Paddy Upton is a celebrated cricket coach, a mental performance coach and a business leader who coaches business leaders as well.

Along with Gary Kirsten as Head Coach, Paddy Upton was appointed Mental Conditioning and Strategic Leadership Coach of the Indian National cricket team in 2008. Under Kirsten and Upton, the team attained the ICC top test team ranking for their first time (2009), and went on to win the ICC World Cup in 2011.

Between 2012-2018 Paddy has been Head Coach in 12 professional T20 cricket seasons, for five different teams across three tournaments, including the Indian Premier League , Australian Big Bash League and the Pakistan Super League . His accomplishments as Head Coach include leading the Rajasthan Royals team from four years near the bottom of the IPL log to IPL Semi-finalists and Champions League finalists in his first season (2013), including a record 13 straight home wins.

Listen to the podcast to learn about

1:53- Journey to India’s World Cup win as a performance coach

5:13- How should one go about cultivating mental fitness and mental agility

8:38- Figuring out what motivates and excites you

14:37- Looking at the other end of spectrum, the fear part

16:45- Focusing on the process, the input metrics

18:20- Paddy on building a team

19:59- Assessing the willingness to learn

21:41- Picking people in leadership positions

23:04- Characteristics of a great Captain

25:31- How to make it collectively work as a team

Read the complete transcript below

Amit Somani 1:10

Welcome to the Prime Venture Partners podcast. Today we have with us a very unique and a special guest, Patty Upton. Paddy is a celebrated cricket coach, a mental performance coach and a business leader who coaches business leaders as well. Welcome to the show Paddy.

Paddy Upton 1:26

Thank you very much Amit. Really a privilege to be joining you today on your Prime Ventures podcast.

Amit Somani 1:32

Thanks, Paddy. So many of our listeners may or may not know but I’ve been following Paddy since 2011, the World Cup where he and Gary Kirsten were widely credited as being two of the architects of India’s World Cup cricket win at home. So why don’t we start with a little bit of that journey, before we dive into some of the lessons from the cricket field that can be applied to the world of entrepreneurship?

Paddy Upton 1:53

Sure, so I guess from that journey really started for myself and Gary Kirsten, we joined together in march of 2008. So we had about a three year run up to the World Cup. At the time, team India, I think had a 50% win ratio in test one day cricket, a 30% win ratio in Test cricket, obviously, very talented players, putting the team and the strategies to get as accurately as they potentially could.

So Gary and my goals with the team were to take them to the number one test team in the world, a position they hadn’t been to and obviously three years later to win the 2011 World Cup. And interestingly, up until that point, no team had actually won a World Cup at home, due to the pressures that players play under in front of the home crowd. So we knew playing a final in Mumbai and Sachin Tendulkar’s last World Cup game was probably going to be the highest level of pressure that any team had possibly played under, up until that point, possibly in cricketing history.

So we knew we had our work cut out for us, we had great players. And we just set about trying to build as a happily a united team where we harness player’s intelligence and said, yeah, we wanted to just together create the magic that ended up being successful by becoming the number one test team in the world. And as you mentioned, winning the 2011 World Cup. So it definitely was a dream three year journey.

Amit Somani 3:17

Wonderful Paddy. Nobody really had a mental performance coach or a peak performance coach up until that time? What was that like? To be hired as that, what do you come in and do with the team?

Paddy Upton 3:30

So that’s a great question. Actually, there wasn’t any such thing as a full time mental coach in world cricket at the time. So it was partly sort of creating the role as we went, a lot of it was really around focusing on supporting the leadership, so particularly supporting Gary Kirsten and on how he was conducting himself as a leader, because that obviously was going to set the tone for the team.

So a lot of leadership coaching for Gary, Anil Kumble was a test captain and soon handed over to MS Dhoni, so working a lot of the leaders and the senior players to try and create the kind of culture so there was a leadership coaching element, there was quite a strong culture coaching element. And then the third was working one on one individually with players helping them navigate the mental challenges of which I would say probably pressure of the big moment and fear of failure were probably the two the biggest mental obstacles to success and that are needed to help address the pressure and the fear part. So those three caps leadership, culture and individual mental game stuff.

