By Deepak Ranade

The Fifa World Cup football championship is a festival that truly tests and demands skills, strength, agility, control, coordination, harmony, resilience, and stamina of each team. Attacks, counterattacks, a slew of deft passes, dribbles, and tackles with lightning speed and accuracy. This, of course, needs to be matched with a strong defence that’s potent and efficient to thwart attacks or strikes by opponents.

This fast-paced sport demands as much from the brain as it does from the body. The typical soccer team formations define a team’s positional structure on the ground, typically written from defence to attack. The most common modern formations are the 4-3-3 and the 4-2-3-1, offering strong defensive stability with creative attacking options.
The strikers are nimble-footed, agile, high-performance athletes, whose minds constantly scout for opportunities and gaps in the opposition’s defence. They demand ahigh level of anticipation to extrapolate the trajectory not just of the ball but also of the opponent’s defensive arsenal.

As the striker threads his way through the opposition defence, he has to focus simultaneously on keeping possession of the ball and keeping a clear picture of his teammates’ positions in the back of his mind. It’s a critical balance between retaining possession of the ball and passing it to a teammate in the nick of time.

A skill that demands great focus, the ability to be in the moment, and having a clear map of the entire field in the mind as he weaves his way through the enemy ranks. All decisions – whether to go solo or then effect a quick pass to a fellow striker – are to be made in a split second.
It involves a great ability to split one’s awareness from the absolute focus of keeping possession of the ball to simultaneously having a bird’s-eye view of the opponents’ defenders, his own team’s strikers, and, of course, the opponents’ goalposts. Tackling the opponents in such critical moments is a total mind game. The brain has to conjure up a strategy to not only go past the immediate challenger but also to navigate through all subsequent counter attacks by the opponents who will spare no effort to defend their sanctum sanctorum. This incredible feat of performing and delivering at the highest level requires in a large measure a touch of spirituality. That split-second decision-making can happen only by stilling the mind in the present moment.

The present moment that’s bereft of any fears, apprehensions, anxieties, progenies of the past, and projections of outcomes – glory or regret. The highest level of neuromuscular coordination is possible only in the fully relaxed state of mind, which is centred on the here and now. The here and now is all that remains, expanding awareness to almost an out-of-body experience that can literally view the entire field from a vantage point outside the Self. A point where the observer becomes the observed. Being in the moment, being unruffled, expanding one’s awareness, maintaining one’s equilibrium, both mental and physical, at the most crucial moment.

An alchemy of cutting-edge intelligence, a neurokinetic skill, and the benediction of being in the moment. It’s the last component that transforms these stars from mere athletes to sheer geniuses. A quantum state of simultaneously being human and divine.
The writer is a neurosurgeon

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