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Why I will stop calling players talented: A discussion of terminology
- Thread starter Flem274*
- Start date
Lillian Thomson
Hall of Fame Member
Talent is the best looking bird at the bar who's most likely to drop her knickers if you buy her a shandy.
Uppercut
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Nice.
My housemate drums for a jazz orchestra. The process of learning involved picking up some drumsticks, being **** just like everyone else, then playing them a lot and gradually getting better. Then, after spending years and years practicing, he got good. And that's when people started telling him he was "talented".
It's mainly just what you call the people you haven't known for long enough to have seen the work they've put into becoming as good as they are.
My housemate drums for a jazz orchestra. The process of learning involved picking up some drumsticks, being **** just like everyone else, then playing them a lot and gradually getting better. Then, after spending years and years practicing, he got good. And that's when people started telling him he was "talented".
It's mainly just what you call the people you haven't known for long enough to have seen the work they've put into becoming as good as they are.
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Lillian Thomson
Hall of Fame Member
Hard work isn't talent, it just tones it. That's why Ian Botham could spend the 50 hours a week that Derek Pringle spent in the nets in the pub and still be 3,000 times more successful.
Neil Pickup
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Spot on, as far as I can tell.
I'd also go further and say that hand-eye has even less significance than you suggest - most perception, particularly as you go higher and higher through the levels of sport, occurs before a ball gets into play - subconscious cues that enable you to "see" before you see.
I'd also go further and say that hand-eye has even less significance than you suggest - most perception, particularly as you go higher and higher through the levels of sport, occurs before a ball gets into play - subconscious cues that enable you to "see" before you see.
Prince EWS
Global Moderator
Yeah there was an article I read a couple of years ago which pointed that international batsmen didn't typically have abnormal hand-eye and were more than likely - as you alluded to - making up their mind on the basics of which shot to play subconsciously before the bowler even let the thing go.
Flem274*
123/5
Yeah mate, go for it.
The idea that top batsmen don't just see the ball early, but make a split-second calculation about where it's going before it even leaves the bowlers hand, is covered in Bob Woolmer's coaching book.
He writes about research where the lights are killed at the moment of ball release. Top batsmen can still play the ball to some degree, despite the darkness. They can't do the same with a bowling machine. This may also explain why bowling machines always seem faster their speed suggests.
He writes about research where the lights are killed at the moment of ball release. Top batsmen can still play the ball to some degree, despite the darkness. They can't do the same with a bowling machine. This may also explain why bowling machines always seem faster their speed suggests.
Neil Pickup
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Yeah - it fits with a piece in Bounce by Matthew Syed, which is compulsory reading if you're into this kind of sports coaching/psychology.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/matthew_syed/article7106706.ece
Men who proved that the gift of time has rarely been God-given
Matthew Syed
Iceberg illusion and titanic challenges
If I were to utter random numbers one after the other, how many could you repeat? If you are like most people, you can probably manage six or seven. Now consider that memory experts can remember more than 80 digits, something that might lead us to the conclusion that they have special “memory genes” or “superhuman powers”. This is what Anders Ericsson, the psychologist, calls the iceberg illusion.
When we witness extraordinary feats of memory (or sporting or artistic prowess) we are witnessing the product of a process measured in years. What is invisible are the countless hours of practice that went into its making.
So how is it done? Try remembering these 13 letters: A B N O R M A L I T I E S. Piece of cake, isn’t it? Why? Because the letters are arranged in a sequence that is instantly familiar. This is what psychologists call “chunking”.
Now, suppose I wrote down a list of random words. You could probably remember six or seven, but at 13 letters per word you would be remembering about 80 letters. By chunking, you have matched the feats of memory experts.
We can see the power of chunking in chess. In 1973 researchers took two groups — one consisting of masters (who are able to play many games simultaneously while blindfolded), the other composed of novices. They showed them chessboards briefly, then asked them to recall the positions of the pieces. As expected, the masters recalled the position of every piece, while the non-players placed only four or five. But the genius of the experiment was about to be revealed. The procedure was repeated, except the pieces were set up not as in real games, but randomly. The novices recalled five or so, but, astonishingly, the experts were no better. What was going on? In a nutshell, when masters look at pieces’ positions on a board, they see the equivalent of a word.
Their experience enables them to “chunk” the pattern, just as we can chunk the letters constituting a familiar word. As soon as the language of chess is disrupted by the random positioning of pieces, masters are looking at a jumble of letters, just like the rest of us.
