T20 World Cup 2021: We Are Too Quick In Sports To Choose The Best Player As A Leader – Paddy Upton

The strength and mental conditioning coach of the MS Dhoni-led India National Cricket Team, which won the 2011 ODI World Cup, Paddy Upton, has opined that the best player of the team very quickly gets appointed in cricket as the leader of the team.

Meanwhile, India is placed in the Group 2 of the T20 World Cup 2021 alongside Pakistan, New Zealand and Afghanistan. The Men In Blue will commence their journey in the T20 World Cup with a battle against arch-rivals Pakistan on 24 October in Dubai.

Also, the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021 will be the last assignment of Virat Kohli as a captain of India in T20Is as he has decided to step down from his role.

Some reports claim that Virat Kohli has also thought about quitting the ODI captaincy in the near future. Meanwhile, The vice-captain of India in limited-overs cricket, Rohit Sharma, is expected to take over the captaincy role after Kohli.

Recently, Ajinkya Rahane led India towards the historic Test series victory on Australian soil, and some fans wanted Rahane to become the permanent captain of India in red-ball cricket. Meanwhile, Paddy Upton was questioned about frequent changing of captains in cricket, to which he replied:

“That’s a difficult question. The answer is very, very subjective. The most educated answer I can give you is that we are too quick in sports to choose the best player as a leader.

“It’s just like in business – we have for years made the mistake of taking their best salesman and making them the sales manager. And what you do is you often lose your best salesman and you get a very average sales manager,” Upton maintained.

We Don’t Really Know How To Choose Captains For A Team – Paddy Upton

“We are not very good at understanding what are the criteria upon which you choose a captain. Number one, so we don’t choose them very often for the right reason, we just choose them because they’re the best player or the player that most people like. And number two, because we don’t really know how to choose them, we don’t know how to improve their captaincy skills.“

Paddy Upton further added that in cricket, there is a Batting, Bowling and Fielding coach to help out players in their respective fields, but we don’t have a leadership coach that can help out the captain of the team. He stated:

“So, we have batting coaches to help batsmen get better and bowling coaches to get bowlers to get better, and fielding coaches to help fielders get better.

“But very seldom do we have a leadership coach to help leaders get better at leading and it’s a very big gap that still exists within not just international cricket, but generally in a lot of team sports is we still in the year 2021, don’t do a good job choosing our captains and we don’t do a good job at helping our captains to get a lot better, a lot quicker. That would be my answer,”

Paddy Upton said that every player had got their good area, and he wants sports to get more intelligent while naming the captains of the team and then grooming the captains into good leaders.

“Rahane has got his areas where he’s very good. Rohit is very good in his areas. Virat is very good. But their captaincy development has to be left alone to be random and experiential and just for them to find their own feet.

“So, that’s what I would say, I would love sports to get a little bit more intelligent with how we pick our leaders and then how we actually train our leaders to become good leaders,” he stated.

Also Read: IPL 2021 Has Been Perfect Preparation For The Upcoming T20 World Cup, Says Josh Hazlewood