The Hindu : Sport : Greatness lies in sporting intelligence

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Friday, Feb 24, 2006

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Greatness lies in sporting intelligence

Great footballers routinely produce outrageous feats of imagination, writes Rohit Brijnath

In an interview to an English newspaper last week, Eric Cantona, the footballing artist, said: "You cannot be a great player if you are not intelligent." One presumes Cantona's claim did not extend to IQ in its traditional sense, an intellect that might allow Federer to solve physics equations in his spare time and Rooney decipher complex arguments on ethics.

What the Frenchman was probably alluding to was the unknown territory of sport-specific intelligence, the exemplary sportsman's aptitude to map a game adroitly, his clarity of vision under pressure, his rarefied ability to interpret the game, his uncluttered brain making swift and accurate judgments.

Great footballers routinely produce outrageous feats of imagination, authoring passes no one else has visualised. "Why," Cantona asked are they able to do this, and then provided the answer. "Because you have something special and can read things nobody else could. Maradona was like Kasparov. He could see 10 moves ahead. Platini was like a chess player."

So is Ronaldinho, who, a nanosecond from being tackled, manufactures the exquisitely weighted pass, through a gap 50 metres away that is just closing, to a player moving into a position he has calculated, but doing it so nonchalantly that it produces the illusion that he has time to spare.

But of course he doesn't. The chess player, weighing his options down various avenues, owns time (so does the snooker player who is constantly thinking ahead, as does the cricket captain). It is not a luxury afforded to athletes in more mobile sports, which makes their genius even more confounding.

Fit and agile

Through time champions isolate themselves from the pack through a combination of superior physical skills and an agile mind. Often of the great ones, they say, he knew what was going to happen. As once was written of the basketball professor Larry Bird: "He performs as though he not only sees everything as it develops, but also as though he sees everything before it develops."

Not enough is known of the mind to understand this, and while it is not as if players are psychic, they do own a fine combination of gut feeling, knowledge, preparation and, of course, skill.

Ric Charlesworth, the former hockey player, for instance points out that many players can read the play (though he admits some do so quicker than others), but lack the talent to deliver; to see space is one thing, to be finely balanced and execute perfectly another.

Mapping the field

It might seem like clairvoyance, but Charlesworth says great players are constantly mapping the field in their mind, looking up, then down at the ball, calculating the altering geometries on the field, also aware from experience where someone might move. Basketballer Magic Johnson may not have looked when he passed the ball, but he had been looking before.

In cricket, says Ian Chappell, astute captains are often an over or two ahead of the game. Reactive captains often put fielders in positions where the ball has just gone; others, answering to instinct and informed experienced, already have one there, to take a catch, and for that moment appear like a savant.

Tennis players are constantly reading play, sometimes a few shots ahead, building sweaty conspiracies through forcing strokes as Agassi often did. Brad Gilbert, in his book Winning Ugly, contends that "smart players observe what's going on in a match and analyse the information."

Coaches help, of course, but eventually, the man in the arena must work the game out for himself. Roger Federer's greatest year in tennis, in 2004, arrived when he did not even own a coach. His skills were superb, but his tennis shone with an intelligence that Cantona might have applauded.

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