Amit Somani 4:33

So Paddy, let’s take the last one first, which is, just getting personal mastery. I’ve also read your book, the Barefoot coach, where you talk about the fact that 80 to 90% of performance at that level is mental. Everybody’s got skills, everybody’s got capability, they probably got fitness, of course everyone can do better and all those things, but really what separates the Sachin Tendulkars from the rest is mental agility and mental fitness which I think also applies to the world of business and entrepreneurship. Can you talk a little bit about how one should go about cultivating mental fitness and mental agility, either as a cricketer or as a business person or an entrepreneur?

Paddy Upton 5:13

That’s a very broad question to ask and answer in a short space of time. But I would say for me, there’s two key elements. One is the short term element in terms of executing accurately with our mental skills. So that’s things like having focus and concentration and building confidence and keeping players that are with an undistracted focus on the task at hand. But for me, that sort of stuff, which most of it comes from the the sports psychology toolkit, I really look at that as a plus, though a band aid that you put on a wound, I don’t really think it’s that sustainable or helpful to continually work with those simple tools and tricks around mental focus, concentration, etc.

For me, the longer term and much deeper and impactful work is working on the individual’s self esteem. And self esteem and confidence are two different things. Self Esteem remains constant through successes, highs and lows, that’s sort of how we see ourselves in the world, where on the other hand, self confidence is a very short term focus, when we do well, our confidence goes up, when you do bad, your confidence goes down. So confidence is almost like emotions, and that it’s a yo yo and very difficult to work with. So I really do spend a lot of the time and I really do believe in helping individuals dig the foundations of their lives. It’s almost like, to be a really good person, have sound values, have sound character, step into your higher nature, as a human being.

And in our nature, we are all something joyful, and kind and caring, and empathetic. And in sports, there’s this policy, not to pick, the technical term we use in sport is a no dickheads policy. And I really do subscribe to that it’s when players are really good people, and they’re secure in who they are as human beings. That goes a long way to actually reducing the two things I mentioned earlier, pressure and fear, both of those is, attaching our self worth to results, pressure comes from how important we make a result and the lower our self worth, the more important it is to do well, because then people like us. And the lower our self worth, the more important it is not to fail, because we feel bad.

But if we have a really strong sense of self worth and self esteem, we want to win, but we don’t have to win to look good. And of course, we don’t want to lose or do badly. But we’re not so attached to losing badly when it’s okay. So as soon as you’re not attached to results, both success and failure immediately decreases the amount of pressure and fear we experience. So the long term and deep and really real work is just thinking into who we are as human beings into personal mastery, as opposed to cricket or rugby, or the sales or technical mastery, the professional skills, so I am a big fan of digging the foundations of the human being..

Amit Somani 8:08

So you talk a lot about values and purpose and aligning your inner compass. And I think the same thing could apply with the startup world as well. Often when we’re talking to founders, we’re looking at people who are sort of more missionary rather than mercenary. Because it just makes it like they’re really passionate about a problem. They really believe in it. But I think you’re going a level deeper than that, like you’re saying, at a human being level, figure out what motivates you, what excites you, what you stand for. And you think that that has an impact on performance.

Paddy Upton 8:38

Yes, so I really do think our foundations as human beings are really important, as I said, and all the spiritual teachings, all the universal wisdom, all the religions, they all talk to this thing, it’s about really being grounded as a good human being. We’re all born with certain gifts at birth and certain talents, we need to be harnessing and using a talent as God given gifts are those birth talents that we’ve got. And we need to use those talents ideally, to serve others or cause or worthy cause greater than ourselves.

So if we’re using our talents that we were given at birth, and we’re using them productively and positively to add value to other people and into the world, things tend to work really well. Life works well. We’re in flow, we’re in sync with our life, we’re in sync with our purpose. And it’s almost like just swimming in with the flow of a river when we’re in flow of our life and mode, and we’re plugged into our natural motivational flow. It’s very easy to get up in the morning, work long days, navigate difficulties and obstacles comparatively when we’re not in flow. When we’re not using our strengths.

Or we are not serving a higher purpose, maybe we were actually just working for fame or power or status or our own personal material gain. Those are shaky building blocks for success going forwards and we’ll find then that those kinds of people will need to read books and go and do courses on motivation and self discipline and grit and determination. But if you’re plugged into purpose, that grit, determination, motivation, etc, it just flows naturally through our veins and through our working days.

Amit Somani 10:14

So let’s drill into pressure and fear two really big things that you pointed out. And maybe we can take a cricket example. Since we’ve talked about this before, what was the environment like in the dressing room before walking out in Wankhede for the World Cup finals? Now you’re already in the finals, this is at home, no team has won at home. And how did all the personal mastery work that you worked with the team, pan out as they went there? Because there must have been an enormous amount of pressure even still, despite all the coaching.

