Possession Football is very knowledgeable.

Thankfully, he was often in the group I was in. He carried me, at the time completely out of my depth for the first 5 days, through the KNVB course. #-o

Welcome to the forum mate.:)

Edited by Decentric: 5/3/2013 12:04:39 AM

Very interesting to see the empirically verifiable changes in football in the EPL over that time span.


I cannot corroborate it, but when Fox shows completed pass stats for A League players on TV, they seem to be accruing much higher numbers of passes than they used to. I'm sure the number of physical contests is diminishing in the A League too.

There are surely less second balls and high balls to compete for. The ball is in the transitions less and in BP and BPO more in the HAL.







Edited by Decentric: 5/3/2013 12:10:41 AM

I had to look up what Zone 14 is, I found these details which should assist us not up with the jargon, an excellent blog by the way.





Putting these articles into an Australian context it appears to me that the day Postecoglou took charge at Brisbane Roar is the day that Australia was finally made aware of the new tactical changes from Europe put into effect at a domestic level. Now with Arnold, Van Egmond, Popovic and now Edwards at Perth I think Postecoglou's seachange is becomming a Tsunami at the top tier.
The crucial part of these changes will now be how long it takes for the grass roots to take on board these new technical and tactical realities.

In Victoria at Premier League and below we are still playing a second ball game. The Womens game hasn't evolved from the Graham Taylor school of football at the State level, while the elite junior level is predominatly a second ball game reliant on athletic ability and the overall junior football is a disgrace in football playing terms.



What a huge change for the English game and a significant change from the predominatley long ball game.

Already the V League coaches are generally changing their training to incorporate a much more technical approach in this state. The training players did reflected much more isolated fitness training. This meant players had much more ability to win the ball back than maintain it in possession.

One of my fellow C Licence participants has already overhauled his club, one of the biggest in the state. There are a lot of changes to the program, with much higher technical content. Early last year it looked like the unmitigated rubbish too prevalent elsewhere on the training track.

The next step is to implement the structural changes where a lot of Game Training should be related to positional play advocated by the KNVB. You also saw it in France, Arthur.

In an Australiocentric context, good football is now also being equated to winning football. Last year Perth and Phoenix were still able to beat most teams playing direct football. The fact they have slipped down the ladder, and, their coaches have been sacked, is a victory for technical football in Australia. Alistair Edwards has already had a positive influence on Glory.










Edited by Decentric: 5/3/2013 11:25:24 AM

A coach's word at the right time

DateMarch 8, 2013 (0)

Ange Postecoglou

Coaching is not an occupation for people who need constant reassurance and universal approval.

Your ability to handle scrutiny and inevitable criticism will often decide how successful your tenure will be. You can try to ignore it, but to do this would require enormous discipline and the ability to suppress any natural inquisitive instincts you may have on how the world measures you. Every coach will deal with it in their own way, but the issue needs to be dealt with even if the decision is to ignore it.

My own way of dealing with criticism, particularly from the media, has been shaped by two unique experiences that were both enlightening and educational.

It's fair to say that, when I first started coaching, my view was slightly different. In my first three years, I enjoyed great success and it was easy to be seduced by the praise and encouragement that came my way. Of course, if you stay in coaching long enough, you will eventually see the other side of the coin. And, so it happened with me at the end of my time as national youth team coach, when the praise was replaced by strong criticism.

If you listen to the praise, you can't ignore the criticism and, while I didn't like or appreciate it at the time, I now realise that it was my own actions that allowed both to affect me rather than the words said or written.

My enlightening experience came when I worked in Greece for a year. Observing the media at work there and the way they equally worshipped or vilified coaches, sometimes within the same week, made me appreciate that in Australia we enjoy a far more lenient environment. Of course, it was not easy to adjust to and for a while I made the mistake of not accepting I was in a different culture.

The city I was in had four daily papers, three local TV stations and three local radio stations, and they all reported daily on the team I was in charge of. Everything was reported on, from how we trained to who trained well, what drills we were doing and with which players and even to the point where it was reported where I had dinner the night before. I realised that privacy and team confidentiality were no longer possible and the best I could hope for were that the stories were at least fact - but even that was by no means certain.

If I applied local standards to that reporting, then I would be suing for defamation and privacy invasion every day, not to mention the psychological damage it would have done to my state of mind. Instead I dealt with it like the locals did and came to appreciate that most of it was born from passion rather than vindictiveness and ultimately the general public were still able to form their opinion on the work I was doing based on the team's performance rather than on how it was reported. In a nutshell, I became less precious.

My educational experience was when I came back to Australia and was lucky enough to be offered a job at Fox Sports. I realised that working in the media had its own responsibilities and pressures and that an opinion was the one essential that you were required to offer every time you spoke.

That was difficult for me as I like to have all the information before forming an opinion. But the reality is that you are always working on assumptions and, because sitting on the fence is not an option, you can sometimes be wrong in your summation. That was difficult to deal with as you know that people will be affected by something you may have got wrong. It is why, now that I am on the other side of the fence, I am not as offended if someone wrongly criticises me or my club.

All this has made me realise that in a public occupation, some form of perspective is a strong asset. Both criticism and praise can distract you from the job at hand, so neither should be drivers of your destiny. That is easier said than done because of the effect it can have on your loved ones and your environment. But as a coach and leader, the alternative would ensure a roller-coaster existence driven by external forces. In a week where the great Sir Alex Ferguson has faced criticism, there is a realisation that as coach you should wear such scrutiny as a badge of honour as it signifies you are at least engaged in the battle.





Thought I'd add this. There are a now a number of coaches on here who either work in football in a paid capacity, or, aspire to have a paid job in football.

Edited by Decentric: 8/3/2013 01:13:36 PM

Wish I was there.

http://www.scienceandfootball.com/

Here is a mind blowing article from the Leopold Method site, a site by the way should be on your favourites.

March 14, 2013 at 12:30 am

http://leopoldmethod.com.au/a-game-of-chance/

It is a mind blowing article.=d>

For those who blame coaches for defeats, a lot of aspects of a game amount to 'chance.'

There are so many good articles in this thread, it is like a library.

I'm keen on having it made a sticky.






Edited by Decentric: 23/3/2013 11:38:24 AM

The below article is written by Larry Paul an A Licence Coach from the USA. He is probably best known for his website Better Soccer more Fun, which is unashamedly Dutch focused.

Larry Paul along with other coaches in the USA like Gary Allen and Sam Snow are professing a more "Street Football" type emphasis in player development, even to the extent of removing Representative teams/squads or Federatation run Academey's that select or identify players upto U14.

Its intersting that with the parrells of Australian Football with USA football in player development terms that we are seeking the same answers to the problem of developing the "World Class" Player.

The USA has an advantage in that the KNVB has been doing a lot of work in the USA along with programs and exchanges with Barcelona, Spain, Italy Brazil and others.
While it is in the USA that most Coaching books and football analysis has been conducted over the last 20 years as they seek knowledge about player development.

The article I'm posting has a bit of heavey reading, but it is about the affect of curriculums and education in the football context.

I'm sure Decentric can help us with any questions, while there is some great reading to had in the sources.

“A lot of youth trainers still have the tendency to use different training exercises… They are afraid that their expertise is in doubt if they do not do it. A good youth trainer, composed in the art of letting his group perform the standard training activities as regards to the game form, however simplified, answers the challenge and the perception the youth soccer player is looking for.” Ab van de Velde

This bit about the Coerver and KNVB debate is interesting too;

“Coerver has written his books from the point of view that a soccer player’s technique is the basic measure of his value to his team and teammates… The Dutch Soccer Association does not share this belief. Wiel Coerver focuses solely on the mechanics of the various movement sand equates these with playing soccer itself… In short, Coerver says that players can best learn to play soccer by learning certain movements with the ball. The Dutch Soccer Association says that players can best learn soccer by playing soccer.” [26]“

Maybe in Australia we are incapable of developing the "free thinking" player?
We are so focused on the regimented measurable football process and understanding that we see players like Carle and Hernandez as liabilities. That in junior ranks these type of players are discarded by not being selected into pathways that open doors to the A-League. That our coaches are looking "efficient" "safe" "reliable' players even now?

Is'nt it strange that the National curriculum has had to be redrawn and re-presented because we cannot cope with the fact that the Curriculum requires us and our coaches to develop our own "ideas" "Drills" and "programs". The NC has effectively been redone because we cannot cope with being free thinkers?



Basically Han berger is saying we do not have the Intellectual coaching capacity in this country.

“We must look at McDonaldization as both “enabling” and “constraining.” McDonaldized[rationalized] systems enable us to do many things we were not able to do in the past; however, these systems also keep us from doing things we otherwise would do. McDonaldization is a “double-edged” phenomenon.” [19]Children tacitly learn order, regimentation, deference to authority and discipline through the curriculum, structure, schedules and reward systems of compulsory standardized education. The same system their parents, coaches and most other adults went through. This rationalized systems perspective becomes the default starting point, the mindset, for evaluation and methodology for teaching in much of the soccer world.

Are we too text book orientated with our coaching and our delivery of the game especially the rationalized NPL and the attached junior academies that will all be reading from the same new NC that will provide the prefered drills.
Will we get any where if every body does the same thing?
Will there be any imaginative footballers with "Strret Football" cunning and skill?

Even in France they are having a debate about why so many of their youth players in elite programs are early physical developers.

Lot of questions but a great topical piece for mine.

Here is the link to the below article and if anybody knows how to download it as a pdf let me know please.
http://www.slideshare.net/Dutchviz/learning-and-teaching-curriculums

Learning and teaching curriculums Presentation Transcript
Decision/Action Model for Soccer – Pt 9
Learning and teaching curriculums “There is one basic golden rule. Coaching is not about technique; coaching is about the game and how it unfolds, and about developing the player’s proficiency and competitive maturity, and it is about enjoyment.” [26]
A curriculum should reflect and enable this rule “We develop national curriculums, ambitious corporate training programs, complex schooling systems. We wish to cause learning, to take charge of it, direct it, accelerate it, demand it, or even simply stop getting in the way of it… Therefore, our perspectives on learning matter: what we think about learning influences where we recognize learning, as well as what we do when we decide that we must do something about it – as individuals, as communities, and as organizations.” Etienne Wenger [30]
“A learning curriculum consists of situated opportunities… [It] is a field of learning resources in everyday practice viewed from the perspective of learners. A teaching curriculum, by contrast… [structures] resources for learning, the meaning of what is learned… [and] is mediated through an instructor’s participation, by an external view of what knowing is about.” Lave & Wenger [12]
2.    Learning and teaching curriculums – an overview“[A Learning curriculum] does imply participation in an activity system about which participants share understanding concerning what they are doing and what that means in their lives.” [12]

Learning curriculum

It’s origin is in the apprenticeship model.
Learning is situated in a heterogeneous community of practice.
Learning is aimed at contributing to an activity and creating an identity within it.
A heavy emphasis on collaboration and trust.
Learn by doing, reflecting, negotiating.
Standards are an inner appreciation against external measures.
Self respect in context.
Repair and maintenance on a local level.
Rules of open systems and bounded rationality applies.

