Mentoring over minding

Andrew Symonds and Shaun Tait may have different reasons to quit the game at the international level temporarily, but the one thing in common is that they have been unable to manage the pressure, writes Makarand Waingankar in the Hindu. While the Australian system is good at solving the problem by getting the player back, the mentoring is missing, the Indian system lacks solution to the mind problem and the mentoring.

In a system that churns out a huge number of participants, teenagers suffer from an expectation syndrome. The pressure of expectations pushes a player into a discomfort zone as the competition grows. Obviously performance tends to get affected. Now with IPL, huge sums have added to pressure, and players not used to such sums have lost focus. And when a player loses the focus, things go awry. This is where mentoring is very essential to guide the behaviour of a player.