Paddy Upton 10:45

So we knew there was going to be this incredible amount of pressure. And so what we intentionally did with the team is in fact, 10 months out from that world cup, actually, and I remember that day very well. It was actually the morning of the Asia Cup final. We’re sitting in Sri Lanka and preparing to play Sri Lanka in the Asia Cup Final. But the question Gary Kirsten, and I asked was, if this was the World Cup final, are we ready to go out and play the game?

And the answer was no. And a large part of, as you mentioned, that we needed to address was the pressure that we were going to feel should we end up playing a final at the Wankhede Stadium on the 2nd of April 2011. So what we did for 10 months, literally, every single team meeting we had, we would bring that language in and we would prefix everything we said in those meetings with when we played the final in Mumbai, or when we played the final on the second of April 2011.

We didn’t say if we said when and we didn’t say when we win we just said when we play because we wanted the players to get so ingrained and so used to the idea of waking up in the morning on the second of April and driving to the ground or walking onto the Wankhede Stadium. That is one of the loudest stadiums in world cricket because it is so vertical, the fans are so on top of view. So we did everything we can every single day, every single meeting to bowl for that very moment so that when it arrived, that felt like wow, we’ve been here so many times before, the pressure was still there. But it wasn’t so high, because of the preparation, that it actually unfolded.

Amit Somani 12:27

Wonderful! And you also talked about a couple of examples, I think in the book as well, around the purpose for that match. And it was Sachin’s last game, so you said, Hey, many players were playing this for Sachin and so forth. How important was purpose at that point? And and obviously, purpose had to be much deeper and more aligned with every individual?

Paddy Upton 12:46

Yes. So with that, all teams that I work with, by being plugged into your purpose, as I said earlier, which means serving somebody or something or some cause greater than yourself. It really just helps with that motivation, that inspiration in those really tough moments, you realize it’s not just about me, I’m doing this for other people. So we worked with players to have those conversations both in a group and individually over that period of 10 months, saying like, who would you be playing that final for if you walk out to bat who is that and some people, it was a t their parents, some people thanks to the early coaches.

It wasn’t all the whole team. But some players of their own volition said I want to do it as I want to win the trophy as a gift to Sachin to thank him for his service to Indian cricket. So each person did have their reason. And in fact, right at the beginning of that tournament, the other reason that we collectively bought into a team is there was language about walking onto the field with the pressure and expectation of a half a billion Indian fans. And we reframe that to say it’s not pressure and expectation of a half a billion Indian fans on your shoulders. Imagine you’re actually walking onto a field with these many hundreds of millions of fans actually holding you by the hand walking out in full support. And that just really reframed that feeling comfortable playing in front of such large fans both on television and live.

Amit Somani 14:10

Very, very inspiring still getting goosebumps thinking about that. But let’s look at the other end of the spectrum, which is the fear part. Again, back in entrepreneurship, and the world of business. Entrepreneurs have a lot of fears, of not getting customers, of not getting funding of having competitive intensity. What if the company shuts down? What if I can’t make payroll? How would you encourage people to as a practice, overcome fear or address fear or acknowledge fear?

Paddy Upton 14:37

Okay, I think for athletes and entrepreneurs, it’s probably a very similar approach. And I’m certainly of the belief, the first thing is to understand the dynamics or the anatomy of what is fear, and we see that we actually created for ourselves and then how to do that differently. So when we look into the future and we look at possible scenarios, of things going wrong. That is a very normal healthy pattern of planning for any coach for any entrepreneur, we need to look at what are the things that might go wrong, that is normal.

And then what we do is we put actions or strategy or plans in place to avert the possibility of things going wrong. And if it does go wrong, we put in various catchment nets, that’s a normal practice, if we get stuck in looking at what’s going to go wrong, and we constantly ruminate about things going wrong. And it starts by going over and over in our head, it starts to become a reality in our head. And that’s where fear arises. So it only arises when I’m here now. And my mind is dwelling on something going wrong in the future. And I’m constantly ruminating or thinking about that thing. So we create fear. It’s not a real thing. It’s a felt experience. But it’s a concept we create for ourselves.

So when you’re feeling fear just means you’re looking at potential things that can go wrong, which is a very healthy process. But now extract yourself from the future and come back to now, and say what steps, what plans were processes, what contingencies can I put in place should that potential scenario unfold? That brings us back into the present moment and into action. And when we’re in action, the present moment, fear cannot exist.