Knowledge gained for use Teaching curriculum

It’s origin is in school systems developed to support the industrial revolution.
Learning is done in a decontextualized environment between the teacher and homogeneous students.
Learning is aimed at gaining exchange knowledge for the title of ‘graduate. ‘A heavy emphasis on isolation and mistrust.
Learn by internalizing concepts, rules, and facts.
Standards are an inner appreciation against theoretical measures.
Self esteem in general.
Building and construction on a global level.
Rules of closed systems and unbounded, formal rationality applies.
Knowledge gained for exchange.

3.    Curriculums find their origin in school models “The public schools prepared their boys for service in the army, the civil service and other positions of authority. The elementary schools were required to teach their pupils to be obedient to their future master’s needs.” [16]
“Present day schooling came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet [the British Empire]… They created a global computer, made up of people. It’s still with us today, it’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people, the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other. They must know three things… [the 3 R’s - reading, writing and ‘rithmetic]. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand, and ship them to Canada, and they would be instantly functional… The Victorians… engineered a system that was so robust that it is still with us today. Continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists… Schools as we know them now are obsolete… It’s not broken, it’s wonderfully constructed, and it’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated.” [14]“The problem is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution… My view is that this model has caused chaos in many people’s lives.”[20]“The Elementary Education Act of 1870: Under the terms of the Act the curriculum of the elementary schools was designed to serve the twin criteria of social utility and cheapness of operation… It was in this climate that one of the major educational controversies was played out. What form of drill should be adopted into the curriculum – Military drill or physical exercises?” [16]“The 1905 Code of Regulations… encouraged the inclusion of organized games in elementary schools in the interests of ‘esprit de corps, readiness to endure fatigue, to submit to discipline, and to subordinate one’s own powers and wishes to the common end’. It recommended football teams… as the means by which those qualities could be promoted.” [16]The first Schools Football Association was set up in South London in 1885 [16] and The English Schools Football Association, the governing body of schools football in England, was founded in 1904. Wikipedia
4. Schools are built around efficiency, predictability, control, and calculability “Good order and discipline were qualities most in demand by teachers facing large classes.” [16]Taken too far efficiency, predictability, control and calculability create formally rationalized systems, i.e. McDonadization [19]:“Efficiency, or the optimal method for getting from one point to another.” [19] Greater efficiency means higher productivity and/or using fewer resources.“Predictability, the assurance that products and services will be the same over time and in all locales.” [19] Uniformity, conformity, reliability.“Control, is exerted over the people who enter the world of McDonald’s. Lines, limited menus, few options.” [19] Leave as little room for chance and choice as possible.“Calculability emphasizes the quantitative aspects of products… and services.” [19] Counting concrete things like ‘touches and wins’ is one thing. Counting abstract concepts like the steps in a process i.e. “learning a move” is something else. What, and how it gets counted matters because, “What gets measured gets done,” - Peter Ducker.
“We must look at McDonaldization as both “enabling” and “constraining.” McDonald zed[rationalized] systems enable us to do many things we were not able to do in the past; however, these systems also keep us from doing things we otherwise would do. McDonaldization is a “double-edged” phenomenon.” [19]Children tacitly learn order, regimentation, deference to authority and discipline through the curriculum, structure, schedules and reward systems of compulsory standardized education. The same system their parents, coaches and most other adults went through. This rationalized systems perspective becomes the default starting point, the mindset, for evaluation and methodology for teaching in much of the soccer world.

5. 5The logical end point for McDonaldization – bureaucracies “In a rationalized society, people prefer to know what to expect in most settings and at most times. They neither desire nor expect surprises.” [19]“German sociologist Max Weber… demonstrated in his research that the modern Western world had produced a distinctive kind of rationality… called formal rationality… According to Weber, formal rationality means that the search by people for the optimum means to a given end is shaped by rules, regulations, and larger social structures… it allows individuals little choice of means to ends. In a formally rational system, virtually everyone can (or must) make the same optimal choice.” [19]“In Weber’s view, bureaucracies are cages in the sense that people are trapped in them, their basic humanity denied… He anticipated a society of people locked into a series of rational structures, who could move only from one rational system to another – from rationalized educational institutions to… rationalized recreational setting.” [19]Bureaucracies replace people with a label or role. Laura and Ben are seen as ‘student, teacher, players, coach, u10, central defenders’ and so on. This allows superiors to observe them as roles ‘doing what/where they should be’ instead of as people ‘doing what/where they really are.’ People are seen through the lens of idealized models of behavior. “The term ‘role’ does not depict consciousness thinking, acting, reflecting. It usually implies norms, attributes, or functions of an occupation.” [15]

