Tag Archives: athleticism

Pursuing ‘Relentless Simplicity’

Posted on by
Reply

The UEFA Pro Licence is, currently, the top qualification in football coaching and management and mandatory in the higher end of football. All the home federations run their programmes and for the past nine years I’ve been involved either as presenter, contributor or part of the planning team in the FA version.

Typically about 20 managers and coaches are accepted onto the programme each year. The licence has to be renewed to keep it current. So this last weekend we had our refresher group renewing their licences and our mid-season group meeting together to share some of the programme.  We invite figures from football and other sports to share their insights.

For me, the UEFA Pro Licence weekend is a refreshing reminder that there is still integrity in football with successful individuals who have the humility and openness to share failures as well as successes.  Whether you listened from an education or a football perspective there were lessons to be learned. My seven key lessons are these.

  • “You can coach technical ability, develop fitness power and strength but you cannot coach courage, belief or hunger – all of which are abundant in elite performers.” Mick Wadsworth (30 years in coaching). These are qualities which have to be ‘found’ in the individual with the coach or teacher, having ‘found’ them, gradually drawing them out.
  • “Performance psychology migrates between the land of reality and the sea of bullshit, no one wins an encounter with a speech.  Protect your players from too much of you and let them make their own decisions” Peter Moores Lancashire County Cricket Club
  • “To coach players and develop them you need a well understood consistent infrastructure and a coach who is open-minded and prepared to study new ideas and solve problems.” – Rafa Benitez who has coached in Spain,England and Italy. Rafa told the group that at half-time in the 2005 Champions League final he made no big speech – focusing instead on tactical changes and inviting the players to be ‘proud.’ A minute before he was due to go back out he discovered because of an injury he had to change his team again.
  • “No matter how thoroughly you prepare, how much time you spend in getting tactics and formation right, how much detail you go into nothing can prepare you for the occasion. The occasion changes performances and changes behaviour.”_ - Rene Meulensteen Manchester United First team Coach on setting up to play Barcelona in the Champions League Final. The level of detail in preparation is frightening!
  • “Don’t wait … Create!” Brendan Rogers who has stuck to his personal philosophy and principles of play in his pursuit of world class coaching and whose team are now earning plaudits for their high tempo possession football. He talked of his own learning journey including working with Mourinho. A manager who was obsessive about detail down to the colour of the cones, whose commitment meant he’d occasionally work late and be found asleep in the dressing room at 7.00 the next morning!
  • “Look at your talent pool and work out their cost per minute on the pitch!” Malky Mackay, manager of CardiffCity whose management approach is forensic in its detail. This maxim could apply to any profession
  • Finally, the message that emerged more than anything else regarding coaching and teaching was, “the environment is the best teacher” In other words, the circumstances in which you have to learn provide the benchmarks and shape the everyday behaviours and habits which then deliver the performance.

The man on top of the mountain didn’t fall there. The managers, teachers and coaches who excel in their discipline are life-long learners and students of their game.  They are in pursuit of what Mourinho calls ‘relentless simplicity’, making the complex simple, seeing beauty in every aspect of their chosen game.

What’s your icy shower?

Posted on by
2

Once in a while you experience, see or hear things which set you back and make you think. These moments don’t happen often and are never to any sort of formula. They are infrequent in life but have a resonance beyond the moment. What then follows is often a period of personal dissonance, where your everyday assumptions and the behaviours which go with them, are questioned.  Things feel uncomfortable for your for a while. You begin to question your motives and ask if what you do, day on day, aligns with something purposeful.

The landscape of our lives provides births, deaths and rites of passage each with their own little questions and answers nudging us along – but what would it be like to get up every day of your life knowing that what you were doing consumed all of your hopes and dreams and answered all your questions? For some, maybe most, such moments never occur and larger questions are never asked, never answered.

Meeting people who have this strong purpose can be as invigorating as standing in an icy shower. I haven’t met this guy, Mickey Smith, but I’ve listened to him speak and what he said stopped me in my tracks. This short video works for me like an icy shower. It sends the equivalent of thousands of volts straight down my spine. It gets me out of bed and asking the questions. It washes away the self-doubt that can transfix. Judge for yourself…

http://player.vimeo.com/video/14074949?title=0&amp%3Bbyline=0&amp%3Bportrait=0

“If I only scrape a living, at least its a living worth scraping…” Mickey Smith, 2011

 

This is what the future holds!

Posted on by
2


What will the elite end of soccer look like in ten years time? This was the question we posed to the group of coaches who met at Wokefield Park Reading this weekend for the first ever FA Elite Coaches Programme.

The English Premiership is now 20 years old and some would argue the game has moved on for the better. The trends suggest that it is being played by athletes who, at the top end, are tactically astute technicians who anticipate and solve problems at speed.

In this period in the Premier League we know that there is now:

  • 90% plus pass accuracy in many games (with two players at 100% in two separate games)
  • 3 seconds average time between passer and receiver
  • typically 2 seconds per player in possession, with just over 2 touches on the ball and under 3 seconds to make a decision as the ball come to you
  • heart rates increasing over 90plus minutes to 180 and beyond
  • more distance covered at pace
  • fewer instances of balls going directly from front to back

In the Champions League in the last six years we know that:

  • there are at least 1400 direction changes per game with 12 – 17 km covered by individual players per game.
  • 15% of time is spent on low speed running, 10% on moderate speed running, 2% at high speed and 1% flat out
  • In the last six years there has been a 13% increase in passes and a forward pass increase  of 10%
  • 84% of passes are successful one touch passes!
  • positional fluidity is dramatically up with more teams defending deeper and counter attacking

So the challenge for our modern coaches is to design development programmes and prepare players for a game which requires quicker decision-making, improved technical ability, increased stamina and speed and more tactical nous!

The answer, despite all the fuss about 10,000 hours of directed practice, is not more and more of the same. The answer lies in coaches understanding the principles of athletic development, who know how to encourage effective and instant decision-making in game contexts, have deep understanding of changing tactical demands and an obsession with working towards technical perfection.

We had sixteen of the best young coaches in the English game for less than three days. We debated the future game, the future player and the future coach. In the next eighteen months we will take the theory onto the grass and into the clubs. The word we kept hearing over the weekend was obsession! Let’s get obsessive together!