Amit Somani 16:22

Absolutely! And you made the other point earlier about focusing on the process and not the outcome. Fear can also happen from the past, I failed, I got out to an outswinger, something happened, or it could happen in the future, like, what if I’m not able to make payroll or what have you. So again, like, I think, focusing on the present, how about the importance of focusing on the process, and what we call, in our parlance, the input metrics, and don’t worry about the outcome.

Paddy Upton 16:47

In sports, focus on the process. And we let the results look after itself. We talk about the input metrics, and not attaching so much to the outcomes. We say that so much that it’s actually become rhetoric and we stop hearing that. And it’s probably one of the most precious concepts and the most valuable concepts, if we can genuinely let it instill at a cellular level in our body.

And if we can genuinely focus on the process or the inputs, that frees us up from fear, frees us from anxiety, and fear frees us up from pressure, and it has us focusing on the correct things. So I’m an absolute believer, and yet the problem is too many people say that, but they don’t live it at a deeply cellular level. So that’s probably one of the wisest things for any athlete or entrepreneur to really plug into that as opposed to going yes, yes I know focus on the process. Okay, now moving on and carrying on and worrying about the results.

Amit Somani 17:52

Absolutely! We talk about it all the time as broken records. So switching gears now, Paddy, so maybe talk a little bit about personal mastery, about fear about pressure about process. Now let’s talk about building a team. You built some amazing teams, you were the head coach for the Rajasthan Royals. You were sitting in the middle of the IPL season, although you’re probably in Cape Town right now I’m here in Bangalore, how do you go about building a team? How do you go about picking players in the team? Can you talk a little bit about that before we go on to how do you make them perform well with each other beyond just your individual performance?

Paddy Upton 18:20

Okay, so for me, I like to keep it really simple by focusing on the really key metrics. So one of the metrics is obviously, performance, which we can get from the statisticians. So one is performance. And two is the person, the character, the personality, what I personally do is I find the best performance analyst or matrix out there and I look to employ that expertise, because that’s not necessarily my expertise.

So I can get these as the best possible players that are available. And this is the matrix we’ve used to illustrate, to prove that these are the places you want to be choosing from, once I have that my role is I look at these players. And we try and put obviously in the right combinations together. That’s another important thing. But I look at the personality, and what I will do in the cricket world, and certainly in this day and age with social media and connectivity, etc. It’s very easy to be able to just follow a little trail into this person’s past to find out are they someone who adds value? Who is an energizer, who is supportive, that they’re a team player, are they open to learning and you just pick the right personality that is useful, but I pick number one talent and number two good people and from there it’s very difficult to go wrong.

Amit Somani 19:40

Great and how do you assess learning ability or willingness to learn? That’s a very difficult thing to figure out. In a short span of time. Of course in cricket, you probably have scouts and people are watching them and seeing how they’ve progressed but are there ways, in a business setting, to figure out whether somebody has learned agility or ability?

Paddy Upton 19:59

The way that I really prefer to do it, and I’m sure it’s possible in the business world, particularly with a high performer or high potential individual, and then obviously comes through maybe a university, they’ve come through one or two businesses somewhere, I look for a trusted person who knows that personal knows someone who knows that person. And that’s how genuine I will get my information. So it’s not in an HR metric.

It’s not on a balance sheet. It’s, who do I trust, and said, he told me about this individual, and everyone is human, we all have our flaws. But as long as someone has thought to the right ingredients and is teachable as to then it’s pretty easy. And I can’t imagine it’s very difficult. If someone does have a checkered past, we would be able to trace it. And if it’s an important appointment that you’re looking to make, take the extra time to go down into that person’s past and find out is this the kind of person who I would like to spend, five days a week and particularly if it’s an entrepreneur or top business, you’re investing more than just a nine to five into the business you want people to really invest themselves their energy, their loyalty and with startups, it’s round the clock, you need to put your nose to the grindstone and just make things happen. And sometimes that stops happening at six o’clock, seven o’clock when business hours stop.

Amit Somani 21:26

Absolutely! How about captains and people in leadership positions on the cricket field, unlike other sports, the coaches involved, but they’re still sitting outside the sideline. So what is the role of a captain? How do you pick a good Captain or a vice captain? What do you look for there?

