Langer made his Test debut for Australia as a 22-year-old in 1993 but was dropped after picking up a pair in his fifth Test, which came against New Zealand in Auckland. After the encounter, as Langer recalled, then-New Zealand opener John Wright approached him with a piece of advice, which he didn’t entertain at first but it changed his mindset for good.

“Back in ’93, I got dropped for the first time,” Langer said. “And I remember John Wright, the legendary coach and the great New Zealand opening batsman, tough old hippie. After the third Test before I got dropped, he came up to me, I was sitting in the changing room in New Zealand, and he had a diary in one hand and a stubby in the other hand, and he goes, ‘I’ve been watching you son, you are trying too hard. You’re putting too much pressure on yourself.’

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“We started talking and he was the old pro … and then he says to me, ‘You know what you should do son? I think you should try transcendental meditation.’ And I started laughing, I said mate, ‘That’s not a cigarette, you are smoking something else. Transcendental-what?!’ And he [again] said ‘transcendental meditation.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and I didn’t think [about it].”

“And then I got dropped and then I‘m sitting at home, thinking the world is about to end, and I open up the Western Australia newspaper and there is a big advertisement, ‘Learn transcendental meditation.’ I remember it was ‘Derek, Smythe Road, Claremont’, I just never forget it … and I thought I’ll never play for Australia again so I call ‘Derek, Smythe Road, Claremont’ in Perth here. And I learned transcendental meditation and I have literally meditated every single day since 1993.

“So you can take things from your tough times and change your mindset, change your attitude, and that’s what it comes down to. There are so many things in this we world that we can’t control but what we can control is our attitude and our mindset.”