This is a guest post by Laurie Ward

Cricket is a simple game complicated by a myriad of variables: physical, technical, emotional, tactical and natural.

Every ball, wicket, match, day, situation, opposition, conditions and personal experience can vary tremendously.

So how can we prepare for something that can be so unpredictable?

Famously, Sir Don Bradman practiced for hours hitting a golf ball with a stump against an uneven wall to develop his incredible hand-eye co-ordination.

Sachin Tendulkar is known to often spend three hours on a bowling machine practicing an individual shot after his team training session.

These two batting legends would have easily clocked up the 10,000 repetitions of an action required for a skill to penetrate the subconscious, as described by Bob Woolmer in "The Art and Science of Cricket."

However, Malcolm Gladwell in "Outliers - the Story of Success" tells us that practice and grooving alone will not be sufficient to make you a great but it will increase your ability to perform those skills when required to do so.

Practice needs to be done correctly and with purpose and ideally under as close to match conditions as feasible. The best guidance, support and facilities will also improve your chances of success.

By repeating and grooving skills correctly, you prepare yourself to make the right response to an individual situation, have the correct muscle memory to perform the relevant patterns of movement and the subconscious experience, confidence and belief to control decision making in a pressure situation.

Creating the subconscious ability to detect early signals and triggers to help you respond better and play accordingly is imperative to be a good cricketer.

So the answer is yes-we do repeat and groove to succeed.

But there is a problem that comes with this method: Choking!

In an article called "The Art of Failure", Gladwell identifies subconscious learning through repetition as 'implicit learning'. This takes place outside of awareness, created by thousands of repetitions of an act, making it become natural, with feel and power developing from this.

Implicit behaviour moves to, and is based, in a different part of the brain from normal coached or skill development learning, or 'explicit learning'.

When under conditions of stress, the explicit system often kicks in.

A player will revert to the building blocks of learning a skill, thinking through actual movements and skills rather than play by feel using the subconscious skill sets developed. Performance and movements are severely depleted and failure is almost inevitable

This is often referred to as choking and we all know many examples in all sports of this nasty occurrence.

 So, you do need to hone your cricketing skills through repetition and grooving but you should also learn to control your emotional responses and reactions to pressure situations by practicing and performing at the same intensity as much as possible.

This is a guest post by Laurie Ward of the Complete Cricketer Academy