Were Kohli and Co too cool for their own good?

India’s Debacle at #IC17 final?

The lack of an “anxiety sweet spot” is what explains India’s loss to Pakistan in the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy Final

At the risk of sounding wiser in hindsight I must say that perhaps India’s loss at the Oval on Sunday was pre-ordained. 

Before we get into the reasons for this conclusion, a bit about the hype that surrounded the Indian team on why it would not lose ahead of the top-billed final. 

For many, India’s victory over Pakistan in the final of the Champions Trophy was a foregone conclusion. “Too good to be beaten”, was what almost all experts including former Indian cricket greats, comprising a few former captains now turned commentators, said on prime time TV even just minutes before the match was to begin.

The previous day, the Indian media was in full flow with smug analysis of how the Indian team, which in its first outing at the tournament beat the arch-rivals and how they (the Pakis) were actually in awe of the Indian team.  They also went on to describe how a “clinical Indian team beat Bangladesh even suggesting the latter were a better team than Pakistan. Naturally, this built up expectations among fans and the general public.

To give him the credit the current Indian captain in his pre-match presser did say the team would treat the final like any other match and would ignore the media hype. But the 28-year-old did veer away from the script and the emotions where India-Pak conflicts are concerned.  "I will never play for redemption. I don't know why things are built up as matters of life and death for sub-continental cricketers. I believe in giving my best for the team, wherever I might be playing and against whichever team," he said. This perhaps should have raised the flag.

One might contrast this and even learn a few lessons from the other men in blue, the Indian hockey team, which also battled against the Pakistani team in the same city, on the same day at the same time.  Notwithstanding the fact that Indian hockey captain and halfback Manpreet Singh spoke a similar language as the Indian cricket captain, the Indian hockey team’s body language was quite different.  There was no swagger in their walk nor did they take anything for granted.  So much so, team members took Pakistan and the rivalry so seriously that they wore black arm bands to honor the Indian army men slain by terrorists and the Pakistani rangers over the last few days. It was not just another team they were playing against. They were conscious it was Pakistan and they took it seriously.

This brings us to the Indian cricket team’s approach to the Pakistani team and its subsequent loss to the latter in the of the Champions Trophy final. Was the Indian cricket team too cool for its own good? With a win taken for granted was it too confident?  If psychologists are to be believed a common reason for favorites to come a cropper on match days is the lack of an “anxiety sweet spot” or what they also call “optimal anxiety”.  When a person feels the pressure to perform well he is prepared well. But what happens when that pressure and fear are not there at all. Performance dips obviously.

This is the Yerkes-Dodson Law which is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance originally developed by Harvard University psychologists Robert M Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908.  Perhaps the Indian team was lacking this mental arousal in the match against Pakistan which it had already defeated once and was written off as a weak team.  The Yerkes-Dodson Law is generally depicted as a bell curve which shows that performance is the best when arousal or anxiety is at a medium level.  

When people are overconfident they may not have enough anxiety to focus and perform the task at hand. The interplay between anxiety and performance is a particularly specialized field of study in sports. Well-known biologist Carron (1965) investigated this need for balance and found that while highly-aroused players did better at easy tasks, low-arousal was best for complex games like golf, gymnastics, and diving. In these games, players need firmer control to maintain optimal performance.
Joseph Oxendine, professor, and chairman of Department of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, Temple University, carried forward this study and suggested different levels of optimal arousal for different sports. For instance, he says that sports like archery, bowling, basketball, and golf would need slight arousal while games like rugby tackle and scrum, sprinting and weight lifting need extreme excitation.

This also explains why underdogs have often romped home with convincing wins in endgame faceoffs over crass favorites.  One such example is the win by less favored Mexico in the 2012 Olympics soccer final when favorite Brazil was defeated in a surprise result.  Anxiety or the lack of it is often what explains why overconfident and fancied champions expect to win but don’t and less fancied underdogs win against all odds as they don’t have anything to lose but are highly motivated to win.

In the present the game was perhaps over for India by the end of the Pakistani innings when they ended their batting with a more than impressive 300 plus runs. So by the time the Indian batting order came in to bat they were reeling under an unexpected performance by the arch rivals and were in a very fragile state. Clearly, given their totally contrasting mental states at the beginning of the match and at the half-way mark, the end result is not surprising.

It was more like when you go to write an examination very confident and sure to do well. But when you see the questions you realize everything is out of syllabus and you have not prepared for it.