Paddy Upton, the celebrated mental conditioning coach who was part of India’s 2011 ODI World Cup-winning backroom staff, believes the team management must prepare Vaibhav Sooryavanshi for “failure”, as there will come a phase when he will not be able to score runs as freely as he has in recent times.
“One of the first things I would do is prepare him (Sooryavanshi) for failure,” Upton told Sportstar. “To say there’s a good chance that in your first two or three innings, you don’t score runs. What is that going to feel like? What’s that going to look like? What’s that experience going to be like? And how are you going to manage yourself? So one of the key things is to prepare him for failure. That’s going to come, whether it comes now or later, it’s going to come.”
Upton said that while failure is normal, what matters is how a player handles the criticism that follows and recovers from it. He stressed that this is why preparing for the worst is important.
“We’ve seen enough quickly rising young superstars in India over the last 5-6 years, who’ve had a great IPL and who’ve been labelled as the next Sachin Tendulkar or the next Virat Kohli or the next MS Dhoni,” he said.
“And the majority of them, we don’t see them anymore. They’ve just sort of returned to the ranks of the rest of the international IPL cricketers. And often, that is them getting caught up in the external noise, getting caught up in the expectations. And my big question was, would be, I wonder who is working with him (Sooryavanshi) around that? Because that’s one thing players have identified over and over in sport is helping someone deal with sudden fame,” he added.
