Richard Pybus and the neuroscience of winning

Mohammad Rizwan had a problem. Not only could he not buy a run, he also couldn't buy the chance to score some runs. Karachi Kings played 23 games in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the PSL. Rizwan featured in only seven of them. It wasn't difficult to see why.

He had had seven innings for Karachi in 2018, and scored 89 runs. During the next two bleak campaigns, he passed 30 in just two innings and never reached 35, suffered a second-baller, lasted five balls in another innings, had only the last delivery of Karachi's innings at his disposal in another, and wasn't required to bat in still another.

From February 2019 to March 2020 - which spans those years' PSL tournaments - Rizwan had four T20I innings for Pakistan in which he scored 50 runs, 31 of them in one innings, and averaged 16.66. During the same period, he averaged 35.33 in seven Test innings and scored two centuries in the space of six days in his four trips to the ODI crease.

Was the issue that Rizwan wasn't a T20 player? Or that he hadn't found a way to make the most of his opportunities in the format?

The latter. Thirty-seven players scored more runs than Rizwan in the 2019 PSL. In 2021, only Babar Azam did. Better yet, Rizwan scored 1,326 runs in T20Is that year - more than any man had done in a calendar year. The mark stands still.

He had gone from the bottom of a deep, dark T20-shaped hole to a world record in the format. What changed?

Rizwan moved PSL franchises to Multan Sultans in 2021, and to the top of the batting order. He made 71 off 53 in his first match for them - he scored four half-centuries for Multan that season - and captained them to the title, and to the final in the next two years.

Who helped Rizwan find himself as a T20 batter?

"This [T20I world] record belongs to a number of people, people who have helped me reach this place," Rizwan was quoted as saying in an interview published on the PCB's website in November 2021. "The first one would be Richard Pybus, who mentally prepared me for T20 cricket and gave me tips on how to improve as a T20 batter."

That would be the same Richard Pybus who has achieved striking success in some of cricket's most volatile and demanding scenarios. He masterminded the three World Cups won by West Indies in 2016, and he remains the most successful coach in South Africa's domestic history having won nine senior men's titles across the formats.

None of the above is news. This is: Pybus is coming to the end of four years with Sports Skills for Life Skills, a non-profit attached to the University of the Western Cape, to help produce provincial and international cricketers who also have a tertiary qualification. That's right: one of the most experienced and accomplished coaches anywhere in the game is on the lookout for new challenges. That's a challenge in itself, because he's met a range of them already.

Pybus helped take Pakistan to the 1999 World Cup final, and served as their head coach, on and off - between military coups and other upheavals - until after they crashed out of the 2003 World Cup in the first round.

So far, so Pakistan. But he forged connections in the country. Among them was Rizwan's agent, who asked Pybus whether he could give his client a much needed new lease on T20 life.

Rizwan's last PSL match in 2020 was his 99th T20 and his 382nd game of cricket from his under-19 days. Yet he spoke of Pybus's influence as if he had encountered the coach as a junior. Pybus opened previously shut doors for Rizwan. How had he done that?

"I helped him understand the mental structure of his game, understand the mental processes within his game, and then being able to contextualise that within the different formats; we set very specific goals for that," Pybus told Cricbuzz.

In his 51 innings across the formats for Pakistan before Pybus's intervention, Rizwan scored 1,115 runs, averaged 28.58 and had two centuries and four 50s. In 184 innings since then going into the Champions Trophy, he made 7,095 runs at 47.93 with six hundreds and 52 half-centuries. That's a leap of 19.35 in his overall batting average and an increase of more than 20% in the frequency of his 50s.

In that PCB interview, Rizwan also referenced Inzamam-ul-Haq and Shahid Aslam, Pakistan's batting coach, as having helped him sort out his game. But he put Pybus at the top of the list. Unlike the two Pakistanis, Pybus's services were delivered electronically from more than 8,000 kilometres and another hemisphere away.

"He and I would get together on a consistent basis," Pybus said. "We'd meet on Zoom and unpack the process around helping him to understand what he needed to do with regards to the mental structure - the architecture - of batting. His game developed exponentially after that."

