Things cricket can learn from the Olympics
It's been great watching Great Britain do well in the Olympics and long may it continue over future games. With Clive Woodward overseeing overall performance up to 2012 with a whole heap of investment behind him, I'm confident we'll keep improving. Anyway - two things that stood out for me that may relate to cricket in the future:
1. Did you notice how many people in individual sports were interviewed afterwards and said "we've been training hard for this", "we're got our reward", etc? It seems that individual athletes realise that they are only as good as the sum of their parts which involves their coach, nutritionalist, sports psychologist etc. With the IPL and Stanford money coming in, I wonder how long it is before we find an international batsman or bowler burst onto the scene with an individual entorage they use to guide them (and them alone rather than the team).
2. Avoid farce by using technology before spectators and players lose faith in your sport. Sports like taekwondo, boxing, diving and gymnastics (and probably several others) all need TV replays to ensure that the right person wins. Gymnastics, from the bit of the Olympics that I saw, is the only sport to have brought that in. Cricket is also a sport that is judged by someone - umpires - and we need to sort out the use of technology asap to avoid farce - we've heard about the Sarah Stevenson taekwondo case in Britain, but it was just one of several for that sport. One of the fighters has made all sorts of allegations against the taekwondo Federation - let's hope this doesn't happen to cricket.
4 comments:
On an associated note, has anyone seen that there is a strange love in going on between Usain Bolt and Matthew Hayden? Bizarre....
It seems that John Buchanan takes a different view to you on how technology fits in with the oft-cited Olympic spirit, from Cricinfo:
"Cricket ought to initially clean its own backyard and then strive to secure a place in the Olympics. I consider it miserable that the decisions of the authorities are questioned. I'm totally against the referral system and Twenty20 cannot be a part of the Olympics as the referral system is against the spirit of the Games."
All this from a man known for his laptop-based coaching methods.
Hmmm, very interesting! I don't really understand his point to be honest - how can the referral system be against the spirit of the games? The whole point of the Olympics is to find out who the best in the world are at each sport - if you need a non-human system to identify who is the best, as some sports do, then surely that is entirely in keeping with the Olympic spirit. Well that's how it seems to me anyway....what do you think?
It's funny how the (good) Olympic spirit seems to be completely forgotten as soon as controversial decisions are made by human judges....the crowd boos, the players get aggressive and are critical in interviews and the coaches shout abuse. Why not end all that and just get the judging right?
Without wishing to divert too far from cricket, you're right, and the whole "Olympic spirit" seems to have become this ill-defined beast which critics can hijack to make almost any argument, as Buchanan shows here. Then again, by saying that, maybe we're guilty of the same thing. Confusing.
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