Staying home the new going abroad for Ireland cricketers

Everything has changed and, for our cricketers, utterly.

Players with the elite nations are conditioned to spending up to four-fifths of their year living in hotels. Tours can stretch from weeks into months. Friends and family members can be relegated to mere avatars through intermittent contact on WhatsApp or Skype.

The Irish men’s team should be facing Zimbabwe in Baulawayo today. The women’s XI was due to face the Netherlands in Chiang Mai. Now? The season has been shelved and Ireland’s cricketing globetrotters have been reduced to the role of house cats just like the rest of us.

Quite a shift.

Andy Balbirnie and his Irish squad had just returned from a series against Afghanistan in India when Leo Varadkar announced the current travel restrictions and everything got put on pause. He’s making the most of it.

Though he lives in an apartment in Rathmines, the decision was made to spend the shutdown in his parents house near Pembroke CC with his brothers and girlfriend. The days are being broken up by stretching routines, stints on a stationary bike, darts and chess.

It could be worse. Balbirnie had six months of restricted movement when he injured a hip a few years ago and he’ll tell you that this would be a lot gloomier for everyone if the pandemic had struck in mid-winter when the sun goes down long before the Six One News.

He certainly doesn’t see it as a hardship given the wider picture.

“This could be a blessing,” he said of the sporting consequences. “Sometimes you look at a schedule and there’s so much cricket and that’s exciting, but it’s nice to have a bit of a break as well. We don’t know how long this break will be though. We’ll be itching to get back very soon.”

Balbirnie was chatting to his teammate Paul Stirling earlier this week when talk turned to some of the tougher days they have spent on the road. Days when they would spend hours on patrol in the field as opposing batsmen smashed them around the park.

“I would give my left arm to be doing that now.”

All this time at home and with no cricket to play is alien to your international cricketer but their experiences of flying around the world may, in an odd way, be the best preparation for such an extended period of inactivity spent indoors.

Ireland were lodged in India for one six-week spell last year and in a hotel which was miles from anywhere and anything. In a way, that remoteness was immaterial as teams are often advised to stay put when on tours of the sub-continent.

Players lodged in single rooms could find themselves in splendid isolation from the moment they return from the ground until lunch or dinner the next day and cricket has delivered its share of stories from players who have found touring too tough a mental task.

“With cricket as well you could be on cloud nine one minute and then right back down the next,” said Balbirnie. “Then you are back at your hotel room and that can be tough and I’m sure that there would be people around the world who would really struggle with it.

“That’s why the mental side of the game is so important for us because this is our job, our livelihood. If you have a good day at the office or a bad day at the office it is broadcast to the world so it can get lonely and you are away from your family and partner.”

Let’s be clear here, none of this is by way of complaint.

The Dubliner is more than happy to accept that territory given it provides the grounds for him to play the sport he loves and captain his country in the process. If the buzz of touring isn’t the same now as when he was a rookie — how could it? — then it’s not something he suffers with either.

What faces them all now as players is a mental obstacle of a different hue.

Anne Marie Kennedy is a sport and performance psychologist who has worked with Cycling Ireland, Swim Ireland and the senior Dublin men’s team, as well as Cricket Ireland, and she has continued to provide support for her charges online.

Kennedy speaks about how the current crisis can trigger a sense of control being lost and how perspective can be waylaid with it if too much thought and energy is invested in the ever-rolling news cycle rather than matters closer to home.

Control the controllables is her mantra. One of them.

“For athletes and coaches that have robust confidence and stable coping mechanisms this period will be fine,” she explained. “These individuals will most likely understand the challenge facing them but will not feel unduly threatened.”

Kennedy places great store in the assertion by Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, that we are challenged to change ourselves when we are no longer able to change a situation.

Sportspeople have been pointed in that very direction by coaches and performance directors suggesting that this period be used to think about areas where they could improve their games, or to pour their energies into a new past-time.

As Kennedy points out, it is okay too to feel afraid, or all at sea, in the midst of the current uncertainty and the monotony of enforced domesticity.

Celeste Raack, one of those Irish players due to be facing the Dutch in Thailand today, is honest enough to admit none of this has been easy.

“It has been really hard,” she said. “This is usually the most exciting time of our year. Everything is supposed to ramp up, we’re supposed to be playing games.

“Anne Marie’s advice, that this will pass, has been really good and we’re still well connected as a team as

well.

“We’re all excited for the next chance to get away again.”

Aren’t we all?