Champions or Chokers?
Few countries enjoy sovereignty over a global sport the way India rules over cricket. Home to most of the sport’s fans, India controls most of its money and increasingly produces most of its best players. The full extent of this cricketing might have been on display during the men’s World Cup, the sport’s quadrennial marquee event, which India is hosting. In front of raucous crowds and conditions optimized for their playing style, the Indian team has pulverized all-comers.
The perfect record of the men in blue — ten wins from ten — will it surely be extended on November 19th, in their final game against Australia? Statistical supremacy sometimes does not deliver a trophy.
In the World Cups of 2019 and 2015, the Indian team cruised to the semi-finals, only to be knocked out by New Zealand and Australia respectively. India has suffered similar heartbreaks in other international tournaments over the past decade.
After the latest such loss — in the semi-finals of the t20 World Cup last year — Kapil Dev, a former captain, offered a simple reason for the consistent underachievement: India “come close and then choke”.
As an explanation for failure, choking resonates with fans and pundits everywhere — and not just in cricket. Manchester City won the English Premier League title last season after Arsenal had spent 248 days in first place. Arsenal, football fans claimed gloatingly, had “bottled it”.
Fans find it easier to attribute a poor result to a team’s mental shortcomings than to their opponents’ skill or the vagaries of sport. Reality is less convenient. Choking in its true sense is rare among elite athletes. According to Christopher Mesagno and Denise Hill, two sports psychologists, choking is when “an acute and considerable decrease in skill execution and performance” is caused by “increased anxiety under perceived pressure”.
Held against this standard, most choking assertions crumble. At the recent t20 World Cup, India batted well but was then swept aside by some remarkable batting by a strong English side. An analysis of India’s matches by ESPN Cricinfo, a cricket website, suggests that the team’s performance does not drop in high-pressure matches.
In most cases, failure has a more banal explanation: a better opponent. Arsenal’s failure to clinch the Premier League was not because of a lack of the mythical bottle. They were overtaken by a Manchester City team that won 11 league matches in a row.
Choking, of course, does occur. South Africa’s cricket team provides one compelling example. At the semi-final of the World Cup in 1999, the Proteas were one run away from victory when madness ensued. Lance Klusener and Allan Donald botched a simple run — both players ended up at the same end of the pitch — to present Australia with a place in the final. Calling that episode an “acute and considerable decrease in performance” would be putting it mildly.
And the “choker” label has stuck. South Africa’s exits from tournaments are invariably analyzed for signs of mental fragility. The c-word will doubtless be bandied about liberally after India faced Australia.
New research has revealed more about how pressure impedes athletes’ short-term memories, causing them to overthink and fumble basic tasks.
The current World Cup slogan is “It takes one day”. The bromide implies that triumph is always within reach, but in elite sports so is failure.
