Finding The Feels
"Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust... It's not real."
Want to support The Boundary Rider? It’s much easier to write when caffeinated…
“Theoretically it is a simple thing, but it is just getting that feel and the look of the bat behind my toe the right way and the way my hands come up on the bat.” - Steve Smith on ‘finding his hands’, November 2020.
When Steve Smith explained what ‘finding his hands’ meant before the 2020/21 Border–Gavaskar series, he was coining his own – somewhat harebrained, but mostly relatable – expression for The Feels.
Intangible, existential and usually fleeting, The Feels can leave us with the impression that we are unstoppable as sportspeople. For batters, see Cardus describing Hutton:
“We might almost persuade ourselves that the current of his energy, his life-force, is running electrically down the bat’s handle.”
And for golfers, see Tom Coyne of The Golfer’s Journal:
“When we listen for our hands and start hearing something back, that’s when we’ve got them – the feels.”
So, keen to understand a bit more about The Feels and the practical implications for athletes chasing them, I spoke with Director of Coaching at Cricket Mentoring, Blake Reed, and Australian professional golfer, Blake Collyer, about what the concept means to them.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as that great a surprise, but for Reed – a true batting technician – the concept of The Feels, is largely the product of having all the technical parts of your game moving and working together in sync.
Everything from getting sequencing right, holding the right amount of tension and moving through the ball at the right time is what it means to him.
“Doing those things makes the bat feel like it’s a part of you and you’ve got all the time in the world. That for me is The Feels.
“You probably notice it more when it’s not there, you feel like your shoelaces are tied together and you tip into the ball instead of making nice, crisp movements.”
That got me wondering if in cricket, we are putting the cart before the horse; chasing a feeling that we believe will facilitate performance, when the feeling itself is the result of all the technical details working in harmony.
As for whether The Feels are essential for peak performance? Reed suggests maybe it’s important to realign our focus.
"Too many of us seek out that perfect feel, instead of playing the game in front of us. We need to be effective, not perfect.”
He goes on to cite Adam Voges’ recent podcast episode with Cricket Mentoring, where the former Test batter explains how he actually rarely felt in full flow in the middle.
“Sometimes we can get so judgmental internally on how we look and feel, that it can actually get in the way of our own success,” Reed says. “The best players make a living by not worrying about any of that stuff.”
Although he wants to caution against a ‘feels-first’ approach, Reed agrees that it is important to recognise the things that make us feel good at the crease.
For him, in addition to technical proficiency, The Feels can look like a bat where the toe seems thick next to his foot, or a pitch that is firming up throughout the first session of play, with a slight indent from where he has tapped his bat.
“It’s a luxury when you have conditions like that, or when your gear just suits your eye a bit more. The days when it feels good, you need to make it a bloody good day, be extra disciplined in the process and not just rely on The Feels.”
That final point rings true for Collyer, too, who has played professional golf since 2019.
“It is certainly a real thing in golf. It is amazing how it happens, but you need to be able to switch into performance mode regardless.”
He concedes that some days he will look down at his putter and feel as though it looks different, and not always in a good way.
“Sometimes it just looks weird,” he laughs. “It can be the same with other clubs in the bag, days where even the shape of it looks different – obviously it’s not.”
Perhaps even more relevant on the golf course is the notion of a hole that suits a player’s eye. No more forgiving or fair, certain holes can just instil confidence in different players, giving them the freedom to make committed, aggressive swings.
“On certain tees you stand up and feel like you’ll never miss the fairway,” Collyer says. “Then the next hole can be the same width but move in a different way and all of a sudden it just feels a lot narrower.”
“You can embrace all of these feels pre-shot if you want, but when it comes time to hit it, you need to be in the contest and forget about all those things.”
So, real or otherwise, fairy dust or not, The Feels can present as a positive or a pitfall across sports. How we choose to draw on or disregard them is up to the athlete, but relying on them entirely is almost certainly an exercise in futility.
After ‘finding his hands’ Steve Smith made scores of 1, 1 no, 0 and 8, before finishing the series as the second-highest run-scorer with 313 runs @ 44.71...