*****
In December 2004 I played tennis with Michael Stich, the former Wimbledon champion, in West London. The match was part of a promotional day pitting journalists against top players to publicise a competition. Most of the matches were light-hearted, but when I came up against Stich I wanted to conduct an experiment.
I asked Stich to serve at maximum pace. He has one of the fastest serves in history and I was curious to see whether my reactions, forged over 20 years of international table tennis, would enable me to return it. Stich smiled at the request, graciously assented and then spent ten minutes warming up. The onlookers — around 30 club members — suddenly became very curious and the atmosphere a little tense.
I crouched down and focused hard, coiled like a spring. I was confident I would return the serve, although I was not certain it would be much more than a mid-court lob. Stich tossed the ball, arched his back and then, in what seemed like a whirl of hyperactivity, launched into his service action. Even as I witnessed the ball connecting with his racket, it whirred past my right ear with a speed that produced what seemed like a clap of wind. I had barely rotated my neck by the time it thudded against the soft green curtains behind me.
I stood up straight, bemused, much to Stich’s merriment and that of the onlookers. I couldn’t fathom how the ball had travelled so effortlessly fast from his racket, on to the court and then past my head. I asked him to send down another, then another. He served four straight aces before approaching the net with a shrug of the shoulders. He told me that he had slowed down the last two serves to give me a fighting chance. I hadn’t even noticed.
Most people would conclude from this humbling experience that the ability to connect with, let alone return, a super-fast serve must belong exclusively to those with reaction speeds at the outer limits of human capability. It is an inference that almost jumps up and bites you when the ball has just rocketed so fast past your nose that you’re relieved at having avoided injury.
But I was forbidden from reaching any such conclusion. Why? Because in different circumstances I have those extraordinary reaction speeds. When I stand behind a table tennis table, I am able to return smash-kills in the blink of an eye. The time available to return a serve in tennis is approximately 450 milliseconds, but there are less than 250 milliseconds in which to return a smash in table tennis. So, why could I return the latter and not the former?
In 1984 Desmond Douglas, the greatest-ever UK table tennis player, was placed in front of a screen containing a series of touch-sensitive pads at the University of Brighton. He was told that the pads would light up in a random sequence and that his task was to touch the pad with the index finger of his favoured hand as soon as he could, before waiting for the next pad to light up. Douglas was highly motivated because the other members of the team had done the test and were ribbing him in the familiar manner of team rivalry. First one pad, then another lit up. Each time Douglas jabbed his finger towards the pad, his eyes scanning the screen for the next target. After a minute the task ended and Douglas’s team-mates gave him a round of applause. Douglas grinned as the researcher left the room to collate the results.
After five minutes the researcher returned. He announced that Douglas’s reactions were the slowest in the entire England team: slower than the juniors and the cadets, slower even than the team manager.
I remember the intake of breath to this day. Douglas was universally considered to have the fastest reactions in world table tennis. His style was based on standing a couple of inches from the edge of the table and allowing the ball to ricochet from his bat using reflexes that astounded audiences around the world. But here was a scientist telling us that he had the most sluggish reactions in the whole of the England team.
It is not surprising that, after the initial shock, the researcher was laughed out of the room. He was told that the machine must be faulty or that he was measuring the wrong data. What nobody considered, however, was that Douglas really did have the slowest reactions in the team and that his speed was the consequence of something entirely different. But what?
I am standing in a room at Liverpool John Moores University. In front of me is a screen containing a lifesize projection of a tennis player standing at the other end of a virtual court. An eye-tracking system is trained on my eyes and my feet are placed on sensors. The whole thing has been put together by Professor Mark Williams, arguably the world’s leading expert on perception in sport.
Mark hits the play button and I watch as my “opponent” tosses the ball to serve. I am concentrating hard and watching intently, but I have already demonstrated why I was unable to return the serve of Stich.
“You were looking in the wrong place,” says Williams. “Top tennis players look at the trunk and hips of their opponents on return in order to pick up the visual clues governing where they are going to serve. If I were to stop the picture in advance of the ball being hit, they would still have a good idea about where it was going to go. You were looking at his racket and arm, which give very little information about the future path of the ball.” I ask him to replay the tape and adjust my focus to look at the places rich in information, but it makes me even more sluggish. Williams laughs. “It is not as simple as just knowing about where to look; it is also about grasping the meaning of what you are looking at. It is about looking at the subtle patterns of movement and postural clues and extracting information. Top players make a small number of visual fixations and ‘chunk’ the key information.”