Paddy Upton 21:41

So for me, for Captain and Vice Captain I tend to focus on the leadership team. So, I think few minds are better than one mind, even on the field, I would like the captain to have two or three people to consult, and particularly people, maybe a wicket keeper and a bowler and someone standing at cover. So they’ve seen the game from different perspectives. One is seen as a captain, one as a keeper, one as a bowler.

So I like to put a leadership team together. And I’m a very strong believer in harnessing collective intelligence or the collective inputs as opposed to just having one person directing proceedings. Of course, the leader needs to be able to gather that information. And then at the end of the day, he needs to make a decision himself and stand by that decision. So you do need a leader who’s got the conviction of their decisions, but also someone who’s prepared to engage other people and collaborate in arriving at that decision. So for me, it’s a team as opposed to an individual.

Amit Somani 22:42

Great, so you’ve built a lot of award winning teams. Not just the 2011 World Cup, but also Rajasthan Royals, I think you used to coach a team in the big bash, I don’t remember the name. So maybe some characteristics of great captains that you worked with great leaders or people in the leadership team on the cricket field, what makes them special, what makes them interesting, maybe even if you have a few names that you’re comfortable sharing.

Paddy Upton 23:04

So different captains have different qualities that they bring to a team, if I take someone like Steve Smith, he had a real strategic feeling that I really appreciated on the field. MS. Dhoni, his real strength is his absolute calmness in those high pressure situations that allows him and the rest of the team to be calm.

Someone like Mike Hussey, I have worked with, he’s an incredibly humble person, I would say almost Mike Hussey in Australia, his equivalent is the Rahul Dravid in India, I was lucky to work with Rahul with the Indian team, he was the captain when I was the coach with the Rajasthan Royals. And then he moved off the field to the mentoring role. When I was still a coach in Rajasthan Royals, Rahul was an amazing leader because he was so open to getting inputs, he was so humble, he never thought he was more important or more special than anyone else. So he was really able to connect particularly with young players, a lot of captains that I’ve worked with before. And I think that’s one of the reasons why Rahul has gone on.

And he will be an incredibly successful coach. I don’t think you could have a better person coaching because he’s a professor of cricket when it comes to his knowledge, and yet he’s able to relate to an 18 year old, not like what happens in a number of organizations, for example, where that senior person adopts a very senior, powerful, authoritarian, all knowing role, and they place themselves on a pedestal on a superior place to their underlings, that doesn’t necessarily get the best out of them, where Rahul would actually come down to their level. So it’s just different captains have different qualities, some examples I mentioned now.

Amit Somani 24:52

Very fascinating, Paddy, and I think I can see a lot of parallels in the business world. One more question on the team side, which is, how do you make the team perform together as a unit? We already talked about purpose, value alignment. But even so you also need skills to execute. You might have a dynamic order, you might change the batting order, or somebody might not get picked for a match. How do you make the team perform with each other number one, and number two, you’ll have people who are supremely strong or very self driven, like Sachin is the example that always comes to mind or Rahul Dravid. And then there are others where you might need to nudge and push a little bit. How do you make it collectively work together as a team and a unit?

Paddy Upton 25:31

So the answer lies in that question. How do we make this work as best possible in this team? For me, it’s asking that question to the team. So I think too often as leaders, we take it onto our shoulders to think what do I need to do to get the best out of this team and get them to work as best as possible? For me, that’s a flawed approach. The question is great, but it’s not on my shoulders as a leader to decide how to get the best out of this team.

I take the question to the team and say, Okay, guys, let’s have a conversation about what’s going to work best for each of us individually and collectively. And can we create an amazing environment where we have an amazing experience here? And just by the way, I just want to double check. Is anyone here not interested in having an amazing experience? For example, during this IPL, and everyone goes, yes, of course, we want to have an amazing experience.

So I’m not a mind reader, who can predict what is required for you to have that, let’s have a conversation, and collectively come up with what we believe can be our most amazing experience. And that conversation remains open for the duration of the season, so that we can keep revisiting it and fine tuning it. Because if we have a better team we put similar players to other teams, it’s similar in businesses, we’ve got similar ideas, we’re using similar technologies and platforms. But can we work better and have a better experience than any of our competitors? And if we do, and we’re using good platforms, and good technologies and good strategies and data, you know what? It’s going to put us at the front of the curve.

