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Richard Pybus, the neuroscience of winning, and the transformation of Mohammad Rizwan

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

Rizwan 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, 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.

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."

Richard Pybus: The Coach

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.

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.

How did Pybus help Rizwan?

"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.

The Science of Performance

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.

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".