Zen Master Qingyuan Xingsi
The Sevens Rugby World Cup in San Francisco, 2018, was my first time travelling with the England Sevens team having taken on the Head of Strength & Conditioning role earlier that year. Shortly after the start of extra time, in the quarter final of that competition (a sudden-death, next-point-wins scenario) something occurred that shaped my perspective on performance and how I view the acquisition of sporting mastery.
We were playing a strong USA team and it was their home World Cup. They took the lead early in the game, before we managed to get two tries back via Dan Norton before half time, followed by a further try from Ollie Lindsay-Hague straight after the break. However, the US team fought back, and the game was tied at 19-19 at the end of regular time. In the short drinks break, I remember standing outside the huddle as our captain, Tom Mitchell, spoke to the team before the referee called the teams for the start of extra-time. There was a calm assurance about this England team, they didn’t seem nervous. I was. It would have felt a huge anti-climax, and a disappointing first tournament, if we dropped out at this stage. The energy between them inspired belief within me that we’d come through with the win… but sometimes it’s the hope that kills you.
The AT&T Park was bouncing. With the field converted from its usual markings as a baseball diamond, complete with patchwork turf where the mound and dirt-based infield had all been covered over. 100,000 fans attended over the 3-day tournament. This was the last game of the Saturday evening slot, with the host-nation playing their second knockout game after breezing past Wales, 35-0, in the previous round.
The restart in rugby sevens is key; often short but high, giving the team taking the restart as much chance as possible to compete in the air and win the ball back. With so much space on the field, and short games, possession is generally much more important than territory in sevens. With extra-time being sudden-death (first score wins), the need to gain possession from the restart was crucial. The team that takes the restart are in some ways in the less advantaged position as they’re unable to lift a player to compete, as they are running on to the ball, although they do know where the ball is going to go…
At the start of extra time in the quarter final, we had the restart. A perfectly placed kick gave Harry Glover the opportunity to get up and tap the ball back towards our team. He executed this perfectly and Phil Burgess caught the ball then carried into contact, setting up a ruck where we successfully secured the ball. Job one complete… What followed was an anxious, short (but which seemed to move in slow-motion) period of ball-retention, where we were reluctant to take contact for fear of being turned over. USA were also nervous to jump out of the line and seek contact, as they were worried about leaving a gap for us to stroll through. Following this short period of possession, Captain Mitch, situated in the USA half and towards the right-hand side of the pitch, spotted Burgess camped out on the opposite touch line. Bravely, Mitch opted to send a high, looping kick across to the opposite side of the pitch, towards a space 25m in front of where Burgess was starting from. Not known for his speed, but renowned for his aerobic engine, we often joked with Phil that he was the fastest player on the pitch towards the end of games, as everyone else had dropped off speed through fatigue. As the ball soared over the USA defenders and they scrambled to make up the space to get underneath it, Burge accelerated to the spot where the ball was destined to land. In a moment of absolute magic and seeming nerves of pure steel, Phil took the catch running on to the ball at full speed, outpacing the US players to the try-line to score the match winning try and knocking out the home-nation from the World Cup.
What a moment.
These are the moments we all delight in when watching sport. It’s why sport continues to grow in popularity. In a world where we increasingly struggle to find authenticity, where it feels harder to grasp what’s ‘real’, sport provides moments that clearly can’t be manufactured. Sport reminds us how fleeting moments can shape entire futures – catching, or not catching, a ball can be the difference between winning a championship or crashing out in the first round. But sport also teaches us that there are second (and third, fourth, and fifth) chances for those who are brave enough to dust themselves off and try again.
So, moments are what make sport special. Moments like that one within the Rugby Sevens World Cup, where the ball hangs in the air and time slows down, where every spectator lives collectively within a Schrodinger’s Cat1 scenario of an outcome that is both positive and negative until the ball is caught, or dropped, and the try is scored, or not scored. Within football, there is nothing like the collective tension between the gasp of wonder and the eruption of elation when a player finds themselves in open space with a free strike at the ball that has just been crossed into the box, while we all wonder whether the strike will be sweet and the ball will soar into the top corner, evading the keeper at full stretch, or whether it will ricochet off the outside of the player’s foot and fly off into the stands.
