Here's An Idea: On The Link Between Hockey and Cricket: Myth or Fact?
A number of sports have skills that can be easily adapted from one to the other, with athletes seamlessly going from one discipline to the other.
Tristan Stubbs who turns 21 in August, debuted for Warriors in the recently ended CSA T20 Challenge held in Durban. The young man was a revelation at the competition, showcasing quality skills with the bat. Stubbs demonstrated good stroke play and looked particularly impressive against the spinners, employing the sweep masterfully.
In a country where many players generally struggle against spin, it was undoubtedly a breath of fresh air to see someone so young demonstrate such ability. During the tournament, Stubbs performed admirably against seasoned campaigners who include Simon Harmer and seems to have all the makings of a quality batter, if he is afforded enough chances and gets good guidance. In his four innings, Tristan 102 runs, averaging 34 with a Strike Rate of 127.5. Very impressive for a debutant, particularly if you consider the fact that he was the Warriors’ third-highest run-getter behind two batters who played more games than him. His average was the highest.
The question then was, what made him different? What makes him stand out in a tournament where a lot of batters struggled because of the Kingsmead conditions and the dominance of spin.
Without a doubt, his abilities against spin - especially when sweeping - were due to coaching and practice, but, could they also, in part, be because of his stint playing hockey?
(In 2018, Stubbs played hockey for Grey PE's Under-19 Hockey team, along with Luke Beaufort and Nicholas Keevy.)
Correlation ≠ Causation
Tristan Stubbs is not the first ex-hockey player to show rare ability early on. He is in good company if you consider that AB DeVilliers, Reeza Hendricks, Jonty Rhodes and Thami Tsolekile have all played hockey, and they are quite decent players of spin.
While AB DeVilliers and Reeza Hendricks only played hockey at the junior level, Jonty Rhodes and Thami Tsolekile played at the international level.
Tsolekile, who narrowly missed out on representing South Africa at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, played hockey for SA Schools for 4 years, then for the National under-21 side, and earned 5 National caps. And Jonty Rhodes, who also missed out on representing South Africa, not once but twice at the Olympics ( Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta in 1996) also played at the highest level.
Of course, the above alone is not enough information to conclude that hockey lends cricketers skills that help them fare better against spin. After all, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The fact that I get sunburned every time I have an ice cream does not mean that it's the ice cream that's doing it, is it? For all we know, they could all just be naturally talented athletes.
Non-Transferrable Skills
Michael Jordan, one of the best basketball players ever, was well-known for his relentless drive to master skills and perform at his very best. And so when he retired from basketball in 1993 (his first retirement) and pursued a career in Major League Baseball, many expected him to do well. If not, he was going to, at least, be above average. But, that was not the case.
In his book Why Michael Couldn’t Hit, neurologist Harold Klawans tries to explain why, Michael Jordan, despite his natural athletic ability, failed to adapt to baseball. Despite his transcendent athleticism Jordan was never going to learn to hit a baseball at the major league level "because the neurons he needed to learn the appropriate anticipatory skills had been pruned long ago, while he was busy playing basketball."
In other words, no matter how good he was at basketball, Jordan was never going to master sports like baseball, volleyball, cricket, tennis and others that require anticipatory skills because he had never developed the necessary neurons useful in these areas. Basketball just does not have overlapping skills with baseball, or skills that one could transfer to baseball. But, if it had happened that there was competitive male netball at the time, he would have taken to it like a duck to water.
Transferrable Skills
In 2007, Justin Durandt, manager of the Discovery High-Performance Centre at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa, conducted a study which he titled "Physical profiles of elite male field hockey and soccer players - application to sport-specific tests." The test compared sprint times and distance run in the repeated sprint tests between soccer players and hockey players found no differences. They concluded that "it is acceptable to use the same type of sport-specific tests to measure sprint capacity and sprint fatigue resistance for hockey and soccer players."
