In this article let’s take a look at how to handle sledging and how to deal with it in cricket and other sports like football.
So if you are a professional player and you are confused regarding how you should approach this tactic of sledging in sports like cricket and football then you should be reading this article till the end because I will be giving you all the professional tips and tactics that will help you handle it better on the ground.
So let’s dive right in.
How to handle and deal with sledging in cricket?
There are bunch of ways to deal with and handle sledging in cricket and popular methods are mentioned below
Practice doing meditation everyday for at least half an hour
Meditation is by far the best thing you can do to improve your concentration and keep yourself focused during distractions.
You should know that the primary purpose of any fielder, sledging to the opponent batsman is to distract them and make them react so that they can lose their concentration and make some error in the game and lose their wicket.
There are many benefits of meditation such as it not only helps you increase your concentration but also helps you get more mentally tough and it will help you manage and control your emotions more better especially if you are cricketer, and meditation will help you increase your self awareness, self-control and help you stay in present, reduce both mental and physical stress, increase patience creativity and imagination power which are amazing benefits and can change your life significantly as a cricketer.
There are many popular legendary batsman like Virat Kohli Rohit Sharma Justin Langer Ricky ponting and many more batsman do meditation in order to control their emotions and increase their concentration power.
And in my personal experience of doing meditation for more than two years now I have personally witnessed many amazing benefits such as controlling my emotions and thoughts more better now, and all you need to do is to spend at least half an hour everyday either morning or evening depending upon your convenience by sitting at a quiet place and just focus on your breath or you can chant mantras like Om and practice mindfulness and slowly over a period of time like three or four months you will start witnessing the benefits of meditation such as being calm and increasing concentration levels.
By the way you can also take the help of meditation and mindfulness applications like headspace, and buddhify.
Visualization & affirmation
Another thing you can do to deal with sledging as a cricketer is to start visualisation and practice affirmation everyday especially early in the morning and before falling asleep in the night.
Visualisation is a practice of visualising and imagining yourself in middle of the cricket match when opponent players are sledging you and you are being controlled and not getting distracted by the sledges but playing your cricketing shots freely and affirmations are positive sentences you tell to yourself that you are confident and do not get distracted by the sledges of the opponent team.
There are many benefits of both visualisation and affirmations like it will increase your confidence and whatever you say to yourself over a period of time in the form of affirmations, it will become a belief in your subconscious mind and you will act in certain way because of that belief and because of law of attraction all those things that you visualised and spoken to yourself will become true.
There are many top cricketers like Virat Kohli who is the best cricketer at present in all three formats of the game actually spoken about visualisation and said in an interview that he uses visualisation to train his subconscious mind to act in a certain way and it becomes a reality after practicing it over a period of time in his mind and because of this Virat Kohli is such a destructive batsman and has some of the best batting averages as we know today.
Increase your confidence by practising your game a lot in the nets
Another thing you can do to deal with sledging in cricket is to just increase your confidence by practice your skill more in the nets.
It is very important that you have high amount of confidence on yourself and on your game and you should know that sledging is a practice of trying to distract the opponent player and remind him that he is not a good batsman which makes him to do some errors and get distracted & lose his wicket.
Spend time after matches thinking about what went well. Spend time before matches planning how it could go perfectly. When you spend time thinking about all the good things you are doing, you believe in yourself.
How much time you need to spend on this kind of reflection depends on how tough you are on yourself and how many negative thoughts you have about your game
But if you have high amount of confidence and confidence only comes by a lot of practice of the game in the nets and a lot of self reflection and self analysis then irrespective of what others say about you and you’re game, since you have practiced your game quite a lot of time in the nets, you will have so much confidence that you do not care what others say about your game and you won’t get distracted easily because your mind gets tougher and more powerful and when the opponent fielder continuously sledges and you do not reply to him then he will get bored of it and stop sledging you.
Ignore them or confront them if it goes beyond a limit
another way to deal with sledging in cricket is either to ignore them or if it goes beyond a certain limit which quite regularly happens then you can also consider confronting them or address it to the umpire so that he can interrupt the fielder and stop him from sledging to you.
With that said let’s conclude the blog.
Conclusion
These are all the things you need know about how to handle sledging in cricket.
Do let me know what are your thoughts about sledging in the cricket in comment section below and whether it is good or bad and also shared the article with your friends who are also interested in cricket and other sports
like football and they are also facing issues of how to handle the issue of sledging so that this article can be helpful for them, I also have written several articles related to cricket and football that you can check out on my website.