A centipede was happy – quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in the ditch
Considering how to run.
- Katherine Craster, 1871
Choking affects all of us at some point. Whether it’s asking yourself: “How do I tie my shoelaces?” midway through the act and becoming momentarily perplexed, or fluffing your lines at a job interview, we’ve all been there.
“Choking is suboptimal performance, not just poor performance,” says Professor Sian Beilock, an expert in how our brains respond to pressure. “It’s a performance that is inferior to what you can do and have done in the past and occurs when you feel pressure to get everything right.”
This is at odds with the common fallacy regarding choking in cricket; that a team has to be in a “position to win,” before they can choke.
“I think we did choke in the game,” said Gary Kirsten, after South Africa’s semi-final defeat against England in the ICC Champions Trophy. “It’s an uncomfortable word but you’ve got to make yourself comfortable with it. It’s a horrible word...”
And it is a horrible word, because ‘choke’ has a visceral quality about it. Guttural and monosyllabic, the term is thrown about all too readily in an era where heck, you-must-click-this-link-right-now headlines are relayed as legitimate opinions (“South Africa are perennial suboptimal performers under high-pressure situations” just doesn’t have the same ring to it). As a result, terms such as ‘choker’ can prove impossibly frustrating to shake off, as many athletes have found out.
To be tagged as chokers - rightly or wrongly - is to add a ball and chain to a team.
Think of the word ‘choker’, and the mind conjures images of Allan Donald’s deer-in-headlights run out, countless English penalty shoot-outs, and Jana Novotna failing to serve out a match at Wimbledon. Rightly or wrongly, the tag of ‘chokers’ has afflicted plenty of sportsmen at various points - indeed, in South Africa’s case, the term has stalked them at every opportunity, the darkest of spectres.
The widely-held perception that South Africa are chokers is significant because it can seep into the pores of the team, and creep into part of its very being, and in the most insidious manner. Comments by South African cricketers both before and after tournament exits are contrasting, and hint towards a deep uncertainty.
For example, here are three quotes from South African cricketers before the 2011 ICC World Cup:
Jacques Kallis: “A lot is being made in the media about the ‘chokers’ tag. But we players don’t even think about it...it is certainly not something which haunts us.”
JP Duminy: “We know that tag (chokers) haunts us quite a bit but there a lot of new faces in the team.”
AB de Villiers: “In recent times we have been the opposite of chokers. ICC tournaments are different, there is pressure in the knockouts but we will be ready for it.”
By offering up varied excuses, it was almost as if they were tacitly admitting a problem. Indeed, de Villiers’ subsequent about turn a year later before the T20 World Cup was telling, particularly as it was pre-emptive and unprompted: “We have choked in the past, and we know about it.”
All this hints towards a pall of fatalism over the South African team, one that would certainly feed into the concept of ‘stereotype threat’, a psychological phenomenon in which a person experiences anxiety when presented with an opportunity to confirm a negative stereotype - in South Africa’s case, ‘choking’.
“Both blatant and subtle reminders of a negative stereotype can sabotage athletic performance, and ironically, the athletes most susceptible to the negative impact of stereotype threat are those who are the most psychologically invested in their sport,” says Michael Inzlicht and Toni Schmader, in their book Stereotype Threat: Theory, Process and Application.
In this way, lazy theories tossed about by the media about ‘a lack of desire’ and ‘not wanting it enough’ are rejected in favour of the opposite: wanting it too much can heap pressure on an athlete.
There are strong links between stereotype threat and the depletion of working memory and executive functions in both academic and athletic situations. Put simply, your brain has a limited capacity for cognitive functions. The idea of a stereotype in your mind - no matter how fleeting - can lead to a vicious cycle of stress arousal, self-consciousness, and attempts to suppress these negative emotions. It is theorized that the more effort your brain puts into regulating these stray, circuitous thoughts, the lower your capacity to perform functions to the best of your ability.
“The available evidence suggests that the threat of confirming a negative stereotype in a sports context causes athletes to focus on avoiding failure, which weakens performance because it interrupts proceduralized responses and impairs working memory capacity,” say Inzlicht and Schmader.
After watching years of sport, you can sense a choke. The shaky, unconvincing ball toss immediately preceding a double-fault. The fake-stop that often masks uncertainty in the run-up to a penalty kick. The hesitation when running, in a desperate attempt to get off strike.
For these brief moments, the choke is all-consuming. It is palpable and obvious, the gory aspect of sport that makes it so morbidly compelling.
“It’s definitely a dark mist that hangs over South African cricket in knockout events,” said Kirsten after South Africa’s most recent knockout exit.
It was a significant admission in the context of cricket - a dirty word that nobody wants to be tarred with, it’s almost as if an unspeakable illness has been condemned upon an entire generation of cricketers. With Kirsten’s frankness, are South Africa at least emerging from a cocoon of decade-long denial, into acceptance?
The choker tag is not something that it shaken off easily: once it is bestowed upon an unfortunate sportsman, only trophies can turn it around in the eyes of an unforgiving public, who thrive on glory, but will always settle for schadenfreude.
Nishant Joshi is a medical student and cricket writer. He is editor of AlternativeCricket.com and curates its cult Twitter feed @AltCricket.
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