6.    Bureaucracies are built through scientific management “Scientific management enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.” [5]
“The managers assume… the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae… All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department,” Fredrick Taylor. [5]“In effect then, Taylor separated “head” work from “hand” work; prior to Taylor’s day, the skilled worker performed both. Taylor and his followers studied what was in the heads of those skilled workers, then translated that knowledge into simple, mindless routines that virtually anyone could learn and follow. Workers were thus left with little more than repetitive “handwork. This principle remains at the base of the movement to replace human with nonhuman technology throughout our McDonald zing society.” [19]“Repetitive labor – the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way – is terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind… The average worker, I am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to think,” Henry Ford. [19]“Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to the workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now work process. This process replaces what was previously an integral activity, rooted in craft tradition and experience, animated by the worker’s own mental image of, and intention toward, the finished product.” [5]
7. 7The cost of school systems goes beyond the disaffected “That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? [7]“When I first started teaching in the Ivy League I had very high expectations. These are the kids that are the cream of the crop of our educational system… these are the “smart kids…” I soon saw some things that I didn’t expect. I noticed that my students could take any test and get an A… But anytime I gave them an unstructured assignment… they had great difficulty… I wondered to myself, what were they doing in those years of their K-12 experience? What I came to realize was that they were getting very good at doing school… they were full of information… but they weren’t knowledge able… In a word, they couldn’t think. ” [2]Yale’s William Deresiewicz addressing the plebes at West Point in 2009; “We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.” So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, ‘excellent sheep.’” [7]
8. 8When scientific management worked well in soccer Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov at Dynamo Kyiv “Football, he explained, eventually became for him a system of twenty-two elements – two subsystems of eleven elements – moving within a defined area… and subject to a series of restrictions… the subsystems were subject to a peculiarity: the efficiency of the subsystem is greater than the sum of the efficiencies of the elements that comprise it… as Lobanovsky saw it… football was ripe for cybernetic techniques.” [31]“He saw a football team as a dynamic system, in which the aim was to produce the optimal level of energy in the optimal pattern.” [31]“Everything was meticulously planned… on the wall at Dynamo’s training base were hung lists of the demands Lobanovskyi placed on players… fourteen defensive tasks… thirteen demands on forwards… Far more radical was the list of twenty items… called ‘coalition actions.’ Lobanovskyi’s goal was what he termed ‘universality’… If a midfielder has fulfilled sixty technical and tactical actions in the course of match, then he has not pulled his weight. He is obliged to do a hundred or more.” [31]“In my laboratory, we evaluate the functional readiness of players and how their potential can be realized…. And we influence players in a natural way – we form them following scientific recommendations. With the help of modeling we assemble the bricks and create the skeleton of the team… we justify it with numbers.” [31]Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov needed the Soviet culture, the rational bureaucratic mindsets, for their brand of scientific soccer. Note the spread of ‘Soviet think’ into current Western consumer culture;“In the 1950’s, sociologists started pointing out a basic resemblance between Soviet and Western societies… Both were industrial, and had in common a growing separation of planning from execution… penetrating observers noted that it proceeded from the imperatives of rational administration… In the Soviet bloc… central control by the state; in the West, by corporations.” [5]
9. 9Learning curriculums deal with repair “The repairman has to begin each job by getting outside his own head and noticing things; he has to look carefully and listen to the ailing machine.” [5]“Fixing things, whether cars or human bodies, is very different from building things from scratch. The mechanic [player & coach] and the doctor deal with failure every day, whereas the builder does not. This is because the things they fix are not of their own making, and are therefore never known in a comprehensive or absolute way.” [5]“Like building houses, mathematics is constructive; every element is fully within one’s view, and subject to deliberate placement… By contrast, in diagnosing and fixing things made by others…one is confronted with obscurities, and must remain open to the signs by which they reveal themselves. This openness is incompatible with self-absorption; to maintain it we have to fight our tendency to get anchored in snap judgments… Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration.” [5]“One was drawn out of oneself and into a struggle, by turns hateful and loving, with another thing that, like a mule, was emphatically not simply an extension of one’s willed. Rather, one had to conform one’s will and judgment to certain external facts of physics that still presented themselves as such. Old bikes don’t flatter you, they educate you… When your shin gets kicked, whether by a mule or a kick-starter, you get schooled.” [5]This perspective illustrates how Teambuilding is a misnomer. Even Alex Ferguson never assembled a team like a piece of Ikea furniture. The parts would never quite fit together as he thought and there’s no user’s manual to refer to. He’s more of a tradesman at work, attentive, and feeling his way towards an uncertain end that will manifest itself in the world. This is why developing fingerspitzengefühl is so important. The ‘feeling’ needs to be continually nurtured at every level. Teaching curriculums rarely if ever deal with this type of learning. In learning curriculums it’s an implicit part of every lesson.
10. 10Communities of practice – beyond teams and schools “Apprentices… must organize their own learning ‘curriculum’ and recruit teaching and guidance for themselves.” [12]“A community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge, not least because it provides the interpretive support necessary for making sense… The social structure of this practice, its power relations, and its conditions for legitimacy define possibilities for learning.” [12]“The first requirement of educational design is to offer opportunities for engagement…participants in a community of practice contribute in a variety of interdependent ways that become material for building an identity. What they learn is what allows them to contribute to the enterprise… and to engage with others around that enterprise… learning is in the service of that engagement.” [30]“Rather than mistrusting social relationships and interests, as traditional learning institutions often do, a learning community incorporates them as essential ingredients in order to maximize the engagement of its members. Building complex social relationships around meaningful activities requires genuine practices in which taking charge of learning becomes the enterprise of the community.” [30]The children, who are at the center of attention for the learning activities, are also some of the primary tools, resources and systems for enacting it. Their spontaneous interactions provide feedback about the structural organization set up by the coach.
11. 11Situated learning in communities of practice “The social and cultural situation of the teaching environment contributes significantly to what is learned and how learning takes place.” [10]“Situated learning has also emerged as a framework to theorize and analyze pedagogical practices in physical education… Individuals are considered part of a holistic learning enterprise, not as acting or participating in isolation. This view of a learning-centered curriculum moves the teacher off center stage and provides an opportunity for the student to help other students learn.” [10]The Mary argument illustrates the debate between ‘formal school’ and situated learning. “The thought experiment was originally proposed by Frank Jackson as follows:” “Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we serape tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?” Wikipedia Participation and reification in communities of practice. For Mary action knowledge is gained through participation; reification knowledge is gained through academic study, passive observation and reflection on experience. We need both types of knowledge and they are interdependent. “Participation refers to a process of taking part and also the relations with others… It suggests both action and connection.” [30] Learn by doing, acting and sharing in both process and results. “The concept of reification… refers to the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal into ‘thinness.’ In so doing we create points of focus around which the negotiation of meaning becomes organized.” [30] Learn by observation, study and reflection.
12. 12Comparison of behavioral and decision training [27]“There are always students who have nothing to learn from the teacher or those who do not especially want to learn. All eventually agree very fast by refusing to actively engage in the learning activity.” [10]Behavioral training: Instruction Part-to-whole Simple to complex drills Easy-first instructions Technical emphasis Internal focus of instruction Practice Blocked practice Low variability Feedback Abundant coach feedback Low use of questioning Low athlete detection and correction of errors Overall: Low levels of athlete cognitive effort. [27]Decision training: Instruction Tactical whole training Competition like drills Hard-first instruction Technique within tactics External focus of instruction Practice Variable practice Random practice Feedback Bandwidth feedback High use of questioning High athlete detection and correction of errors Overall: High levels of athlete cognitive effort [27]
13. Technical curriculums are built on behavioral models “It has been noted that one of the most prominent value orientations in the domain of physical education is disciplinary or subject mastery, whereby practitioners attempt to teach perceptual motor skills through verbal explanation, demonstration, practice drills, and simulated game play.” [4]The Mary argument about learning soccer – the KNVB [head work] and the Coerver School[hand work] debate. “Coerver has written his books from the point of view that a soccer player’s technique is the basic measure of his value to his team and teammates… The Dutch Soccer Association does not share this belief. Wiel Coerver focuses solely on the mechanics of the various movement sand equates these with playing soccer itself… In short, Coerver says that players can best learn to play soccer by learning certain movements with the ball. The Dutch Soccer Association says that players can best learn soccer by playing soccer.” [26]“But why are teachers so technique oriented? Perhaps the answer lies in the development of the subject Physical Education and the resulting implications on the way teachers were trained. As the subject moved to degree status in the 60’s so courses such as Skill Acquisition and Measurement and Evaluation grew in importance. The problem with Skill Acquisition courses, at least in England, was that the desire for experimental stringency meant that skills studied were rarely in a sport context. Add to this the desire to measure and evaluate our work objectively and the well recognized fact that isolated techniques are so much easier to quantify than other aspects of the games and it is easy to see how the Physical Educator was pulled toward the technical side of games. In addition during methodology courses the search for a lesson plan which would ensure clear and easily documented preparation procedure led to a format that divided lessons into Introductory Activity, Skill Phase and Game. In addition by guiding the teacher to identify teaching points a ‘command’ or ‘task’ teaching style is encouraged.” [25]
14. 14Technical curriculums – blocked practice and behaviorism Scientific management and behaviorism, McDonaldization shapes soccer training today “Our own research on professional practices in physical education shows that physical education teachers, when teaching team sports, keep presenting their students with technical solutions to be reproduced or tactical principles to be applied rather than technical or tactical problems to be resolved… Some of the reasons for that may be the following:  First, a majority of physical education teachers… were given a sports education in which they were essentially taught the “do as I do” method. They then proceeded to apply this model in their own professional practice.” Second, the little time devoted to physical education at school likely bears on pedagogical choices… given the time that they have at their disposal, they must proceed quickly. So as soon as students experience learning problems, they are [told] and shown what to do. [10]“Until the late 1970’s, most researchers in motor learning promoted the use of behavioral training methods where athletes were trained using blocked repetitive practice. During blocked training, complex skills and tactics are broken down through a process called task analysis into countless subs kills that are then trained using simple to complex progressions of drills.” [27]
“This approach can be traced to a major school of psychology called behaviorism [the intellectual rational behind scientific management]… The laws of behaviorism state that a response will become habit as a consequence of the number of times it is paired or associated with a given stimulus… When a behaviorist approach is used, the mind of the performer is largely discounted as a factor in performance.” [27]
15. 15   Learning curriculums are built on decision models “The coach must give space and time to his students to discover the problems of the game situations by themselves.” [28]“Guiding Pedagogical principles of the Tactical-Decision Learning Model:” [10] The teacher or coach as a facilitator. Students are active learners. Students work in groups or modified games. Learning activities are interesting and challenging. Students are held accountable. Teaching Games for Understanding (The variation ‘Game Sense’ is used in Australia.) “The Teaching Games for Understanding approach to the teaching of sport/physical activity is a holistic model because it focuses attention on the individual and not with the sub set of activity specific skills for the activity in focus.
Learning skills of the game are placed in the broader context of the game itself. The nature of the game is taught first, and the skills are added at a pace manageable by the participants. By doing this, the thinking and problem solving aspects of the game are taught in tandem with the skills. The result is a participant who is skilled in the broader sense of understanding the game than simply being skilful at the game.” [17]
The Dutch Vision. [26] “Ideas used from street soccer were the foundations of the development of youth soccer and youth coaching in a modern style. In the early 50s and 60s young players used to learn to play soccer in the streets. They played before school, during the breaks, and after school. Every day, 6 or 7 days a week. Time was on their side. There were no adults, parents or coaches, involved in street soccer, except sometimes a bad neighbor or a policeman. All aspects of the game skill; technique, tactics and fitness developed by playing in simple situations, in which WINNING was very important.” [21]
16. The Dutch Vision – working in a structural and systemic fashion “A soccer coach coach’s soccer, not something else.” Ab van de Velde“ Many coaches find it difficult to work in a structural fashion with their team… To be able to do this, the coach must possess the theoretical knowledge of the football team building process.” [13]
“A lot of youth trainers still have the tendency to use different training exercises… They are afraid that their expertise is in doubt if they do not do it. A good youth trainer, composed in the art of letting his group perform the standard training activities as regards to the game form, however simplified, answers the challenge and the perception the youth soccer player is looking for.”
Basic forms are a reflection of the ‘real’ soccer match, whereby the youth players are confronted with opponents, teammates, goals, defined spaces, game rules, [a ball and a result – the product of the process] and still new options to find the solutions for more complex or simpler soccer situations! There petition of these basic forms is a golden rule for every youth training session.” [13]
“There is no perfection in competitive soccer… However, structural teambuilding makes sure that: the players have confidence in each other, there is calmness in the game actions, the essential team spirit is present and team tactical views are present. These are the basic prerequisites for an optimal performance level.” [13]
The coach creates the structure (command of the systems) through the elements of the game; “opponents, teammates, goals, defined spaces, game rules,” a ball and a result. The players work together (take systemic actions) to solve the problems they face. By manipulating the elements the coach can highlight any particular system (TIC, next slide) that he or she likes in a holistic fashion. The game really does teach and the kids get a “kick in the shins” when their process comes up short of the desired product. Results matter, they validate the legitimacy of their participation in the activity.
17.   TIC, the systemic tool and measure in soccer “You have to have TIC to play soccer.” [26] “The elements on which the actual play is based, or rather the means by which the objective of the game i.e. winning, can be achieved are summarized in the so called TIC principle. TIC stands for: [26]
Technique: This encompasses the basic skills necessary to play the game. No matter how small children are, or however elementary the standard of play, the players possesses a certain degree of technical skill.
Insight: Insight into the game is necessary in order to understand what actions are appropriate or inappropriate in a given situation. Insight is largely a question of experience and soccer intelligence.
Communication: Communication in this context refers to the interaction between the players and all the elements involved in the game. This obviously covers communication with players of the same and the opposing team (verbal and non-verbal) but also covers interaction with the ball… the field… the spectators… the officials, the coach etc.” [26]
“TIC covers all the attributes needed to play and to influence the game. An additional complicating and influencing factor is the continual flux of these ingredients.” [26]To coach players one must read and influence their TIC while they play. The elements of TIC are viewed as being interdependent, open systems. They are not separated like in a technical model and can’t be learned in isolation. It is distributed across the team through the interactions of the players. Certain combinations/systems may increase a players TIC while others degrade it. It is neither a trait nor individual quality; it’s an emergent systemic property.
18. Communication – participation in a community of practice “Participation refers to a process of taking part and also the relations with others…It suggests both action and connection.” [30] “Every training session is a form of communication.” – Rinus Michels [13] “Communication in this context refers to the interaction between the players and all the elements involved in the game [the structure]. This obviously covers communication with players of the same and the opposing team (verbal and non-verbal) but also covers interaction with the ball… the field… the spectators… the officials, the coach etc.” [26]There are three defined time frames to observe players communication: Pregame or session. How does the communication unfold, democratic or autocratic? What the plan? What factors does the team take into account? How fast can they get it together? Pay attention, listen and take mental notes. Guide as a leader, not as a manager. During the game or session. Is anyone held accountable? By who? How close to the plan is the team playing? Do they make appropriate adjustments when necessary? How quickly? Make mental notes; keep details of changes, significant events and ‘friction points’ in mind. Post game or session. This is the time when players need to reflect and the coach can access real world events. Memories are fresh, emotions maybe raw and the participants are present. Conduct AAR’s until the players can do it themselves. This requires a lot of experience and trust between the players and coach. “The after action review (AAR), built around four questions: What did we set out to do? What actually happened? Why did it happen? What are we going to do next time?” [29]
19. Insight – when “thinness” raises to the level of attention “The power to spot leverage points.” [10]“The concept of reification… refers to the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal into ‘thinness’ In so doing we create points of focus around which the negotiation of meaning becomes organized.” [30] “Insight into the game is necessary in order to understand what actions are appropriate or inappropriate in a given situation. Insight is largely a question of experience and soccer intelligence.” [26] “Leverage points are just possibilities – pressure points that might lead to something useful, or might go nowhere.” [11] “Leverage points provide fragmentary action sequences, kernel ideas, and procedures for formulating a solution. Experts seem to have a larger stock of procedures that they can think of… Novices, in contrast, are often at a loss about where to begin.” [11] “Military commanders also need to detect leverage points. They need to find ways to exploit enemy weaknesses and to detect signs that an adversary is preparing to do the same totem.” [11]Leverage points are the “thinness” that gets attention, the ‘what’s’ in participation as opposed to the ‘haws. What was that? What does it mean? What do I do? What are we doing? What were you thinking? They can be understood as rational thoughts i.e. ‘free kick ‘or as emotional, gut feelings i.e. this is ‘good/not good’.
20. 20Creating identities, going beyond roles “Rather than a teacher/learner dyad, these points to a richly diverse field of essential actors and, with it, other forms of relationships of participation.” [12] “Building an identity consists of negotiating the meanings of our experience of membership in social communities. The concept of identity serves as a pivot point between the social and the individual, so that each can be talked about in terms of the other.” [30] “To make sense of… identity formation and learning, it is useful to consider three distinct modes of belonging; engagement – active involvement in mutual processes of negotiation of meaning. Imagination – creating images of the world and seeing connections through time and space by extrapolating from our own experience. Alignment – [harmonizing] our energy and activities in order to fit within… and contribute to broader structures.” [30] “Identity in practice arises out of interplay of participation and reification. As such, it is not an object, but a constant becoming… Identity is not some primordial core of personality that already exists. Nor is it something that we acquire at some point… As we go through succession of forms of participation, our identities form trajectories, both within and across communities of practice.” [30] “Activities, tasks, functions and understandings do not exist in isolation. They are part of broader systems of relations… The person is defined by as well as defines these relations. Learning thus implies becoming a different person with respect to the possibilities enabled by these systems of relations. To ignore this aspect of learning… is to overlook… the construction of identities.” [12]
21. 21Work or play, how do you make progress in learning? “Play is intrinsically motivated, except if you don’t do what the others tell you, they won’t let you play.” [24] “The playful aspect also constitutes an important dimension. Indeed, one of the main functions of games in childhood is to develop a child’s sense of identity and self accomplishment. Nevertheless, a primary objective for a teacher is to create an instructional setting that will include a rapport of strength within a problem-solving environment.” [10] “Children’s own spontaneous play is still thought to be fairly useless by many educators and most parents who pursue the rhetoric of progress. Of all the rhetoric’s, progress is the most explicit in terms of hegemony, and the organization of children’s play in terms of the educational and psychological beliefs of adults… The very point of the progress rhetoric has-been to constrain child play in the service of growth, education, and progress… Most adults show great anxiety and fear that children’s play behavior, if not rationalized… will escape their control and become frivolous and irrational… Treating… play as frivolous… illustrates and adds momentum to the idea that adults should organize the kind of play through which children are believed to develop properly.” [24] “Typically the work ethic view of play rests on making an absolutely fundamental distinction between play and work. Work is obligatory, serious, and not fun, and play is the opposite of these. This distinction, while influenced by the Protestant religion, derives its major impetus from the urban industrial view of time and work… Play [is seen] as a waste of time, as idleness, as triviality, and as frivolity.” [24]
22. 22Legitimate participation in communities of practice “The task for the novice is to learn to organize his own behavior such that it produces a competent performance.” [12]“Football players know that there is a certain ranking within a team [the pecking order].The players who are at the bottom of the ladder usually accept this. The coach has to be alert to those players who are almost at the top of the hierarchy. For them there will always come a day that they feel it is their turn to be on top of the food chain… The ranking in the team is not a constant factor… you can recognize the… conflict when watching the game.” –Rinus Michels [13]“A newcomer’s [or players lower on the pecking order] tasks are short and simple, the cost of errors small A newcomer’s tasks tend to be positioned at the ends of the branches of work processes, rather than in the middle of linked work segments… As opportunities for understanding how well or poorly one’s efforts contribute are evident in practice, legitimate participation provides an immediate ground for self evaluation.” [12]Legitimate participation includes the notion of a centripetal force. In soccer these are the ongoing negotiations of Einhart, Schwerpunkt and Auftragstaktik in the team or organization. In these negotiations, identity matters. It shapes, and is shaped by these negotiations, ultimately determining the pecking order and authority structures for the next round. An ever ending process it is often not a smooth ride as people jockey for power: “I have argued that communities of practice are not havens of peace and that their evolution involves politics of both participation and reification. Generational [and talent] differences add an edge to these politics by including distinct perspectives… to bear on the history of the practice. The working out of these perspectives involves a dynamics of continuity and discontinuity that propels the practice forward.” [30]
23. 23Summary“What the hell is going on? Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?” [5]Communities of practice should not be thought of as some new age, feel-good, everybody is a winner model for learning. In fact, it is the opposite of that. If you’re not good enough, get out - go home. Thesis, at least partly, the antidote for one of youth soccer’s biggest problems; a lack of physical, mental and moral commitment to anything beyond immediate self gratification. In CoP’s, standards are external, the measures cannot be denied, dismissed and what one thinks is of no importance. Product matters just as much as process. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of him to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.” [5]This false sense of self is, at least in part, built up and encouraged in a rationalized, consumer economy where happiness and success comes with a price tag and a guarantee. “In any hard discipline, whether it is gardening, structural engineering, or [soccer] one submits to things that have their own intractable ways. Such hardness is at odds with the underlying ontology of consumerism… The modern personality is being reorganized on a predicate of passive consumption, and it starts early in life… The consumer is left with a mere decision. Since this decision takes place in playground-safe field of options, the only concern it elicits is personal preference.” [5]Identity as an individual in a group is important. It matters and it’s learned in CoP’s. It cannot be taught like a subject in school. Such a belief that everything’s for everyone is illogical. “It seems illegitimate to give rank its due in a society where “all children are above average,” As Garrison Keillorsays of Lake Woebegon.” [5]
24. 24Selected references Several years ago I remarked to a top KNVB coach that “the Dutch Vision is a system that’s not a system.”His reply, “it’s not a system at all, it’s a way of thinking.” Yours truly
1. BOYD, J. 1976, Destruction and Creation (http://pogoarchives.org/m/dni/john_boyd_compendium/destruction_and_creation.pdf)
2. CABRERA, D. Dec. 6, 2011, How Thinking Works (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUqRTWCdXt4)
3. CHRISTENSEN, M. LAURSEN, D. SORENSEN, J. 2011, Situated Learning in Youth Elite Football: a Danish case study among talented male under-18 football players (Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, Vol. 16, No.2, 163-178)
4. CHOW, J. et al. 2007 The Role of Nonlinear Pedagogy in Physical Education (Review of Educational Research 2007, Vol. 77, No. 3, 251-278)
5. CRAWFORD, M. 2009, Shop Class as Soul craft, An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, (New York: Penguin Books)
6. CRAWFORD, M. May 16, 2011, Manual Competence (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdGky1JZovg)
7. DERESIEWICZ, W. 2010, Solitude and Leadership (The American Scholar, March 2010)
8. GATTO, J. 2010, Weapons of Mass Instruction, A School Teachers Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (Gabriela Island, B.C: New Society Publishers)
9. GOFFMAN, E. 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books)
10. GREHAIGNE, J-F. RICHARD, J-F. GRIFFIN, L. 2005, Teaching and Learning, Team Games and Sports (London: Routledge)
11. KLEIN, G. 1998, Sources of Power, How People Make Decisions (Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press)
12. LAVE, J. & WENGER, E. 1991, Situated Learning, Legitimate Peripheral Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press)
13. MICHELS, R. 2001, Teambuilding, and The Road to Success (Spring City, Pa: Reed swain)
14. MITRA, S. Feb. 27, 2013 Build a School in the Clouds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jYVe1RGaU)
15. PAGET, M. 2004, The Unity of Mistakes (Philadelphia, Pa: Temple University Press)
16. PENN, A 1999, Targeting Schools, Drill, Militarism and Imperialism (London: Woburn Press)
17. PILL, S. May 13, 2013, Teaching Games for Understanding, Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (http://www.ausport.gov.au/sportscoachmag/coaching_processes/teaching_games_for_understanding)
18. RICHARDS, C. 2004, Certain to Win, The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business (Xlibris Corporation)
19. RITZER, G. 2008, The McDonaldization of Society 5 (Thousand Oaks Ca: Pine Oaks Press)
25.   Selected references Several years ago I remarked to a top KNVB coach that “the Dutch Vision is a system that’s not a system.”His reply, “it’s not a system at all, it’s a way of thinking.” Yours truly
20. ROBINSON, K. Oct. 14, 2010, Changing Education Paradigms (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U)
21. ROYAL DUTCH SOCCER FEDERATION, July 2001, The Dutch Vision on Youth Soccer (KNVB-Holland P.O. Box 5153700 AM Zeist, Holland)
22. ROWE, M. May 23, 2011 Mike Rowe testifies before the US Senate about skilled trades(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC0JPs-rcF0)
23. SKINNER, B.F. 1971, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Bantum Books)
24. SUTTON-SMITH, B. 1997, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press)
25. THORPE, R. BUNKER, D. ALMOND, L. 1986, Rethinking Games Teaching, (Loughborough University: www.tgfu.org)
26. VAN LINGEN, B. 1997, Coaching Soccer, The Official Coaching Book of the Dutch Soccer Association (Spring City, Pa:Reedswain)
27. VICKERS, J. 2007, Perception, Cognition, and Decision Training, The Quiet Eye in Action (Champaign, Il: Human Kinetics)
28. WEIN, H. 2004, Developing Game Intelligence in Soccer (Spring City, Pa: Reedswain)
29. WEICK, K. SUTCLIFFE, K. 2007, Managing the Unexpected, Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, (SanFrancisco, Ca: John Wiley & Sons, Inc).
30. WENGER, E. 1998, Communities of Practice, Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press)
31. WILSON, J. 2008, Inverting the Pyramid, A History of Football Tactics (Great Britain: Clays Limited)
32. WORTHINGTON, E. 1974, Learning and Teaching Soccer Skills (North Hollywood, Ca: Hal Leighton Printing)
33. ZEIGLER, E. 2005, History and Status of American Physical Education and Educational Sport (Victoria, B.C: Trafford Publishing)
26.    Thank you “ I’ll live or die by my own ideas.” Johan Cruyff Presentation created May 2013 by Larry Paul, Peoria Arizona. All references are available as stated. All content is the responsibility of the author. For questions you can contact me at; larry4v4@hotmail.com - subject line, decision/actionmodel.For more information visit the bettersoccermorefun channel on YouTube or the other Decision/action puff’s on Slideshare.


