An investigation into the stressors and coping strategies for International cricketers.

Within the world of modern mass communication, the playing of international cricket has become a highly scrutinised sport. This media focus has placed increased demands on both teams and individuals potentially causing far greater stress. This study has looked to identify the sources of these stresses and the coping strategies used to combat them. It has looked to associate specific coping strategies with the relevant stresses. To achieve this 12 autobiographies of International cricketers were sampled and analysed. The books were all written by male International cricketers who had all played at least 60 (some exceeding 100) International Test matches for their respected countries (M = 113.4, SD = 41.5). Together they had an average of 12.3 years of International experience at the Test level, with the longest playing for 24 years. Through the use of a thematic analysis method, the content of the autobiographies was analysed firstly inductively and secondly deductively to identify the stressors and the coping strategies. The study found that International cricketers identified stressors in organisational (e.g. match specific, environmental, external influence, physical), competitive (e.g. performance, task-related, technical) and personal (e.g. perception of self, relationship with others, external). Within the identified coping strategies, the four dimensions’ emotion focused, appraisal focused, problem focused and approach, many different strategies were identified. It was noted, that unlike other sports where particular stressors are identified as requiring a certain coping strategy the studied showed that for cricketers the coping strategies were not uniquely linked to a stress. It has been shown, that in most cases, that for the stressors identified there is a coping strategy that has been used. Interestingly the particular coping strategy chosen by any individual cricketer maybe a different strategy to cope with the identical stressor. In future this should allow a number of identified coping strategies to be tried to help overcome a particular stressor