Issue 178

Punching, kicking and choking: behavior that is most certainly not cricket. So how can a game that can last up to five days hold any relevance to a fight that lasts 15 minutes? Well, if you are to believe Robin Williams, cricket is basically baseball on Valium where 11 guys dress in butcher’s uniforms to throw around a little red ball. 

Truthfully, it’s a game of skill, strategy and lightning-fast reaction times, which are now being transferred to MMA. And although it’s thought of as one of the most quintessentially British sports, making it the choice of more reserved chaps, it can be psychologically and physiologically rough. That’s because of all the team sports; it's probably the most individual-orientated game there is. 

Each time you go out to bat, it is required of every player to ply their trade with a partner against the brunt of 11 opposing players. This demands mental fortitude that’s proving to be very useful in the cage. Here's how MMA has been used to improve cricketers’ performances and how cricket has helped MMA fighters knock their opponents for six. 

Keeping eyes on your opponent

The golden rule in any fight is to always keep your eyes fixed on your opponent’s appendages. This directed focus is also a huge part of cricket, because when you misjudge a ball, it hurts, not just as much as a punch, but far more. Cricket balls are rock hard, travel at up to 86 mph and have actually killed several players since the dawn of the professional game. 

Fortunately, players are required by the game’s conduct to wear pads and helmets, but research in the Journal of Hand Surgery has found the most often injured areas are the hands, which unlike baseball or softball, aren’t protected by gloves, unless batting. Dislocations, fractures, ligament tears are the bye-catch of poor reaction times. So cricketers are forced to work hard to make sure their hand-eye coordination is spot on or pay the price. 

“I may or may not have been born with fast reaction times, but I do have a particularly good ability to see punches and avoid fastballs,” says Adam Hollioake, thus far the only former professional cricket player captain to compete, albeit briefly, as a pro-MMA fighter. “Cricket enhances this reaction time and it is easily transferred to MMA. My stand-up trainer always tells me I have great eyes because I can see punches coming and avoid them easily. While I’m not sure if I was born with this skill or not, cricket certainly helped perfect it.” 

Improved reaction times are definitely a skill worth mastering whether you’re a cricketer or MMA fighter because the world we live in is actually geared towards slowing it down, and not in a Matrix way either. Research at the University of Birmingham, England found the information the brain uses to process moving objects and to estimate their likely trajectory – which can then be used to decide whether to move out of the way of a punch or how to play a shot or catch a ball – is biased by the generally slow-moving world around us. 

Dr Andrew Welchman, the study author, has discovered this bias affects the way we perceive and interpret objects approaching from dead ahead, far more than objects moving side-to-side in our field of vision. "We may think we live in a fast-moving, hectic world, but statistically our environment moves around us slowly," says Welchman. "Apart from the odd speeding car, buildings, landscapes and walls around us all move past us at slow and predictable speeds. 

"When an object moves quickly – be it a football, cricket ball or, for our ancestors, a spear – our brains have to interpret the movement rapidly and, because our brains draw on experience, it's often biased by what it already knows. The less certain we are about what we see, the more we are influenced by the brain's statistical assumptions, which means in some circumstances we get it wrong."

This means even with high-speed rail, eight-cylinder car engines and 4G broadband, the rat race is slow enough to drum down the potential of your eyes and reaction times. So even if you don’t want to play a full cricket match it could be worth getting a friend to bowl a few at you in the batting cages to improve your reaction times. And if you’re a cricketer, then a jab traveling towards your face carries a stiff enough penalty that you’ll want to move out of its way, prompting you to react quicker. Both activities complement one another and offer you an eye for an eye solution for fixing slow reaction times. 

The mental game

While cricket is often regarded as the game of noblemen, that courtesy stays firmly in the clubhouse and is very rarely seen during a match. To make matters worse, the higher up you play, the harsher the attempted mental disintegration gets. Taunts such as, ‘So, how’s your wife and my kids?’ are a regular feature on the field and are often peppered with far worse language than this magazine is willing to publish. Worse still, this sledging doesn’t just last the duration of a weigh-in the way it does for MMA fights, but can go for hours if a batsman has the psychological grit to dig in and perform. This kind of mental toughness is helping cricketers who decide to tough it out in the sport of MMA. 

“Standing on a freezing-cold cricket paddock for hours on end forces you to look inward and find out if you can step up to the challenge, and with fighting that is also a very real proposition,” says Hollioake. “If you’re losing, cricket has helped me to stay calm and find a way to change the game to a winning scenario. I’ve also become the master of preparing for a match because when I was playing cricket for a living, I’d do it 100 times a year where as most fighters do it 50 times in their career. The regular gameplay of cricket helps you get into that winning frame of mind where you visualize and prepare in a professional manner by controlling and channeling your nerves into something positive. 