Edited by Arthur: 21/5/2013 01:46:51 PM

ANNALS OF INNOVATIONHOW DAVID BEATS GOLIATHWhen underdogs break the rules.
BY MALCOLM GLADWELL
MAY 11, 2009
When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.

But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? The Turks sat in Medina “on the defensive, immobile.” There were so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel and water, that they could hardly make a major move across the desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their point of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. Instead of focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage war over the broadest territory possible.
The Bedouins under Lawrence’s command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them “an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle.” But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, forty-five pounds of flour, and a pint of drinking water, which meant that he could travel as much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the desert, even in summer. “Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,” Lawrence wrote. “Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage.” The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs. In one typical stretch, in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24th, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-Naam on March 25th, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27th, raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29th, returned to Buair and sabotaged the railway line again on March 31st, dynamited eleven rails at Hediah on April 3rd, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Dhaiji on April 4th and 5th, and attacked twice on April 6th.

Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus, in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” of one stage in the journey:


We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.

When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks, and lost only two men. The Turks simply did not think that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the desert. This was Lawrence’s great insight. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

Vivek Ranadivé is an elegant man, slender and fine-boned, with impeccable manners and a languorous walk. His father was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he says, because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of India’s planes. Ranadivé went to M.I.T., because he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his way. The Ranadivés are relentless.

In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Silicon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as “real time” processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he’s “batch processing.” There is a gap between the events in the company—sales—and his understanding of those events. Wall Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of databases. The trader would collect information from here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What Ranadivé’s company, tibco, did was to consolidate those databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, tibco’s software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.

Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”

A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two. “Everything in the world is now real time,” he said. “So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, “deliberation” just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it’s several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.

