What Playing Cricket Online Taught Me?

As an aspiring young cricketer who has been training to play and have been involved in many cricket tournaments representing various clubs has one thing consistently bothering me. How do I score big and contribute to teams win?

Trying

I have tried many things with inputs from various players from my peer group to seniors to coaches. I realized one thing – no matter what people say, it’s the space between your ears (your head) that needs to be clear. This brought me to the next question, how do I stay in the moment without worrying about what’s going to happen next? This brought up another contradicting question, how do I plan my innings?

To plan means thinking about future, and to stay in the moment is not to think about the future. This for was like two sides of the same coin. I was not able to crack it for quite some time.

What changed?

In order to take my mind away from these questions, I have tried playing online games. These games are a great source of entertainment and also give you a break. However, deep in my mind I was having this question – Am I trying to escape reality? I figured out that it is not escaping reality, however, it actually helped me enhance my game and handle staying in the moment and plan my innings at the same time.

Playing Cricket Online

I played two games on neodelight.com – 1. CPL (Cricket Premier League) and 2. Cricket World Cup, while playing these games I was able to perform well. Though online games are quite different from real experience, I asked myself why I was able to perform better online.

The answer surprised me, because of its simplicity. I was not looking at the scoreboard, I was playing one ball at a time and most importantly, on its merit. This helped me stay in the moment. That’s exactly what is required.

Now came the interesting part, how do I plan and still stay in the moment?

Before start of the innings I know the score to chase and after every over, I understand what needs to be done for that particular over. Instead of planning in detail for the entire innings, I had a broad plan for the whole innings and broke down the plan for every over. Depending on the outcome of previous over, I started planning what needs to be done in the subsequent over.

In every over, the ball is played on its merit and the planned target is achieved by taking calculated risk for that particular over. Some overs did not go in my way, I had to make that adjustment in the subsequent overs.

This knowledge, I tried to apply in my league game and to my surprise, it worked pretty well. This I’m sure can be applied to life as well.

So the bottom line is:

• Have an overall Plan for any goal
• Breakdown the plan into manageable and measureable pieces
• Execute the plan by taking one step at a time
• Take calculated risks (minimize risks by planning for the over and subsequently carrying it forward based on the outcome)

I’m sure there are lot of learning that can be directly applied to our daily lives. Casual games, if you observe closely, are not so casual after all.

Serious or Casual! Get Gaming!

PS: Post is by a league cricket player based on his experiences who wishes to stay anonymous