Amit Somani 27:03

Actually, Paddy, I can’t help but plug the question around the India-Australia match in Ahmedabad during the World Cup. Because you shared that story. What happened in the dressing room, around that match? Because obviously, people were expecting to meet Australia, maybe much later in the cycle. It almost felt like that was the finals, India vs. Australia.

Paddy Upton 27:24

Yeah, that quarterfinal probably was the two strongest teams India-Australia. And we had played Australia about eight times, or eight or 10 times in the previous year, we had played at that ground about four times that season already. And the conversation with Gary Kirsten myself went something like and I’ll just abbreviate it. Is there anything we can talk about in the pre match strategy meeting that we had the night before every game is anything we can tell the players about the Australian team we haven’t already discussed and the answer was no, we’ve already covered all those bases.

Is there anything we can talk about this particular venue in the match statistics and how it plays out? And when the answer was no, we’ve already done that. Is there anything we can talk about playing about the quarterfinal, but it was our seventh World Cup game. And we had very deliberately set about having a consistent process. And I use that word again, how we approach each game doesn’t matter whether it’s through this game or the final, we’re going to approach it in the same way. And so we actually didn’t have anything new we could add in that meeting. So when the players came into the meeting, which is obviously whatever meeting before the quarterfinal in the World Cup, I just wrote one question on the whiteboard.

And the question was what’s really important for tomorrow? And Gary Kirsten got up and he said, right, guys, this meeting is just about answering this question. But before we do, he asked all coaches, including himself, to please leave the meeting room, only the 15 players in the squad, this question what’s really important for tomorrow. And then Gary left the room. And he said, when you guys are finished, the meeting is over, you’re free to leave. And you’re not required to tell anybody what you spoke about and coaches please don’t ask the players what they spoke about.

And the idea was the players themselves needed to own what was important because they were the ones who were going to be on the field and delivering whatever was required. In order to get ourselves through and beyond that quarterfinal. To this day, neither myself nor Gary Kirsten knows what happened in that 55 minute meeting. But we trusted the players to come up with the answer for themselves what was really important, it sure was a bit of a high risk move but such as our belief in allowing intelligence to sit within the playing members on the front line and delivering, like, for example, our sales people might be they need to be making the call in that moment when they’re client facing.

Amit Somani 29:45

Phenomenal, that’s a high point to end on. So two takeaways for me one is, which you talked about earlier in the context of personal mastery, which is to be your own best coach, take responsibility for your own coaching. And the second which you just talked about, which is the conscious collective intelligence of the team, trust that, delegate to that. If they’ve used the process, if they’ve focused on this, that is going to take them and not necessarily interference or management from you. So time to end here with some fun IPL predictions or thoughts about the IPL just since you’ve just got into it. So favorite interesting player or team or who’s gonna win it, anything that you feel comfortable sharing love to hear about.

Paddy Upton 30:24

So this IPL is going to be the most unpredictable IPL of all of them. The reason being one of the major factors in players and teams performance, at high performance, a low performance is the way that they navigate their way through the bio bubble experience of being cooped up in a hotel room, in a hotel, all of them are in a foreign country. They’re not allowed visitors, they’re not not allowed to go to dinner to watch movies to go shopping, which Dubai is famous for. They’re not allowed to go to the beach, they are restricted entirely to their single rooms and the five star hotel, they can only go out to go to training and to the 14 matches.

So it’s going to be an incredibly difficult period for human beings to navigate such isolation, given the fact that everyone has already come out of extended periods of isolation at home. And obviously, some of the foreign players in the England and Australia series have already been in a bio bubble for something like two months. So the results are going to be determined by which teams are lucky to have the majority of their players actually thrive and be okay through this period, which is largely going to be the introverts will do better than the optimist to see the glass half full, will do better.

And the players who have got more of a maturity and self esteem and spend their time achieving successes outside of and beyond cricket and hotel rooms. So they’re learning something they’re adding some meaningful building blocks so that they can be achieving some sort of feeling of self worth and success and progression outside of cricket. So I think prediction is going to be more difficult than ever. And I’m not even going to venture in there to predict which team it’s just going to be lucky. Which team got those people who managed COVID best.

Amit Somani 32:07

Wonderful, Paddy, thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, Paddy Upton, we had the pleasure to work with him and our portfolio a couple of months ago on building our A games, and I strongly recommend him and a delightful conversation, Paddy. I do recommend you talk to him, read his books. He’s reasonably active on social media. Thanks again, Paddy.

Paddy Upton 32:30

Thank you very much, Amit.

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