Is it any wonder that Ranadivé looked at the way basketball was played and found it mindless? A professional basketball game was forty-eight minutes long, divided up into alternating possessions of roughly twenty seconds: back and forth, back and forth. But a good half of each twenty-second increment was typically taken up with preliminaries and formalities. The point guard dribbled the ball up the court. He stood above the top of the key, about twenty-four feet from the opposing team’s basket. He called out a play that the team had choreographed a hundred times in practice. It was only then that the defending team sprang into action, actively contesting each pass and shot. Actual basketball took up only half of that twenty-second interval, so that a game’s real length was not forty-eight minutes but something closer to twenty-four minutes—and that twenty-four minutes of activity took place within a narrowly circumscribed area. It was as formal and as convention-bound as an eighteenth-century quadrille. The supporters of that dance said that the defensive players had to run back to their own end, in order to compose themselves for the arrival of the other team. But the reason they had to compose themselves, surely, was that by retreating they allowed the offense to execute a play that it had practiced to perfection. Basketball was batch!

Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent. “And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.

Ranadivé’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division, representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a series of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, the former all-pro running back for the San Francisco 49ers, who is also tibco’s director of business development. As a football player, Craig was legendary for the off-season hill workouts he put himself through. Most of his N.F.L. teammates are now hobbling around golf courses. He has run seven marathons. After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who played Division I basketball at Duke and U.S.C. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order to shut her down. The girls loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “It was so awesome to have her along.”

Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that’s not an issue, because teams don’t contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.

The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent’s end, within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”

The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time, they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to take low-percentage, long-range shots that required skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by three points.

“What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” Rometra Craig said. She helped out once Redwood City advanced to the regional championships. “We could hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup, because as long as we played hard on defense we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, ‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’ But they understood their roles.” A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. “They were awesome,” she said.

Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—the railroad—and not where they were strong, Medina. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. Lawrence extended the battlefield over as large an area as possible. So did the girls of Redwood City. They defended all ninety-four feet. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence . . . courage.”

“It’s an exhausting strategy,” Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a tibco conference room, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table.

“My girls had to be more fit than the others,” Ranadivé said.

“He used to make them run,” Craig said, nodding approvingly.

“We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.” He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?”

The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison, “One, two, three, attitude!”

That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

“One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadivé said, “and so in the first practice I had I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not One, two three, attitude. It’s One, two, three, attitude hah ’ ”—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.

In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of the season, which meant that their tallest player was six feet five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was six feet two. But from the opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press, and never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. “These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won, 87–79.

In the world of basketball, there is one story after another like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. People look at upsets like Fordham over UMass and call them flukes. Basketball sages point out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers—and that is true. Ranadivé readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Playing insurgent basketball did not guarantee victory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath. If Fordham had played UMass the conventional way, it would have lost by thirty points. And yet somehow that lesson has escaped the basketball establishment.

What did Digger Phelps do, the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. The UMass coach, Jack Leaman, was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids. Did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not.

The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that game was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn’t play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, thirty-eight years later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. “They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage.”

Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. At the University of Kentucky, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Pitino took his team to the Final Four three times—and won a national championship—with full-court pressure, and then rode the full-court press back to the Final Four in 2005, as the coach at the University of Louisville. This year, his Louisville team entered the N.C.A.A. tournament ranked No. 1 in the land. College coaches of Pitino’s calibre typically have had numerous players who have gone on to be bona-fide all-stars at the professional level. In his many years of coaching, Pitino has had one, Antoine Walker. It doesn’t matter. Every year, he racks up more and more victories.

“The greatest example of the press I’ve ever coached was my Kentucky team in ’96, when we played L.S.U.,” Pitino said. He was at the athletic building at the University of Louisville, in a small room filled with television screens, where he watches tapes of opponents’ games. “Do we have that tape?” Pitino called out to an assistant. He pulled a chair up close to one of the monitors. The game began with Kentucky stealing the ball from L.S.U., deep in L.S.U.’s end. Immediately, the ball was passed to Antoine Walker, who cut to the basket for a layup. L.S.U. got the ball back. Kentucky stole it again. Another easy basket by Walker. “Walker had almost thirty points at halftime,” Pitino said. “He dunked it almost every time. When we steal, he just runs to the basket.” The Kentucky players were lightning quick and long-armed, and swarmed around the L.S.U. players, arms flailing. It was mayhem. Five minutes in, it was clear that L.S.U. was panicking.

Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo—and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state. “See if you find one play that L.S.U. managed to run,” Pitino said. You couldn’t. The L.S.U. players struggled to get the ball inbounds, and, if they did that, they struggled to get the ball over mid-court, and on those occasions when they managed both those things they were too overwhelmed and exhausted to execute their offense the way they had been trained to. “We had eighty-six points at halftime,” Pitino went on—eighty-six points being, of course, what college basketball teams typically score in an entire game. “And I think we’d forced twenty-three turnovers at halftime,” twenty-three turnovers being what college basketball teams might force in two games. “I love watching this,” Pitino said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “Every day, you dream about getting a team like this again.” So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use the full-court press the way Pitino does?

Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures was endless. In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in “Violent Politics,” a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.

“I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,” Pitino said. Louisville was the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. “Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if they have the bench. They don’t know if the players can last.” Pitino shook his head. “We practice every day for two hours straight,” he went on. “The players are moving almost ninety-eight per cent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections”—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instruction—“they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.” Seven seconds! The coaches who came to Louisville sat in the stands and watched that ceaseless activity and despaired. The prospect of playing by David’s rules was too daunting. They would rather lose.

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox parc, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.

This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.

T. E. Lawrence, by contrast, was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from Sandhurst. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. And David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

“In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,” Lenat said. “It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.”

It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.

The trouble for Redwood City started early in the regular season. The opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls, who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned something much more valuable—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.

“There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadivé said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.”

Roger Craig says that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs—‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.”

“My girls were all blond-haired white girls,” Ranadivé said. “My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because she’s half-Indian. One time, we were playing this all-black team from East San Jose. They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head: never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw him out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”

At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o’clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six, to beat the traffic. It was downhill from there. The referee did not believe in “One, two, three, attitude hah.” He didn’t think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another.

“They were touch fouls,” Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful.

“My girls didn’t understand,” Ranadivé said. “The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team.”

“People were booing,” Craig said. “It was bad.”

“A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?” Ranadivé shook his head.

“One girl fouled out.”

“We didn’t get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But . . .”

Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end, and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. They did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and they lost—but not before making Goliath wonder whether he was a giant, after all. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: ZOHAR LAZAR

How Germany went from bust to boom on the talent production lineNation that suffered an embarrassing Euro 2000 now boasts both Champions League finalists thanks to a system that values coaches and nurtures indigenous talent
Stuart James
The Guardian, Thursday 23 May 2013 19.20 BST

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/may/23/germany-bust-boom-talent

Robin Dutt has a lovely problem on his hands. Sat in his office in Frankfurt, the man who replaced Matthias Sammer as the sporting director at the German Football Association last August, taking on responsibility for the development of young players and coaches, doubts there is any room for improvement. "We are at the top level and it's difficult to go above that," Dutt says. "If we are in the year 2000 and we are at the bottom it is OK. But nobody sees anything wrong here."
A decade or so after the DFB travelled the world in search of best practice, Dutt smiles at the irony that other nations are coming to them for advice these days. Dan Ashworth, the Football Association's newly appointed director of elite development, was among recent visitors, spending three hours with Dutt, the former Bayer Leverkusen and SC Freiburg coach, in a meeting that must have been enlightening.
German football is booming, reaping the rewards of the strategy drawn up after their dismal performances at Euro 2000, when Germany finished bottom of their group. Forced into an overhaul of youth football, the DFB, the Bundesliga and the clubs decided that the development of more technically proficient homegrown players would be in everyone's best interests. This led to the creation of academies right across the top two divisions.
The fruits are there for all to see. Joachim Löw, Germany's coach, is blessed with a generation of gifted young players – Julian Draxler (19), Andre Schürrle (22), Sven Bender (24), Thomas Müller (23), Holger Badstuber (24), Mats Hummels (24), Mesut Ozil (24), Ilkay Gundogan (22), Mario Götze (20), Marco Reus (23), Toni Kroos (23) … the list goes on – and Dutt says there are more coming through in the under-21 side who will travel to Israel for the European Championship next month.
As for Saturday's Champions League final at Wembley, the DFB proudly points out that 26 of the players Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund named in their Uefa squads this season are homegrown and eligible to play for Germany. More than half of those players came through the DFB's talent development programme, which was introduced in 2003 with the aim of identifying promising youngsters and providing them with technical skills and tactical knowledge at an early age. Covering 366 areas of Germany, this impressive initiative caters for children aged 8 to 14 and is served by 1,000 part-time DFB coaches, all of whom must hold the Uefa B licence and are expected to scout as well as train the players. "We have 80 million people in Germany and I think before 2000 nobody noticed a lot of talent," Dutt says. "Now we notice everyone."
Some youngsters attending the development programme are already affiliated with professional clubs but others may be only turning out for their local junior side, which means the weekly DFB sessions are also a chance for Bundesliga teams to spot players.
It is the opposite of what happens in England, where the FA relies on clubs to develop youngsters. Dutt smiles when it is suggested to him that the DFB are doing the clubs' recruitment for them. "But if we help the clubs, we help us, because the players of our national teams – the youth teams and Joachim Löw's team – come from the clubs," he says.
The incredible depth of Germany's coaching resources, as well as the DFB's close relationship with Bundesliga clubs, helps to make the programme. According to Uefa, Germany has 28,400 (England 1,759) coaches with the B licence, 5,500 (895) with the A licence and 1,070 (115) with the Pro licence, the highest qualification. It is little wonder that Ashworth said last month that there will be no quick fix for English football. The country that invented the game has forgotten that we need people to teach it.
For Germany, post-Euro 2000 was about changing philosophies as well as employing more full-time coaches and upgrading facilities. The DFB wanted to move away from playing in straight lines and relying on "the German mentality" to win matches. Instead coaches focused on developing fluid formations that required the sort of nimble, dexterous players who would previously have been overlooked because of their lack of physical strength.

"In the past there were a lot of big players. But look at our players now," Dutt says. "You realise that an important thing for a football player is technique and then the height of the player, ordinarily, will be small. [Diego] Maradona, [Andrés] Iniesta, Xavi – all little players. In the defence we think we need big players. Mats Hummels is big but he is very good with the ball. In 1982 Mats Hummels wouldn't have played in defence, he would have played at No10. In the 1970s, [Franz] Beckenbauer was playing football and [Hans-Georg] Schwarzenbeck was running after the English players – if he got the ball he gave it to Beckenbauer and the job was done. But now Schwarzenbeck is Hummels, and Hummels plays like Beckenbauer and Schwarzenbeck."
If one club has led the way when it comes to producing young players in Germany it is Freiburg, who have won the German equivalent of the FA Youth Cup four times in the past seven years. Their 25-man first-team squad consists of 10 homegrown players, six of whom started in the 2-1 defeat against Schalke last Saturday, when Freiburg needed to win to pull off the unimaginable and qualify for the Champions League. Beckenbauer was among those who travelled to Freiburg's Mage Solar Stadion hoping to see history made.