Think back to the master chess players. When they looked at a board, they saw words. They were able to chunk the position of the pieces because of their long experience of playing chess. Now we can see that precisely the same thing is happening in tennis. When Roger Federer returns a service he is not demonstrating sharper reactions than you and I; what he is showing is that he can extract more information from the service action of his opponent, enabling him to move into position earlier and more efficiently than the rest of us, which, in turn, allows him to make the return.
As Janet Starkes, of McMaster University, puts it: “The exploitation of advance information results in the time paradox where skilled performers seem to have all the time in the world. Recognition of familiar scenarios and the chunking of perceptual information into meaningful wholes speeds up processes.”
The key thing to note is that these cannot possibly be innate skills: Federer did not come into this mortal world with knowledge of where to look or how to extract information any more than chess players have innate memory board skills (remember that their advantage is eliminated when the pieces are randomly placed). No, Federer’s advantage has been gathered from experience.
More precisely, it has been gained from a painstaking process of encoding the meaning of subtle patterns of movement drawn from many thousands of hours of practice. He is able to see the patterns in his opponent’s movements, and it is his regular practice that has given him this expertise, not his genes.
Recently I went to the Birmingham home of Desmond Douglas to try to figure out how someone with such unimpressive innate reactions became the fastest man in the history of one of the world’s fastest sports. It turns out that Douglas had perhaps the most unusual grounding of any international table tennis player of the past half-century.
Brought up in working-class Birmingham, struggling and unmotivated in his academic work, Douglas happened upon a table tennis club at school. The tables were old and decrepit, but functional.
The problem is that they were housed in the tiniest of classrooms. “Looking back, it was pretty unbelievable,” Douglas said. “There were three tables going along the length of the room to accommodate all the players who wanted to take part, but there was so little space behind the tables that we had to stand right up against the edge of the tables to play, with our backs almost touching the blackboard.”
I tracked down a few of the others who played in that era. “It was an amazing time,” one said. “The claustrophobia of the room forced us to play a form of ‘speed table tennis’, where everyone had to be super-sharp. Spin and strategy hardly came into it; all that mattered was speed.”
Douglas did not spend a few weeks or months in that classroom, but the first five years of his development. “We all loved playing table tennis, but Des was different,” another classmate told me. “While the rest of us had other hobbies, he spent all his time in that classroom practising his skills and playing matches. I have never seen such dedication.”
In essence, Douglas spent more hours than any other player in the history of the sport encoding the characteristics of a highly specific type of table tennis — the kind played at maximum pace, close to the table. By the time he arrived in international table tennis he was able to perceive where the ball was going before his opponents had even hit it. That is how a man with sluggish reactions became the fastest player on the planet.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/matthew_syed/article7106706.ece
Men who proved that the gift of time has rarely been God-given
Matthew Syed
Iceberg illusion and titanic challenges
If I were to utter random numbers one after the other, how many could you repeat? If you are like most people, you can probably manage six or seven. Now consider that memory experts can remember more than 80 digits, something that might lead us to the conclusion that they have special “memory genes” or “superhuman powers”. This is what Anders Ericsson, the psychologist, calls the iceberg illusion.
When we witness extraordinary feats of memory (or sporting or artistic prowess) we are witnessing the product of a process measured in years. What is invisible are the countless hours of practice that went into its making.
So how is it done? Try remembering these 13 letters: A B N O R M A L I T I E S. Piece of cake, isn’t it? Why? Because the letters are arranged in a sequence that is instantly familiar. This is what psychologists call “chunking”.
Now, suppose I wrote down a list of random words. You could probably remember six or seven, but at 13 letters per word you would be remembering about 80 letters. By chunking, you have matched the feats of memory experts.
We can see the power of chunking in chess. In 1973 researchers took two groups — one consisting of masters (who are able to play many games simultaneously while blindfolded), the other composed of novices. They showed them chessboards briefly, then asked them to recall the positions of the pieces. As expected, the masters recalled the position of every piece, while the non-players placed only four or five. But the genius of the experiment was about to be revealed. The procedure was repeated, except the pieces were set up not as in real games, but randomly. The novices recalled five or so, but, astonishingly, the experts were no better. What was going on? In a nutshell, when masters look at pieces’ positions on a board, they see the equivalent of a word.
Their experience enables them to “chunk” the pattern, just as we can chunk the letters constituting a familiar word. As soon as the language of chess is disrupted by the random positioning of pieces, masters are looking at a jumble of letters, just like the rest of us.