I’ve been coaching for over 15 years and most of that time has been spent within professional sport. As a coach I have the habit of zooming out before zooming in. I want to understand the holistic context before I decide on how we approach the details. Ever since I started working in professional sport, it has never been lost on me how much these moments, that dance on the knife-edge of meaning, can impact a team’s outcome. But the processes and ideas I’ve seen in the teams and governing bodies I’ve worked with rarely allow space for this reality within how they operate or make decisions. It’s difficult and inconvenient for large organisations to acknowledge that all their efforts may in the end be scuppered by chance. There are maybe two ways you can deal with this reality; the first is to pretend it’s not the case and discuss every aspect of your programme as if there is a clear cause and effect lineage from your actions to end outcomes. The second is to accept it is fundamental to sport, then build systems, processes and organisational philosophies that allow space for the unexplainable and the unplannable. So that when faced with the unexpected the team and staff can respond appropriately.
In his book ‘Fooled by Randomness’ (and throughout much of his other work), Nassim Taleb highlights how we are wired to construct causal narratives from random outcomes, and how institutions are particularly prone to this because they need to justify their decisions. In some ways this is most clear in sporting organisations. There have been many programmes that owe at least part of their success to a few lucky bounces in key moments within games. There will also be plenty of others who haven’t succeeded because of the luck of the bounce going against them. But these outcomes – whether championships were won and where the team finishes in a league for example, are the frame from which success or failure is judged.
This unspoken tension exists within professional sport organisations; between the billions of business investment that funds the teams and the almost quantum chance that can decide outcomes. The unknown nature of sport, brings the excitement, the excitement brings the fans, and the fans bring the revenue that the billions of business investment is trying to turn into more billions. Naturally, investment wants a degree of certainty that there will be positive returns. But their penchant for seeking certainty can often lead to organisational environments that squeeze the magic out of the building. Following this, results slump. Following that, there is often a lot of head scratching about what didn’t work and what they need to do more of… (Often the solution would be doing less, allowing more space, more flexibility in the schedule, and remaining conscious of the importance of magic within creating magic moments).
These are issues I have become more aware of as my time in sport has progressed. Returning to my original aim though; I wanted to be able to link my processes, training programmes and philosophy for developing sport mastery back to what really mattered. The phrase I came up with and have kept in mind ever since is;
Players only ever exist in the moment… they either solve the problem in front of them… or they don’t.
There is nothing we can do that guarantees a positive outcome – that’s the magic that makes sport special, so we need to accept this uncertainty as part of our process. What we can do however, with a relatively high degree of confidence, is increase the likelihood that players will be able to find solutions to the types of problem they face in competition. To do this effectively, we need to deconstruct those moments that athletes find themselves in.
All sports training is driven towards this aim. Whether the coaches are aware of the bigger picture or whether they just focus on their area of speciality, everyone is training with a view to be able to solve the problems they find on the field, in the ring, on the court or on the track. Those problems exist within moments.
The popular ‘High Performance Podcast’, with Jake Humphrey and Damien Hughes, has had a wide variety of guests from within sport and beyond. Within each episode, they ask the guest; “What does ‘High Performance’ mean to you?”. One of my favourite answers to this question came from Jonny Wilkinson, generally considered one of the greats within his sport of rugby union. He said High Performance to him was: “All of me in every moment.”
This is a profound answer and what it fundamentally presents is this idea we’ve been discussing. That beyond the physical, technical, tactical and psychological abilities an athlete may possess, it is not a given that they are able to bring all of these to the table at any one time. There are a variety of factors that may affect whether an athlete is able to maximise their ability within any one moment.
While that ball hung in the air over the AT&T Park in San Francisco, while we floated between winning and losing, we were touched by the grace of unknowingness. How interested would we be in these moments if we could confirm their outcome? Imagine football games without the gasp and release of tension that accompanies those mystical moments before the ball hits the back of the net. In sport we find something fundamental to life; the interplay between knowns/unknowns, order/chaos, structure/freedom.
We all long to know how everything will play out, because we’re vulnerable, because we’re fearful, because it’s nice to win. But we often forget that we also long to be surprised, excited and thrilled. That space in between these poles is living. It’s nice to win because we knew we could lose. When working with athletes, I think it’s important to remember the joy in this dance with the unknown, rather than trying to squeeze all the uncertainty (& joy) out of the journey.
Footnotes:
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Schrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in which a cat sealed in a box is theoretically both alive and dead simultaneously — until the box is opened and the outcome observed. The experiment illustrates how quantum superposition holds multiple possibilities in coexistence until the moment of resolution.