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#Post#: 75298--------------------------------------------------
Re: How Quins won the league - Squidge rugby video
DIR By: poorfour
Date: September 30, 2021, 8:57 am
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It's a good illustration of how hard Clive Woodward's T-CUP
principle - Thinking Correctly Under Pressure - is to execute in
practice. Exeter knew they were in trouble, but under pressure
reverted to what they'd practiced in drills.
I suspect the Quins thought process was just to keep forcing
them to react under pressure until they left part of the field
unattended. It's a pretty quick passage of play, and we'd have
gone in knowing that Exeter play a very structured game and with
some ideas for how to disrupt that (as with the Dombrandt try).
[psychology nerd alert]
The psychology if this stuff is fascinating. The basic principle
is that your conscious brain is very very clever, but it's also
slow and limited in capacity, so you develop automatised
responses to patterns of stimuli that enable you to react
appropriately with less conscious input.
A good analogy is to imagine that you are deadlyfrom5yardsout
and have an army of highly trained, very specialised butlers at
your beck and call. When a butler recognises the task he or she
has been trained for, a discreet cough and "Perhaps, sir, if I
may..." is heard in the deadly's drawing room of the brain.
The tricky bit comes when the challenge at hand looks
superficially similar to a familiar one, but actually requires a
different response. Sometimes there's another, less senior
butler who *does* have the right response but is less forceful
with the "Perhaps, sir..." than the usual butler. Sometimes
there's no butler at all.
When not under pressure, deadly might recognise that the
standard butler's skills are not appropriate to the task, and
devise a response himself. But under pressure, or having to deal
with other considerations, deadly will tend to accept the
graciously offered help, not fully realising that it's the wrong
response.
A guy called James Reason demonstrated in the 80s that this same
mechanism is behind both everyday mistakes where you find
yourself, say, changing to the wrong gear or forgetting some
vital item that you only need today and a lot of "pilot error"
type tragedies.
But it also explains why visualisation works in sports: by
visualising a situation and what you will do in it, you train up
a butler to be ready to respond to that situation. Before the
RWC2003 Final, Woodward, Dawson, Johnson and Wilkinson walked
every metre of the Sydney pitch and discussed what they would do
in that position in different circumstances they might encounter
in the match - thus helping the players' brains to associate the
visual picture of where they were standing with the right
response for the situation. T-CUP.
[/psychology nerd alert]
At that point in the match, Nowell, O'Flaherty and Cuthbert
probably had their conscious brains fully occupied with "where
the heck do I need to be to field the next kick?" - an unusual
situation that needed them to think [1] about their next move.
So when a butler politely offered the option of hoofing it
downfield, they most likely accepted without having the spare
capacity to think "hang on, let's get this off the pitch". A big
part of that is that Quins got Exeter playing to the Quins
tempo, disrupting their normal thought processes. One of the
most important butlers in a rugby player's head is the one that
goes "Perhaps if sir were just to slow down and take back
control of the game?", but he can go missing if there's too much
else on.
Smith's great differentiator is that he's such a good reader of
other team's systems and choices, and can do it so well on the
fly, that he only needs a moment to unlock an opportunity. The
silly flowchart I drew up has a serious point behind it -
Smith's ability to recognise situations on the pitch and respond
appropriately is now so good that it gives him options that
other fly halves just don't have - and therefore gives his team
different ways to unlock defences.
---
[1] Unlike Johnny May, whose response to Eliot Daly's red card
in that England match was probably "If I run from side to side
across the pitch fast enough, I can probably be in two places at
once."
#Post#: 75300--------------------------------------------------
Re: How Quins won the league - Squidge rugby video
DIR By: MadMax
Date: September 30, 2021, 9:10 am
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--- Quote from: QuinKent link ---
>
> Top tip: you can use the settings on YouTube to watch it at
3/4 speed, which means you don’t have to watch it three times.
>
--- End Quote ---
I found the stop button very useful just the once but each to
their own!
#Post#: 75306--------------------------------------------------
Re: How Quins won the league - Squidge rugby video
DIR By: Ignoramus
Date: September 30, 2021, 2:14 pm
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--- Quote from: poorfour link ---
>
> [psychology nerd alert]
> The psychology if (sic) this stuff is fascinating. The basic
principle is that your conscious brain is very very clever, but
it's also slow and limited in capacity...
>
--- End Quote ---
As one cognitive visionary to another, may I thank you for
sharing your conceptual framework for understanding human
decision-making as it bends and twists its way towards an artful
conclusion. It has been both revelatory and therapeutic.
#Post#: 75311--------------------------------------------------
Re: How Quins won the league - Squidge rugby video
DIR By: deadly
Date: October 1, 2021, 3:46 am
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In reality thats brilliant. My eldest daughter is actually a
Clinical Psychologist and we have many conversations about the
decision making process (not always just Rugby..). She has a
Butler too.
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