*****
In December 2004 I played tennis with Michael Stich, the former Wimbledon champion, in West London. The match was part of a promotional day pitting journalists against top players to publicise a competition. Most of the matches were light-hearted, but when I came up against Stich I wanted to conduct an experiment.
I asked Stich to serve at maximum pace. He has one of the fastest serves in history and I was curious to see whether my reactions, forged over 20 years of international table tennis, would enable me to return it. Stich smiled at the request, graciously assented and then spent ten minutes warming up. The onlookers — around 30 club members — suddenly became very curious and the atmosphere a little tense.
I crouched down and focused hard, coiled like a spring. I was confident I would return the serve, although I was not certain it would be much more than a mid-court lob. Stich tossed the ball, arched his back and then, in what seemed like a whirl of hyperactivity, launched into his service action. Even as I witnessed the ball connecting with his racket, it whirred past my right ear with a speed that produced what seemed like a clap of wind. I had barely rotated my neck by the time it thudded against the soft green curtains behind me.
I stood up straight, bemused, much to Stich’s merriment and that of the onlookers. I couldn’t fathom how the ball had travelled so effortlessly fast from his racket, on to the court and then past my head. I asked him to send down another, then another. He served four straight aces before approaching the net with a shrug of the shoulders. He told me that he had slowed down the last two serves to give me a fighting chance. I hadn’t even noticed.
Most people would conclude from this humbling experience that the ability to connect with, let alone return, a super-fast serve must belong exclusively to those with reaction speeds at the outer limits of human capability. It is an inference that almost jumps up and bites you when the ball has just rocketed so fast past your nose that you’re relieved at having avoided injury.
But I was forbidden from reaching any such conclusion. Why? Because in different circumstances I have those extraordinary reaction speeds. When I stand behind a table tennis table, I am able to return smash-kills in the blink of an eye. The time available to return a serve in tennis is approximately 450 milliseconds, but there are less than 250 milliseconds in which to return a smash in table tennis. So, why could I return the latter and not the former?
In 1984 Desmond Douglas, the greatest-ever UK table tennis player, was placed in front of a screen containing a series of touch-sensitive pads at the University of Brighton. He was told that the pads would light up in a random sequence and that his task was to touch the pad with the index finger of his favoured hand as soon as he could, before waiting for the next pad to light up. Douglas was highly motivated because the other members of the team had done the test and were ribbing him in the familiar manner of team rivalry. First one pad, then another lit up. Each time Douglas jabbed his finger towards the pad, his eyes scanning the screen for the next target. After a minute the task ended and Douglas’s team-mates gave him a round of applause. Douglas grinned as the researcher left the room to collate the results.
After five minutes the researcher returned. He announced that Douglas’s reactions were the slowest in the entire England team: slower than the juniors and the cadets, slower even than the team manager.
I remember the intake of breath to this day. Douglas was universally considered to have the fastest reactions in world table tennis. His style was based on standing a couple of inches from the edge of the table and allowing the ball to ricochet from his bat using reflexes that astounded audiences around the world. But here was a scientist telling us that he had the most sluggish reactions in the whole of the England team.
It is not surprising that, after the initial shock, the researcher was laughed out of the room. He was told that the machine must be faulty or that he was measuring the wrong data. What nobody considered, however, was that Douglas really did have the slowest reactions in the team and that his speed was the consequence of something entirely different. But what?
I am standing in a room at Liverpool John Moores University. In front of me is a screen containing a lifesize projection of a tennis player standing at the other end of a virtual court. An eye-tracking system is trained on my eyes and my feet are placed on sensors. The whole thing has been put together by Professor Mark Williams, arguably the world’s leading expert on perception in sport.
Mark hits the play button and I watch as my “opponent” tosses the ball to serve. I am concentrating hard and watching intently, but I have already demonstrated why I was unable to return the serve of Stich.
“You were looking in the wrong place,” says Williams. “Top tennis players look at the trunk and hips of their opponents on return in order to pick up the visual clues governing where they are going to serve. If I were to stop the picture in advance of the ball being hit, they would still have a good idea about where it was going to go. You were looking at his racket and arm, which give very little information about the future path of the ball.” I ask him to replay the tape and adjust my focus to look at the places rich in information, but it makes me even more sluggish. Williams laughs. “It is not as simple as just knowing about where to look; it is also about grasping the meaning of what you are looking at. It is about looking at the subtle patterns of movement and postural clues and extracting information. Top players make a small number of visual fixations and ‘chunk’ the key information.”
