BEHIND THE PLAY #44

Thanks to those who touched base with me by text, email or Twitter about last week’s newsletter on the 20th anniversary of Domenic Mobilio’s passing. Great to see how many people still remember and miss him.

Q&A Mail

My semi-regular feature that sees me answer questions that come in from you. Got one you’d like to answer (anonymously or not - up to you)? Submit it here.

Question: Hey mate, wanted your opinion about developing young players in this day & age. I've noticed over the past few years, there's a real 'push' to really develop a player that takes risks, is good in 1 v 1 situations (attacking) and a general focus on individual play. I agree, I think all players need to improve technically but I do find that this takes away from 'team play' - passing / sharing the ball, creating a style of play that encourages keeping possession, creating space & time on the for each other. How do you find a balance to develop individual play within a team environment ??

Answer: Technical play here is definitely a big step behind what I see in top players from South America, Africa and Europe. For me it’s the fundamental building block. Tactics are mitigated when players don’t have the ability to bring them to life with their actions on the ball. Strength and speed are similarly worth less if you’re a black hole when the ball is played to you. I put this down to two main hinderances: playing a lot on artificial turf and lack of unstructured play. I am aware of the irony of someone who has worked at the club level here for over 20 years, using turf fields almost exclusively for most of it, saying that it’s not ideal for developing excellent touch on the ball. But you have to train and play on the fields that are available to you and in Vancouver those are overwhelmingly artificial turf as the grass ones get damaged too easily with our wet fall and winter weather. We’ve tried offering unstructured play but there’s little uptake. Very few parents really believe in it as a development tool despite the fact it didn’t seem to hold the guy in the video below back. Learning technique though on a perfectly flat pitch conditions your brain to believe there will never be a bad bounce to contend with so it reduces the factors you need to consider, and the quickness with which you need to consider them, in controlling or striking a ball. You move kids who have played eight years on AT fields to a hard grass field with some patchy areas and you will quickly see frustration set in as their touch goes down the drain.

The rest of what you mention, I believe, gradually layers on top of a technical base. Asking players questions, as a coach, instead of shouting instructions forces them to calculate options and choose from between them. Build their game intelligence as their technique improves and the tactics can then actually be employed with reasonable success. Make them feel responsible for what happens on the field rather than looking to the sidelines for instructions from coaches.

I hate to bring it back to parenting as I’ve noted the parallels between coaching and parenting here before but having had three kids spread out over ten years you eventually learn which approaches work better than others. For me, it was the realization that implicit works better than explicit. Be the example of the behaviours, the traits, the actions that you would like to see in your kids rather than demanding they do as you say. They’ll gradually pick it up as they see you navigate various scenarios and develop a personality based on agency and self-reliance. Same with soccer IQ. I’m a huge believer in conditioned small sided games. Pick conditions that create specific challenges and give them the time and space to learn how to solve them. Don’t tell them the answer- present and frame problems for them to solve, providing necessary guidance in the form of questions along the way.

Text. Context. Subtext.

_{Back with another one of these. It may be my favourite of the recurring BTP elements}

Here’s the text. It’s from a Rio Ferdinand piece he wrote for The Player’s Tribune. It made a big impression on me when it came out years ago.

Context: Rio had recently retired and was given the opportunity to look back on his career and give people a sense for what had enabled him to be so successful. What shines is his self-confidence, his refusal to ‘hide’ and his knowledge of how important various steps on his path to becoming a top professional were even if they weren’t all that glorious at the time.

Subtext: It’s been repeatedly shown in studies that players are most likely to rise to the highest levels of the game if they have strong mental skills. They aren’t intimidated, they have good impulse control, good work ethic and they aren’t overwhelmed by difficult situations. And what this leads to is the development of players who are intrinsically motivated. They don’t need a parent, a coach or teammates to wind them up and motivate them. The confidence and resilience that embeds in you keeps you steady and moving forward. No one’s pushing you forward, cajoling you to go to training when it’s raining. There is no question. You’re going to train because it’s important to YOU. Of the four pillars of development mental trumps technical, tactical and physical.

This ties in to what I said above in the Q&A. For Rio these experiences playing with men when he was young was unstructured, uncoached play (and unknown for the most part to his mom). He went in addition to his regular league game which he describes as “posh, cupcake shit.” He had a single mom and not a lot of extra money at home so there were no personal trainers. No backyard pop up goals and rebounders.

It reminds me of a study UBC did awhile ago on their own students. They sampled second year students from Vancouver to see how they were doing in terms of failure rate and grades. This was about ten to twelve years ago (sorry can’t find link to it). They divided the students into three groups: those that went to private schools, those that went to public school on the west side and those that went to public school on the east side. For those not familiar with Vancouver, the west side is seen as being more affluent than the east side by a fair margin; likely more true when this study was done than now. Private schools tend to be on the west side but not exclusively and back then, and still, the more expensive ones were out of reach for all but the most wealthy.

So what did the study show? The east side public school kids were comfortably performing the best of the three groups while the west side public school kids were next and the private school kids were third.

In other words the advantages of wealth that can provide tutors, connections that can provide access and schools that find ways to maximize students ability to get into schools like UBC only go so far. As they say, it all comes out in the wash and kids who were likely to have had to rely far more on themselves, who developed the discipline to study hard, didn’t just get in to UBC, but thrived once there.

Like Rio did.