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By Tony Hallett, 19 July 2005 08:42

COMMENT Morale, the team and man management

You're known for having a good dressing room. Obviously winning a lot helps but how do you approach that, how do you foster that in the team?
MV: With the morale factor it certainly helps when you're winning but I like to take the pressure off. There's enough pressure playing at the top level - from the spectators, the media - the last person I feel that needs to be putting the pressure on more so is the captain. I try to relieve the pressure. Maybe that helps the team spirit in the dressing room. I certainly like to see a dressing room with people enjoying the practice, enjoying the cricket. And enjoying tough challenges. Enjoying easy games is easy. I want players to enjoy it when it gets a little tougher out in the middle.

You seem like quite a relaxed player and person yourself.
MV: I am. I certainly have a great outlook on life that no matter what happens between 11:00 and 6:00, at seven o'clock I can just have a laugh... because there's not a lot you can do about it. You can only look towards the next game, the next day or the next innings. I certainly don't sulk and think 'Oh god, I got nought today'. You have to analyse, you have to make sure that you work with the coach and yourself to make sure you know why you had a failure. But you can't beat yourself up and go too deep about it because you can certainly get yourself in problems if you do that.

How do you approach the psychology of the game?
MV: I think it's important that first and foremost you identify everyone's roles. You have to identify the roles with the individual as well, so both sets, the management and the player, are happy with their roles. Once you know your role... you can prepare for that role much more easily.

I've been very fortunate to have been brought up with a good work ethic at Yorkshire. The mental side of it is the tough side but it's the most important side. I try to work individually with players about how I feel they need to be motivated best. There are 11 players, 11 characters and no two characters are exactly the same, so you have to kind of manage the when and how to talk to certain players. Whether you just give them a little bit of a challenge, whether you relieve the challenge, whether you just try to relax them a bit more. Really you get them a lot of the time because you're hoping it's the right moment. You try to get the moment right but there are times when you get it wrong.

The biggest thing to leadership and management is that you are going to make mistakes. You're going to make wrong decisions. But as long as you give it your best shot, you can't be too harsh on yourself. Because you're making so many decisions you'd be god if you made every correct one. But especially out in the middle I don't take every decision - I like to get the advice of players, like to keep them all involved, I like to have a real team ethic, hear everyone talk.

I like to get them all talking and communicating and give them a little bit of ownership of situations - if I've asked Andrew Strauss 'Who do you reckon…?' - if you give him that and something happens, if you give him a bit of ownership, then he feels better about himself. I try to do that about the whole team, get them all involved.

Victory from the jaws of defeat?

In the Durban test match in South Africa last winter, England came close to completing one of the biggest turnarounds ever seen in cricket - only to be stopped in their tracks by bad light in the last session of play.

I remember you sitting in the middle of the pitch, clearly not looking happy but not looking angry as such and it seemed to be that you were thinking there's not much that could be done about it, that's just the way it went.
MV: The light came in and we tried our best. Two days previous we were staring down the barrel of an innings defeat. So I was very proud of the way the team had fought back and put the opposition back under pressure. You can relate to that in any game of cricket. If you have the mental strength to turn games around and put the opposition under pressure when they feel they've got you - then that's a great thing. It probably creates more confidence from those kind of performances than hammering a team. If you're getting into trouble on day one, day two, and you still get out of trouble and end up winning then they're the kind of games you gain a lot of confidence from.