Think back to the master chess players. When they looked at a board, they saw words. They were able to chunk the position of the pieces because of their long experience of playing chess. Now we can see that precisely the same thing is happening in tennis. When Roger Federer returns a service he is not demonstrating sharper reactions than you and I; what he is showing is that he can extract more information from the service action of his opponent, enabling him to move into position earlier and more efficiently than the rest of us, which, in turn, allows him to make the return.
As Janet Starkes, of McMaster University, puts it: “The exploitation of advance information results in the time paradox where skilled performers seem to have all the time in the world. Recognition of familiar scenarios and the chunking of perceptual information into meaningful wholes speeds up processes.”
The key thing to note is that these cannot possibly be innate skills: Federer did not come into this mortal world with knowledge of where to look or how to extract information any more than chess players have innate memory board skills (remember that their advantage is eliminated when the pieces are randomly placed). No, Federer’s advantage has been gathered from experience.
More precisely, it has been gained from a painstaking process of encoding the meaning of subtle patterns of movement drawn from many thousands of hours of practice. He is able to see the patterns in his opponent’s movements, and it is his regular practice that has given him this expertise, not his genes.
Recently I went to the Birmingham home of Desmond Douglas to try to figure out how someone with such unimpressive innate reactions became the fastest man in the history of one of the world’s fastest sports. It turns out that Douglas had perhaps the most unusual grounding of any international table tennis player of the past half-century.
Brought up in working-class Birmingham, struggling and unmotivated in his academic work, Douglas happened upon a table tennis club at school. The tables were old and decrepit, but functional.
The problem is that they were housed in the tiniest of classrooms. “Looking back, it was pretty unbelievable,” Douglas said. “There were three tables going along the length of the room to accommodate all the players who wanted to take part, but there was so little space behind the tables that we had to stand right up against the edge of the tables to play, with our backs almost touching the blackboard.”
I tracked down a few of the others who played in that era. “It was an amazing time,” one said. “The claustrophobia of the room forced us to play a form of ‘speed table tennis’, where everyone had to be super-sharp. Spin and strategy hardly came into it; all that mattered was speed.”
Douglas did not spend a few weeks or months in that classroom, but the first five years of his development. “We all loved playing table tennis, but Des was different,” another classmate told me. “While the rest of us had other hobbies, he spent all his time in that classroom practising his skills and playing matches. I have never seen such dedication.”
In essence, Douglas spent more hours than any other player in the history of the sport encoding the characteristics of a highly specific type of table tennis — the kind played at maximum pace, close to the table. By the time he arrived in international table tennis he was able to perceive where the ball was going before his opponents had even hit it. That is how a man with sluggish reactions became the fastest player on the planet.
Can't remember. Some may occur during the run-up but I think most of it happens in micro-seconds through the delivery stride.
Neil's article about tennis players raises the tantalising possibility that batsmen could look somewhere else than the ball/hand during this period, but I've not heard of anything to suggest that.
The research also disproves the idea that a batsman watches the ball all the way to the bat. They don't. although they clock it early, when it bounces and watch it later right on to the bat in a way the rest of us probably don't.
honestbharani
Whatever it takes!!!
Talent is being able to do something to a superior quality or degree. Meaning, just in terms of being able to see the ball early, an Afridi is just as talented as a Ricky Ponting. But obviously, that is just one part of batsmanship. And I think to the most part, the posters here understand what one means when we use the word "talent"".
So sorry phlegm, I think you are making too much of a trifle.
So sorry phlegm, I think you are making too much of a trifle.
Athlai
Not Terrible
Bonnie Prince C
U19 12th Man
Top post. I would definitely agree that talent is a word that gets used too much. I don't think it is just a cricket thing either.
fascinating stuff !
Hurricane
Hall of Fame Member
I think Flem some people have the talent to pick up skills easier than others. I might have to practice something for a year to get it right. Someone else might have to practice for 6 months. Some people will never get it right no matter how much they practice.
Typically the faster learners in cricket will get identified around 11 years old and start to get put through superior coaching programs and encouraged to practice more.
Typically the faster learners in cricket will get identified around 11 years old and start to get put through superior coaching programs and encouraged to practice more.
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are the ex-test players, who commentate or write, as liberal with their use of the word talent, as opposed to the professional journos/commentators who haven't played the game at the highest standard? because they should/would understand that, at the elite level, talent, as defined by eye hand coordination and suchlike physical attributes, is not particularly differentiable. for example, the eye hand coordination of a tendulkar is not going to be more than marginally different than that of a atapattu, if at all.