As novel as that approach might seem, Pybus was accustomed to it. Importantly, he knew it worked. He was the WICB's director of cricket in 2016, when West Indies won the men's and women's World T20 titles and the men's under-19 World Cup. Pybus was central to that success, but the Caribbean's fragmented geography meant he wasn't often near the centre of operations.

"We live in the world of Zoom and Skype, and that's how those World Cups were designed and delivered," Pybus said. "I was based in Antigua, but working with individuals across the Caribbean; from Guyana to Dominica to Barbados to Trinidad. It was an incredible experience being able to work with management teams independently and remotely in the pre-Covid era and get such incredible results."

Pybus set sail for the Caribbean after a slew of stellar seasons with the Titans and the Cobras. His Titans shared the first-class title in 2005/06 and won it outright in the next two seasons. They were one-day champions in 2007/08 and 2008/09, and T20 kings in 2007/08. Pybus moved to the Cape in July 2010, and with him came first-class championships for the Cobras in 2010/11, the T20 title in the same season, and the one-day trophy the summer after that. He won all three titles in 2007/08 and two of the three in 2008/09 and 2010/11. It was a storm of success, a torrent of trophies, a blizzard of bling.

Exactly half of all the titles on offer in South Africa in six seasons - Pybus took a sabbatical in 2009/10 to become an executive coach - were won by one coach. How?

"There is a specific design process related to performance," Pybus said. "Using Formula 1 as an analogy, If you look at Red Bull or McLaren, you've got the structure of the car and then you've got the engine capacity; how much power can it produce, how fast can it go, etcetera. When you're putting teams together and you're developing individuals to populate those teams, it's exactly the same process.

"You're designing the vehicle, the team and its performance capacity and the players to produce that - a volume of runs and wickets at specific strike rates. And then you manage that process to win leagues and championships."

If your idea of a cricket coach is someone slathered in sunscreen under a sweat-stained floppy hat, throwing balls, hitting balls, collecting balls, watching players attentively and issuing orders for hours on end, Pybus is your man. He's also a lot more.

"After we won the three World Cups, I was so fascinated by this [the science of performance] that I did a doctorate to unpack the whole process," he said. "It's one thing as a head coach being in the dressingroom. There's a sense that you're central to that. But being able to coach other people to do that as team management teams and understand how to deliver it, that really is fascinating.

"There's very clear science behind it. That's why coaching isn't just a case of managing players or managing a dressingroom. You've got to understand the principles of team design, which inform this. You're developing the player and then you develop the sub-units within the team and develop the team - how the individual player fits into the sub-unit and the overall team. You're developing the individual to perform optimally within the team context; moving with the individual into the team context and the other way around.

"As a coach you need to understand the performance design process and the science that underpins this. And you need the coaching, communication, and design skills to be able to bring it together."

Pybus studied with the noted American neuroscience specialist, Dr Rayma Ditson-Sommer, and obtained his doctorate from Middlesex University in 2020. His thesis, which runs to 119 pages, was titled, "The art and science of winning: professional cricket coaching as transdisciplinary practice". But Richard Pybus, PhD, was a winner long before the boffins put letters after his name. Not that he wants to join their ranks...

"I don't want to come across as a boffin, but anybody can learn neuroscience. That doesn't mean you're going to be able to apply that understanding in a coaching context. The work with Riz helped him to understand the mental structure of T20 batting, and got him to focus on the right things at the right time. There's a very clear process to that.

"Over a period of time, this focused work becomes part of a performer's brain. That becomes the way they think about batting. Then they don't have to think about it because it's become unconscious. We've moved it from the conscious mind into the unconscious.

"When I was unpacking it with a doctorate, I saw there's a neural architecture to it - how we think, what we're focusing on and what we're looking to do in each moment. When we're batting and bowling optimally we need that to be wired together. There's a literacy to it. In the same way that one plus one makes two and, and C and A and a T make cat. And then you've got cattle; categorical..."

Easy for him to say. But not for the rest of us to do. That's where Pybus comes in. He has plenty of sunblock and sweat-stained floppy hats to go with his track record - and doctorate - in winning.