Under the tutelage of their erudite and colourful manager Christian Streich, a qualified teacher who worked in the club's youth setup for 16 years, Freiburg were one of the stories of the Bundesliga season. With an annual wage budget of only €18m (£15.4m), which covers the coaching staff as well as the first-team squad, Freiburg's fifth-place finish was a remarkable achievement, even if Streich was unable to conceal his disappointment that they will be playing in the Europa League, rather than the Champions League, next season and that four of his best players have been snapped up.
Last week the Guardian went behind the scenes at Freiburg, whose location, on the fringes of the Black Forest, is every bit as impressive as the work that goes on at the football school. The facility, which has four pitches including a small stadium, cost €10m in 2001, before the academy reforms were introduced and at a time when Freiburg were relegated from the Bundesliga, which gives an idea of how committed they are to producing players.
Freiburg has neither the financial wherewithal nor the desire to compete for overseas talent, so there is no chance of Streich, or any of his staff, being spotted with an agent in São Paulo brokering a deal for a teenage Brazilian. Of the 66 players in the under-16 to under-19 age groups in their academy, all but two are eligible to play for Germany. In keeping with the ethos of the club, where there is a wonderful sense of community, every senior academy player earns the same.
Across a sizeable area where they face little competition from other Bundesliga clubs, Freiburg work closely with five amateur feeder teams who receive a part-time coach to train children aged 8 to 11 twice a week. The most promising players are invited to attend the academy during school holidays and for occasional tournaments at weekends. "We believe it is not good for a nine-year-old to play [regularly] for a professional football club because it changes the reasons why he plays football," says Sebastian Neuf, a member of the football school's management.
Once a player reaches under-12 level things change. Those who live within 40km of Freiburg train at the football school up to four times a week and play in a league, where teams can win a title and be relegated, a major difference to the way academies are run in England. The earliest an academy player would take part in competitive football with a professional club in England – where the theory is that it "should be about performances, not results" – is at under-18 level.
Dutt offers an interesting response when asked about the rationale behind the league system. "It's important for the mentality to have some games in the year you have to win, but it is not the main thing. The main thing is to do good training.
"For the Germans this system is very important. It's like golf. If I play golf in England, no club wants to know my handicap. If I go to play in Germany you have to show your handicap. If you play with a guy you don't know, the first question is: 'How do you do?' The second question is: 'What is your handicap?' Germans want to reach something, they want to go up."
There is no shortage of silverware on show in Freiburg's academy, yet the club are not obsessed with winning leagues and cups and acknowledge there is life outside football. Through a nationwide elite schools programme supported by the DFB, the 16 players who board on the top floor of Freiburg's three-storey academy building, along with those who live with host families and travel from home, are able to continue their education around their football schedule, which sometimes means training before and after lessons.
Freiburg place great emphasis on academic work, so much so that they like a selection of their staff to come from a teaching background, so that they can provide educational help whenever it is needed, including on the way to matches. It is not uncommon for players to do homework on the coach. Streich says that clubs have a moral obligation to think about what happens to those who fail to make the grade.
"When I went to Aston Villa eight years ago I told them our players, under-17, 18 and 19, go to school for 34 hours a week," he says. "They said: 'No, you're a liar, it's not possible, our players go for nine hours.' I said: 'No, I'm not lying.' They said: 'It's not possible, you can't train and do 34 hours of education.' I said: 'Sure. And what do you do with the players who have for three years, from the age of 16 to 19, only had nine hours a week of school?
"They said: 'They have to try to be a professional or not. They have to decide.' I said: 'No, we can't do that in Freiburg. It's wrong. Most players in our academy can't be professionals, they will have to look for a job. The school is the most important thing, then comes football.' We give players the best chance to be a footballer but we give them two educations here. If 80% can't go on to play in the professional team, we have to look out for them. The players that play here, the majority of them go on to higher education. And we need intelligent players on the pitch anyway."
What is clear is that those who are good enough will get a chance at Freiburg, which makes the €3.5m the club put into the youth academy every year (about 10% of turnover) feel like a sound investment. Against Schalke, in what was one of the biggest games in Freiburg's history, Streich gave Sebastian Kerk, a Germany Under-19 international, his debut. Nobody at Freiburg batted an eyelid.
While Freiburg have been investing in youth for years, not least because the club's existence depends on it, Streich acknowledges that huge changes have taken place across all Bundesliga clubs, in particular when it comes to attitudes towards coaching, where a "jobs for the boys" mentality has largely disappeared. He believes England needs to rethink its own approach.
"They have to look to build coaches in England. They have a lot of money and they have bought players. But for me the most important thing is to educate the coaches in the youth academies.
"Before in Germany, if you played in the Bundesliga for a few years, clubs said: 'We'll take them to manage the under-17s.' But they had no education to be a coach. Sometimes the same thing happens in England – I saw this. On the pitch these players played very well but that doesn't mean they're a coach, and now this changes in Germany. And then under-15, under-17 and under-19 coaches, they gave them a salary so they could do this work full time. Coaches came from university, who had studied sport, they mixed it up and then it got better."

Streich smiles when asked what he thinks of some of the top English clubs, which spend millions on youth programmes despite there being no obvious pathways to the first team. "You can't compare someone like Manchester City with SC Freiburg, it's saturn and the moon," he says. "We played against Manchester City's youth team here, in the Black Forest, some years ago and also a few years later. They had one player from Sweden, one player from Finland, one player from Brazil, one player from here, one player from there. 'What do you do next year?' 'Yeah, we buy eight or nine players.' 'What about scouting?' 'We have 20 people scouting at youth [level].' We only have four for the professionals."
Frank Arnesen, who is full of admiration for Streich's work at Freiburg, has been on both sides of the fence and is well qualified to compare the merits of youth football in Germany and England. The Dane, who has just left his position as sporting director at Hamburg after working for Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur in the same capacity, believes England has the best facilities for young players but feels the spending power of Premier League clubs denies academy graduates the chance that exists in the Bundesliga.
"The money is a big part of the problem in England because clubs go out and buy finished players instead of waiting," Arnesen says. "Young players need to make mistakes to get better, but managers think they can't afford [for] that to happen. You see the squads, even in the smaller clubs, they get players from all over instead of bringing young players through."
Arnesen believes that the introduction of the "50% plus one" rule in 2001, which requires Bundesliga clubs to be owned by their members, has helped to promote homegrown talent. In the absence of foreign benefactors it makes financial sense, and also appeals to the supporters in control, to give young German players an opportunity.

The landscape could not be more different in the Premier League, where the majority of clubs are in foreign hands and English players in the minority. It is hard, almost impossible, to imagine Germany accepting that situation, not least because the success of the national team is at the forefront of everyone's mind.
"I think one thing is very important, coaches who are coaching for the national team of Germany, from upstairs to down, they are very respected and it's a good job to have. In England I am not so sure about that," Arnesen says. "I think there is a feeling that to work for a club is much higher than the FA but that's not the case in Germany."
It was one of the reasons why so many people were surprised when Ashworth, who was attracting interest from leading clubs because of the exceptional job he did as sporting director at West Bromwich Albion, opted to take up a high-profile but extremely challenging position with the FA at its new national football centre at St George's Park, where it remains to be seen whether he will get the support he needs from the Premier League and its clubs. Arnesen, who recently met Ashworth at Hamburg, believes relationships need to change in England.
"The FA [must] create a situation where it is an honour to be there and you need help from clubs," he says. "Hamburg have one of the biggest defensive talents in Germany, Jonathan Tah [the national Under-17 captain]. Sometimes he is training from Wednesday to Friday [with the DFB] and he cannot play Saturday in his own game for Hamburg. We did not think that was correct so we sat down and talked, and that is what the Germans do."
Dutt agrees. "I spoke three hours with Dan about this," he says. "It will be better for England if the clubs and the association talked together. If you see the English clubs, there are a lot of foreign players and not many from England. Chelsea win the Champions League and then the Europa League, so they have success. But the English national team, I don't think they are successful at this time."
The Elite Player Performance Plan, which the Premier League introduced a little more than two years ago, feels like the last throw of the dice for youth development in English football. Millions of pounds are being pumped into academies, with clubs free to cast their net far and wide for players who will have more contact time with coaches than ever before, albeit with no promise of greater opportunities to break through. Time will tell whether it works.
Back in Frankfurt, Dutt is looking at his watch before his next meeting. There is just one final question for him before he heads off: why is it that Bundesliga academies so rarely bring in players from overseas? "If you want to get an African player, or a player from Brazil, you need money," he says. "It's cheaper to bring through your own player from Germany. And we have enough players here."

Tactical Periodisation TP

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ep8dlag9j9hff0j/SoccerJournal_MayJune_28-34.pdf?m



tried cut and paste but lost formatting

A history of football in the Ukraine 1972-1984
http://inbedwithmaradona.com/journal/2012/8/9/a-history-of-football-in-ukraine-1972-1984.html

1972 saw another shocking result: Zorya Voroshilovgrad (now Luhansk), an unfancied side from a provincial capital in Eastern Ukraine, won the Soviet Championship. Along the way, they battered Dynamo 3-0 and also defeated the Moscow sides of CSKA, Dinamo, and Spartak. Zorya became the first team not from a capital of a republic to win the Soviet championship, a feat unmatched until Zenit Leningrad won the title in 1984.

In a twist of history, the man that would build on Maslov's legacy was none other than Valeriy Lobanovskyi, one of the players pushed out by Maslov when he was first appointed by Dynamo. Lobanovskyi, renowned for his ability to score Olimpico style goals directly from corners, went on to play several more seasons in Chernomorets Odessa, before finishing his career at Shakhtar Donetsk. Immediately upon retirement from playing he became the head coach of Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. During his tenure at Dnipro the club was promoted to the Soviet Top League and he led them to a 6th place finish in 1972. He caught the eye of the Dynamo Kyiv establishment and Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Shcherbytsky himself invited Lobanovskyi to join his favoured club, and in the Soviet Union requests from Party Chiefs are notoriously difficult to turn down.

It was not just Lobanovskyi's modest success at guiding Dnipro from the depths to the first division to a respectable top flight finish that endeared him to Dynamo Kyiv. Following in the footsteps of his distinguished predecessors Oshenkov and Maslov, 'Loba' was both a tactical visionary and a disciplinarian with a healthy obsession over the physical fitness of his players. He was a perfectionist who believed in the power of science. He thought that football was a game that could be, with the help of modern technology, broken down and systematically analysed to create a winning formula. A chance meeting with Anatoliy Zelentsov, a statistician who was at the time the Dean of the Dnipropetrovsk Institute of Physical Science, was the moment that allowed Lobanovskyi's vision of football to become a reality.