"Does it mean I’m a better fighter? Who knows? But it certainly feels like an advantage because it’s helped me overcome the fear of physical pain, whether it’s come from a punch in the face or a cricket ball to the body.” This kind of positive mental preparation is useful for all sports because being worried about what’s to come doesn’t do a competitor any favors.

Research at the American Gastroenterological Association found that the tendency to experience negative emotions before an event significantly affects processing during pain, as well as during the anticipation of pain. “People who have high expectations of pain may have a harder time coping with the actual source of pain,” says Dr Steven Coen, the studies lead author. 

Fighters or cricketers, who worry about the aches they are about to face, actually feel more pain than those who were relaxed before their matchup. So experiencing the pre-match jitters more regularly will make you a more relaxed fighter and one who dons his pain-proof armor easier. 

Aristotle is famous for saying: “Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.” And if you can master this anticipation by using cricket as a cross-training tool then you’ll learn to bury your fears of entering the cage. 

The crossover works both ways because fighting also gives cricketers mental toughness that they can carry on to the pitch. The most notable example of this in action is England's Ian Bell, who claimed his maiden test century (100 runs) against Australia (the world’s number-one ranked team at the time) after training with English MMA vet Barrington Patterson and trainer Darren Grewcock. 

During the game, there were a few controversial decisions where most batsmen would have succumbed to the pressure. But Bell acknowledged his MMA training and said the pressure he’d been put under by his trainers had taught him how to front up and given him a new mental toughness in the middle of the pitch. “It was all about control of thought and calmness under duress,” says Grewcock “It has changed him. The old Ian Bell would have just walked off when the Aussies appealed and the umpire gave him out. Instead, he stood his ground. He learned that in combat. He’s a different character, he’d changed before he left for Australia.”

Even former Aussie bowler Shane Warne commented that Bell had gone from the ‘Shermanator’ (the geek of American Pie fame) to the Terminator. And compliments from an Australian about a Brit’s mental toughness are about as rare as catching a smile from Nick Diaz. 

Learning the easy way

Both mixed martial arts and cricket demand you to learn new techniques. In MMA, you’ll probably never know all there is to know. And even if you do, you won’t be able to implement it all in a fight. The same is true for cricket, which makes both sports highly technical in their own rights. For some, this can quickly spell frustration, but for those with a thirst for knowledge and a love of coaching, these sports become happy hunting grounds for information and skills. 

Learning through trial and error forces you to modify your actions to get new responses, found research in the journal Neuron. While this isn’t anything groundbreaking, you will benefit from starting a new sport and making mistakes. “One of the biggest things I’ve taken from cricket into MMA is the ability to understand instructions,” says Hollioake. “You have to develop the ability to listen, watch and replicate. Cricket teaches these skills to an athlete. You’re forced to make alterations based on other people’s instructions and that makes you more adaptable.” 

Whether it’s your stand-up or skills on the mat, your ability to listen to your coaching staff during practice and a fight is sure to improve your results. “When players compete against each other in a game, they try to make a mental model of the other person’s intentions: what they’re going to play so they can play strategically against them,” says Kyle Mathewson, the lead author for a study on brain patterns published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

And this kind of mental chess is easier if you can take on board advice from experienced coaches and implement their changes and viewpoints into your strategy. The skill of two-ears-and-one-mouth is one fighters can learn from cricketers and cricketers from fighters. 

Fitness: Battling the bat

Cricket isn’t a calorie-nuking activity so it probably isn’t going to help your fighting fitness. At best, bowling, which is prone to repetitive injury, will probably give you a bit of extra strength on your bowling arm. Hollioake who was a right-handed bowler, and drew his MMA debut in Australia in 2012, says: “During my fight I was dominant on my right hand and kept on looking for the KO with my right hand.” Training in MMA has also helped Ian Bell’s mental and physical fitness. 

Coach Barrington Patterson admits he set out to unsettle Bell. “We’ve just tried to mess him up, really, to try and break him mentally,” says Patterson. “I wanted to see him puke, because I’m being paid to do a job. If you don’t like it, don’t come back again. I want to get the best out of you. But Bell just kept coming back. We’ve had him sprinting with his kit on, doing hill sprints, and then on the pads, sparring in full batting kit. 

"We’ve been at the indoor nets doing circuits with him, where he's on the bowling machine, and then into sprints and pad work – jabs, hooks, and uppercuts. Then I’ll lean on him and push him around in a grappling session, so he can work on his strength and resistance.”

So although cricket practice won’t double as an Octagon workout, doing MMA is an excellent cross-training tool for a budding batsman to boost his fitness.