This is not surprising, considering that both sports require periods of bursts of sprinting. Therefore, in this regard, an athlete will find sprint training easier if they do both. The difference, however, was in upper body strength. Hockey players need the use of upper body strength and therefore did more upper body strength training. Coincidentally, cricket also requires a good sprint capacity and sprint fatigue resistance. Not only that but like hockey, it requires upper body strength training and strength.
An ex-hockey player, Jonny Bairstow, one of England's better players of spin, explained, “I owe the power in my shots to my youth playing hockey. I use the same whip action of the wrists to generate energy through the ball. If you watch Jason Roy you will see he has a nice, big flowing follow through on his shots. But I will punch the ball, with very little follow-through, a bit like playing a hockey shot with a snap.”
But, that is not the end of it. The sweep shot is a field hockey staple shot. It is utilized in long-distance passing or to take a shot at a goal. The sweep is a must-have skill in any hockey player's arsenal, and therefore, many invest in mastering it. Then there is the reverse hit, another field hockey shot. This shot has similarities to the cricket reverse sweep and can be adapted into one.
Remember Ross Taylor's standing hockey swat? Instead of employing the cover-drive against a delivery full and wide of off-stump, Taylor moves across his stumps and bends his knee. It's like he's building to sweep. What follows is a cross-bat shot, although the bowler is fast. The ball disappears over deep midwicket.
That is a hockey shot that Taylor adapts on the pitch.
Of course, I doubt there are many cricket skills that one can transfer to hockey, but there are a good number of hockey shots one can import into cricket. Fair to say, a cricketer with a hockey-playing background does indeed help in the moulding of a well-rounded player. Their ability to play spin is much better than their peers, particularly if they utilize the sweep and reverse sweep shots.
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Really interesting post. I've played a lot of both sports, albeit at a very moderate level for the most part, and have often thought about this topic. One thing that might be worth considering is that the nature of hockey as a sport, and therefore the nature of the skills required, has changed quite a bit over the years due to changes in the playing surfaces and the rules. I don't think the fundamental nature of cricket has changed with time in the same way.
When I started playing hockey as an under-10 in the late 90's effectively all my hockey was on very flat, dead-bouncing sand-based astroturfs. This meant the sport was played largely, although not entirely, in two dimensions. If you wanted to stop the ball it almost always made sense to do so with a flat stick as even bouncing balls would roll after only one or two bounces and playing flat increased margin for error most of the time. I tend to think the relevance of this to cricket was quite low. Older players, who grew up on grass pitches, played much more upright as on grass, in the UK winter at least, the situation was effectively reversed and a ball played flat could bobble at any moment, necessitating constant consideration of movement in three dimensions. Those players also tended not to sweep in the way I do (stick flat on the pitch, almost all power from the wrists) as that sort of method didn't work well when the ball could behave unpredictably on the surface. Instead they would push and strike with much more vertical stick behind the ball. I do think there might have been good cricket-to-hockey transferability here.
When I got a bit older water-based pitches became more common, and had always been in use at higher level I believe. These bounce, meaning you very often have to control the ball with a vertical stick, although they're usually predictable so the sweep hit is still perfectly useable. I adapted relatively easily which I attributed, without evidence, to my cricket- clearly a mostly vertical sport as far as implement orientation goes.
More generally I would say that hockey, particularly on bouncy surfaces, might bear more relation to defensive cricket shots as you have to control balls coming to you at high speed. However as far as attacking shots go in hockey you very rarely try to add impetus to a ball that is moving at any speed relative to yourself, except when deflecting the ball, and this is generally done with a flat stick, somewhat analogous to a cut shot but without much consideration for height. While I suppose muscle memory might make the cricket and hockey sweep look similar in some ways (although they actually go in different directions relative to the body, hockey sweeps mostly go in the direction the shoulders are pointing rather than perpendicular to them) I do tend to think that difference between hitting a near-stationary ball and a moving ball is quite significant.
One specific area with a lot of commonality is the left-post defender for penalty corners. The ball can be drag-flicked at you at 70 mph+ anywhere from on the ground to above head height and you have to stop it going in the goal. You see everything from forward blocks to uppercuts to full blooded hook shots employed.