The two began to collaborate, applying the latest advancements in computer technology to football. In his classic 1994 book Football Against the Enemy, Simon Kuper writes:

"Zelentsov worked from the premise that since a fraction of a second's thought can be too long in modern football; a player had to know where to pass before he got the ball. To this end, Dynamo's players had to memorize set plays, as if they were American footballers, and had to run off the ball in set patterns."

According to Zelentsov's calculations, a team that commits an error in less than 18% of a game's key situations is unbeatable. These statistics were the basis for Lobanovskyi's training sessions which were characterized by predetermined patterns of play deeply embedded in the tactical structure of the team. The positional switching of Rinus Michels' Total Football tactics prominently featured as well. In his own words, Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov described their ideas in a book entitled The Methodological Basis of the Development of Training Models:

"When we are talking about tactical evolution, the first thing we have in mind is to strive for new courses of action that will not allow the opponent to adapt to our style of play. If an opponent has adjusted himself to our style of play and found a counterplay, then we need to find new a new strategy. That is the dialectic of the game. You have to go forward in such a way and with such a range of attacking options that it will force the opponent to make a mistake. In other words, it's necessary to force the opponent into the condition you want them to be in. One of the most important means of doing that is to vary the size of the playing area."

It was Scientific Communism meets Total Football. His rigorous style may not have always been particularly pleasing on the eyes, especially considering that 'Loba' preferred the strategy of playing for a draw away and only going for the win at home over the course of the domestic season. But the success was immense.

After Maslov was sacked, the head coaching position was entrusted to the Russian manager Aleksandr Sevidov. Sevidov, favouring an attacking mentality, led the Kyiv side to the Soviet championship in his first season in charge, but two subsequent second place finishes and a an embarrassing collapse to Ararat Yerevan in the 1973 Soviet Cup final sealed his fate. Under his tutelage, however, two youngsters, striker Oleh Blokhin and playmaker Leonid Buryak, made a name for themselves and became first team players.

Then, under Lobanovskyi, Dynamo attained heights unprecedented for a side from the Soviet Union. In his first season in charge Dynamo once again won the Soviet Top League and achieved their second domestic double by winning the Soviet Cup as well. Over the course of his 17 year tenure (interrupted in 1983 due to national team commitments), Dynamo would become Soviet champions six more times, ensuring their status as the USSR's most decorated club side, and Lobanovskyi's as its most decorated manager. In addition, Dynamo took home five more Soviet cups including two more doubles.

But as impressive as this domestic success was, it was Dynamo's performances on the continental arena that have cemented their place in footballing lore as one of the game's legendary sides. Lobanovskyi's first foray into European competition was the 1973-74 UEFA Cup, when Dynamo went out in the third round to VfB Stuttgart. The next season, however, their fortunes would change. On account of Ararat's 1973 domestic double, Dynamo was granted entry into the 1974-75 UEFA Cup Winners' Cup, since they were runners up in the Soviet Cup. Led by the inspirational Blokhin, Dynamo tore through their opponents and lost only one match on their way to the final, a 2-1 second leg defeat to PSV Eindhoven in the second leg of the semi-finals after 3-0 victory in the first leg. The final at St. Jakob Stadium in Basel was no contest. Up against the Hungarian side Ferencváros, Dynamo simply dominated (video). The team chemistry and mutual understanding in the team was far superior to anything the Hungarians could throw at them. Dynamo was 2-0 up at half time through a brace from Volodymyr Onyshchenko. Blokhin sealed the victory in the second half with a Maradona-esque run and finish. For the first time, a Soviet side had attained European glory.

More was to come from Lobanovskyi's men. The UEFA Super Cup, a competition held between the winners of the European Cup and the Cup Winners' Cup, was to be held for the second ever time that year. Dynamo Kyiv went up against the German giants of Bayern München, fresh off their second successive European Cup. That Bayern side, often ranked among the greatest European club sides of all time, were heavy favourites against the upstarts from Ukraine. But once again led by Blokhin, Dynamo dazzled and defeated the Bavarians 3-0 over two legs to secure their second European honours. Blokhin, who scored all three goals, deservedly took home the Ballon d'Or in 1975 as the best European player of the year.

Eleven years later, Dynamo replicated their success in perhaps the best example of Lobanovskyi's philosophy put into action. Blokhin, still a hugely important player in the squad, was partnered this time by Ihor Belanov. The two strikers, along with teammate Konstantin Zavarov and Frank Lippmann of Dynamo Dresden, all finished joint top scorers of that year's competition with 5 goals each. In the final, Dynamo met Atlético Madrid. Once again, Dynamo won 3-0, and once again Blokhin got on the scoresheet in a European final, finishing off a beautiful counterattacking move in the 85th minute (video). That year, Belanov took home the Ballon d'Or.

Unlike in earlier eras, Dynamo's growing status as a footballing powerhouse was no longer overlooked by the Soviet sporting authorities when Lobanovskyi was at the club. In the Soviet Union's first match in their UEFA Euro 1976 qualifying campaign they were embarrassed 3-0 by the Republic of Ireland. After this defeat, the Football Federation of the Soviet Union sacked then head coach Konstantin Beskov and appointed Lobanovskyi to the position. Lobanovskyi quickly transformed the national team and used his Dynamo as a model. There was a marked improvement in the results, but nevertheless they failed to qualify for the competition, falling in the final qualifying round to eventual winners Czechoslovakia. In the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, the USSR won the Bronze medal. The 17 man squad consisted of eleven players from Dynamo and was led by their manager. Ukraine, for centuries dominated politically and culturally by the centralized Russian state, was now reasserting its identity through its footballing domination of Moscow. The Dynamo fans came up with a catchphrase: "The Soviet Union national team is just Dynamo Kyiv, weakened by the presence of players from other clubs."

But this state of affairs did not sit well with the Moscow party officials. Before the 1976 qualifier in Bratislava, just eight years after the Soviets invaded the country to crush the Prague Spring uprising, the Soviet authorities sent a memorandum to the national team: "You are taking all the responsibility [for the result] into your own hands." Though the USSR was beyond the era of Gulags and show trials, the attitude of Moscow toward the national team that heavily featured Ukrainian players was clear. Despite the Bronze medal in Montreal, where the Soviets defeated Brazil in the third place match, Lobanovskyi was fired after the tournament. The failure to win gold was seen as a failure back home. At the 1980 Olympics held in Moscow, the Soviet squad consisted of just two players from Dynamo. The Soviets once again won the Bronze medal. Volodymyr Veremeyev, a former Dynamo Kyiv player and member of the 1976 edition of the Soviet Union, recalls:

"Only in 1980 was the result seen in a positive light, unlike 1976. After Montreal, right away players were stripped of their 'Master of Sport' rankings. This is what the rivalry between Moscow and Kyiv meant, and the pressure we felt from the capital of the Soviet Union."

Despite the mutual antagonism felt between Moscow and Kyiv, Lobanovskyi returned to the managerial role for the national team in 1984 but was quickly dismissed after the Soviets failed to qualify in controversial circumstances. The defeat to Portugal that sealed the USSR's fate was decided on a penalty awarded to the Portuguese for a foul that took place outside the box; even science cannot completely account for human error. He was appointed to the head coaching position again just two years later, after the Soviet Union had gotten off to a disastrous start to World Cup qualifying, failing to win any of their first three matches. Lobanovskyi's tried and true method - simply replacing the squad with his Dynamo players - worked like a charm. Results were instantaneous, and the USSR qualified for the 1986 World Cup as group runners up. Twelve of the twenty-two players selected for the final tournament in Mexico were from Dynamo. The Soviet Union raced through their group and came up against Belgium in the second round. The match was 2-2 after 90 minutes, but Belgium ran out 4-3 winners after a thrilling extra time period. The match in the Soviet Union is still remembered with anger and heartbreak; the Belgian second goal, allege the Soviet fans, was clearly offside.

1988 was the last hurrah for Lobanovskyi as manager of the national side. Once again, the squad was heavily drawn from Dynamo. In the first match of the tournament against the Netherlands which the Soviet Union won 1-0, 9 of the 11 starters were from the Kyiv side. The two teams met again in the final, but this time Marco van Basten's moment of magic was too much for the Soviets to overcome. The Dutch won 2-0, and the Kyiv core had to settle with a runners up medal. Glory in international competition proved to be just outside of their grasp.

This history of Ukrainian football may at times read more like a history of Dynamo Kyiv. But there are political and structural reasons for why Dynamo came to dominate Ukrainian, and then eventually Soviet, football. Many of these reasons have to do with the aforementioned Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. Shcherbytsky was not just a high ranking Communist Party official, he was also a fanatical supporter of Dynamo Kyiv. Unlike in Moscow, where the party chiefs split their support and patronage among the various clubs, Kyiv was a one-club city with a party power base entirely dedicated to ensuring the success of Dynamo.

Kyiv's status as capital of the Ukrainian SSR and thus the seat of the Ukrainian Politburo served Dynamo well. Genadiy Orlov, the former footballer and current commentator on Russian television, revealed in an interview:

"The mechanism by which Dynamo was propelled to the top of the table was well developed in the Central Committee of Ukraine, led by Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. His first secretary would call his colleagues in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Odessa. He would say something along the lines of 'Dynamo is the flagman of our republic, you have to help us out. Let's play to a draw at your stadium, and in Kyiv, we'll play on equal footing.' Just try to beat Dynamo in Kyiv on equal footing!"

The same mechanism applied to the transfer system as well. For example, after Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk went through their 'golden years' in the mid '80s during which they twice won the league, many of their players were 'encouraged' to move to Kyiv. A phone call from Shcherbytsky's office to anywhere else in Ukraine all but ensured that all of the best Ukrainian players ended up in Dynamo. The Central Committee also interfered in Dynamo's internal affairs. When Dynamo finished a disappointing 10th in 1984, a congress was convened to discuss the situation. Journalist Aleksandr Gorbunov writes:

"Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, the head of the Ukrainian party, and the entire republic, held a meeting, where one important issue was discussed: the coach of Dynamo. Shcherbytsky, according to witnesses, silently listened to the speakers, including those defending the position of the lobbyists (who wanted Lobanovskyi dismissed), then sharply declared 'Lobanovskyi remains the coach. The question is closed.'"

The glorious history of Dynamo and Ukrainian football in general deserves to be appreciated for its inherent footballing value. But the sport cannot be separated from the political machinations going on behind the scenes that helped ensure Dynamo's status and success. In the Soviet Union, clout was everything, and Dynamo had a lot of it.

