Team India’s mental conditioning coach Paddy Upton has recently revealed that 10 months before the 2011 World Cup, the Indian team management believed that they won’t win the competition. In a video uploaded by the cricket.com/tv YouTube channel, Upton said that everyone on the coaching team, including head coach Gary Kirsten, had a fear that India might not win the title as well.
He suggested that it was because the Indian team were under immense pressure to do well as they were playing at home. Upton added that it was Sachin Tendulkar’s last-ever World Cup appearance and they had to keep these things in mind while preparing for the crucial encounter.
Paddy Upton expressed: “It was on the morning of the Asia Cup final, 10 months before the 2011 World Cup final, we were preparing to play Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka. The question that Gary Kirsten asked was, if this is a World Cup final, are we ready as a team to go out and win? Gary and I, along with Eric Simmons, all of us said, ‘No, we aren’t ready to win a World Cup final’.
“The thinking was that because of the amount of the home pressure, and when we extrapolated that, it was very clear that playing the final at Wankhede, which is one of the noisiest stadiums, and Sachin Tendulkar’s last World Cup game, there would be higher pressure than what any of those players had played under or would play under in the rest of their lives,” Paddy Upton again stated.
However, the MS Dhoni-led team ultimately won the 2011 World Cup final against Sri Lanka. The hosts chased down the target of 274 set by Sri Lanka in the final at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai to lift the title as well. Paddy Upton further shared that in all the team meetings, the support staff would ensure that they discuss about India playing the final at the 2011 World Cup as well.
“Every single team meeting, we would start with, ‘When we play the final in Mumbai’ or ‘When we play the final on the 2nd April’. So that by the time we got to that place, it had been in the players’ minds over and over. Going into that final, we probably experienced less pressure than what most teams have experienced going into final because we were so mentally prepared for that moment.”Half the battle is won if you can arrive at a moment that big and not be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the situation. A fair degree of winning that game had already been done before we arrived,” Paddy Upton concluded.
Paddy Upton recently started his second stint with the Indian side. He has been appointed as the mental conditioning coach for the national side till the duration of the upcoming T20 World Cup 2022 as well.