This article originally appeared in footandball.net

Follow Vadim on Twitter @passive_offside

Footbal:Kiev's keen scholar of science
Simon Turnbull reports on the coach dismantling reputations with the numbers game
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/footbalkievs-keen-scholar-of-science-1295820.html

Sunday 23 November 1997

Only three clubs remain unbeaten as the 16 members of the Champions' League prepare for Matchday Five, as Uefa would have us call this week's set of fixtures. Manchester United have yet to drop a point. Real Madrid have been held just the once. So have the surprise untouchables, Dynamo Kiev, who would boast a perfect record had they not conceded two late goals to Newcastle last month. Those who know Valery Lobanovsky, the Ukraine club's formidable coach, will not be surprised that Newcastle succeeded where others - PSV Eindhoven and Barcelona (twice) - failed to avoid defeat. Lobanovsky's meticulous methods of preparation would not have taken into account such an unlikely possibility as two fluke goals by John Beresford.
Lobanovsky has developed the ultimate school of football science, one that makes the supposed Goodison version of slide-rule precision passing seem like a children's laboratory set by comparison. [size=6]He started 30 years ago when he was made coach of Dneproprtovsk, enlisting the help of the dean of the local Institute of Physical Science, Professor Anatoly Zelentsov. Working on the theory that a player ought to know where to pass before he gained possession, they taught their charges to memorise set moves on and off the ball. They also formulated a computer programme to analyse matches, dividing the pitch into nine squares and measuring how often each player went into each area and how much work he did with and without the ball. Each player is awarded a mark computed to the third decimal point and is also tested by computer for reflexes, endurance, balance, nerve and memory (woe betide anyone who does not know which colleague ought to be in which square at any given time of a set move[/size]).

Students of the traditional British school of hit-it-and-hope might laugh but the Lobanovsky-Zelentsov formula, playing by numbers, has been a proven success. In Lobanovsky's first spell as coach at Kiev, Dynamo became the first club from the former Soviet Union to capture a European trophy. They beat Ferencvaros in the 1975 Cup-Winners' Cup final and also defeated Bayern Munich in the European Super Cup. Lobanovsky was coach again when Dynamo beat Atletico Madrid in the 1986 Cup-Winners' Cup final. And in 1988, after selecting his squad on the basis of performances in the computer tests, he guided the Soviet Union to the final of the European Championships.

After six years in the Middle East, coaching the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, Lobanovsky has been back at Dynamo for 11 months. And for a third time he is making the Kiev club a dynamic force in Europe. His players were afforded a standing ovation after they beat Barcelona 4-0 at the Nou Camp three weeks ago and victory at home to PSV Eindhoven on Wednesday night would put them into the quarter-finals of the European Cup. That would do much to restore the reputation of a club tarnished in the past by links with the Ukrainian mafia (who were reported to have operated a licence, through Dynamo, to export nuclear missile parts) and by the bribe scandal which prompted their shame-faced premature departure from the Champions' League two years ago.

Lobanovsky was already regarded as a national hero and his return has galvanised Ukraine's damaged sporting flagship. He commands the respect of his players not just because of his record. In his first spell as Dynamo coach, after seeing one of his players drunk he made him work as a groundsman for five months and then sold him to a minor club. Combining such authoritarianism and his extreme methods of preparation, Lobanovsky has produced some exceptional players. His two triumphant Cup-Winners' Cup teams both featured the striking talent of Oleg Blokhin. And his Group C Champions' League leaders are led from the front by the 21-year-old hailed as "the new Blokhin".

Andriy Shevchenko, Ukraine's player of the year, stunned the Nou Camp to silence with a first-half hat-trick. He has been courted by Milan and by Manchester United but is reluctant to depart through the great gates of his home city. "I am flattered by the interest of such famous clubs," he said last week, "but I grew up watching players like Blokhin, who were coached by Mr Lobanovsky. I am happy also to learn from him..." And from his numbers too, of course.

Valeriy Lobanovskyi – One of Football’s First Scientists
Posted on: Jul 4, 2012 in Footballing History, Greatest Managers, International Football, UEFA Champion's League



There are many attributes that one can associate with Valeriy Lobanovskyi – influential, stern, authoritative among others but the one phrase that really describes his career can be as a skilled tactician, skilled in the planning and execution of his game plans.

Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Lobanovskyi played for Victor Maslov’s Dynamo Kyiv as a left winger in the late fifties. He was known for his pace and his ability to bend the ball. He flourished in the team until Maslov started implementing the 4-4-2 formation with no wingers, later used by Alf Ramsey’s World Cup winning team of 1966.

Maslov was breaking popular tradition by fielding a 4 man midfield opposing the more popular 4-2-4, then used by Brazil. Lobanovskyi, not used to playing as a midfielder, became disenchanted with Maslov’s pressing approach to the game. He left Dynamo in 1965, going on to play for Chornomorets Odessa and finished his playing career at Shakhtar Donetsk. Lobanovskyi hung up his boots at the premature age of 29 and took up the coaching job at FC Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk (another Ukrainian team) a year after his retirement, in 1969.

His years at Dnipro went largely unnoticed as he did not win anything significant. However, he did lead Dnipro to the Soviet Top League in three years and in his fourth year, Dnipro finished sixth in that league.

It was at Dynamo Kyiv that Lobanovskyi began to gain a reputation as a tactician. Lobanovskyi joined Kyiv as manager in 1974 taking over from Andrey Biba. He started in a controversial manner – by ordering his first computer. Computers were something that were not easy to get and Lobanovskyi had to call in every favour with top military and government officials to get one. This immediately alerted the Soviet Intelligence agencies which thought that Lobanovskyi would be using it to send secret information to rival countries. Who knew that Lobanovskyi would begin something that was as revolutionary as it was audacious? He used it to analyse his players by their performances, use statistics and access all possible data on his opponents. He and his team of statisticians would meticulously collect data on each individual player, tracking every detail, from what areas of the pitch the player covered, to how he trapped the ball.

Valeriy Lobanovskyi was a huge supporter of the 4-4-2 because he saw the key to winning any game was not control of the ball but control of the space on the pitch – not only control of space when attacking but control of space when the team was in more defensive positions. As a result, he divided football into 22 elements (players) divided into sub-systems 11 elements each which moved within a defined area (the pitch). If the sub-systems were equal, it was a draw. If one sub-system was better than the other, they would win. As simple as that! Lobanovskyi believed that football was not about individuals but about coalitions, connections and the bond that the individuals in a team shared. He encouraged these bonds in various training sessions in which he would carry out a specific number of drills, the most popular being blindfolded 5-a-side matches. These training sessions resulted in an almost telepathic understanding between the players.

Lobanovskyi believed that pace and teamwork were equally important, hence his emphasis on fitness and teamwork drills. He preferred a player to playing in a particular position and being good at it rather than being able to play anywhere and be versatile. As a result, he was absolutely against the “Total Football” style of play preferred by the Germans and Dutch.

He was also one of the first to apply psychology to the game of football, Lobanovskyi famously said, “I don’t just speak of the sporting aspect of things, I’m equally inspired by scientific theories, which enable me to plan the training sessions, or by philosophical ideas, which allow me to organize the group of which I have charge. Every manager in the world says that the most difficult thing of all is the leadership of men. They are right, but do they know that reading philosophical works can help us?“

The Lobanovskyi regime was a success in the very first season the club won a double, claiming both the Soviet Top League championship and the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup in the process, becoming the first team from the USSR to win a major European title when they trampled over Hungarian side Ferencvaros to beat them 3-0 in the final. Dynamo controlled the ball well and their passes and their link up play was a delight to watch. The first two goals scored by Vladimir Ontischenko were brilliant. For the first goal, Ontischenko cut past the defender and from a narrow angle from the right side of the goal, scored with his left foot. The second goal was a superb swerving shot which looked more like a chip which went to the top right corner. The third goal was amazing as Oleg Blokhin cut past a defender and the keeper to score the goal. That season, Oleg Blokhin won the European footballer of the Year award, becoming the first Ukrainian footballer and second USSR footballer to achieve such a feat.

Lobanovskyi would go on to win 8 Soviet titles, 6 Soviet Cups, 2 European Cup Winners Cups and 1 European Super Cup in 15 years of dominance between 1974 to 1990. In that period, he managed USSR thrice, where they reached the finals of the European Championships where they were beaten by the Dutch and Marco Van Basten’s wonder goal. He also managed Soviet Union for the 1986 World Cup, where he chose almost his entire Dynamo Kyiv line-up. They were one of the favourites to win the World Cup but they were dumped out of it by Belgium in the second round in controversial circumstances.

The 1986 Cup Winners Cup emphasised everything which Lobanovskyi considered football. Kyiv won 3-0 against Athletico Madrid in the final. Oleg Blokhin, now 33, scored again, getting on the end of a beautiful pass over the defender by Yevtushenko and scored by lofting the ball over keeper. That goal was in Jonathan Wilson’s words,” rapid, simple, devastatingly co-ordinated – everything Lobanovskyi insisted football should be.”

In that period, many players like Oleg Blokhin, Rinat Dasaev, Vadym Yevtushenko and Pavlo Yakovenko flourished under his regime. The most astonishing fact about this is that he used mainly home grown talent and nurtured them into one of Europe’s best teams.

He left Dynamo after he lost many of his key players who left to play in Western Europe following perestroika. When he recalled them for the 1990 World Cup as coach of USSR, the players weren’t the tight knit group they once were and as a result Lobanovskyi failed to control his side, leading to the USSR finishing last in their group.

He had short lived careers as manager of UAE and Kuwait but was sacked after he could not achieve the results he was supposed to.

He returned to his first love, Dynamo in early 1996 to rescue the club and try and bring it back to former glory. Dynamo Kyiv had been thrown out of European competition by UEFA following attempts to bribe an official, and the club was also struggling in the league. Lobanovskyi came back and nurtured home grown talent. He managed some exceptional players including one of Ukraine’s finest strikers ever, Andriy Shevchenko. He had the same effect he had with Dynamo in his previous spell, leading them to 5 consecutive championships. He turned a struggling side into one of Europe’s best, making them reach the semi-finals of the UEFA Champions League defeating Barcelona twice en route.

However, Andriy Shevchenko departed for AC Milan in 1999, and with his departure, Dynamo never made the same impact again. He was made manager of the Ukraine national side in March 2000, but was sacked after the side lost a playoff to reach the 2002 World Cup to Germany.

Sadly, the one detail that Lobonovskyi was not paying attention to was his health. He was so unwell that he was unable to stand up for UEFA’s one minute remembrance for the 9/11 attacks just before Dynamo’s Champions League game against Borussia Dortmund. Things came to a standstill when Lobanovskyi suffered a stroke after Dynamo Kyiv’s win against FC Metalurh on 7th May. He passed away on 13th May following complications after a brain surgery.

More than 200,000 people appeared for his state funeral including star pupil Andriy Shevchenko and other alumni of the Dynamo Kyiv teams of the 70’s and 80’s. He was posthumously awarded the Hero of Ukraine award, Ukraine’s highest civilian award. Dynamo Kyiv’s stadium was renamed the Valeriy Lobanovskyi stadium in his honour.

His intent was to combine science and technology to create the perfect football team, a side in which no effort was wasted and every action of the players was monitored in order to ensure they would always perform to the peak of their potential. He is in many ways the prototype of the modern European manager and changed the way football thought forever.

Sturt Football Club chief medical officer David Martin treating more injuries in children


http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/sturt-football-club-chief-medical-officer-david-martin-treating-more-injuries-in-children/story-e6frea83-1226658079572


Articles like these should be in every clubroom of every club around the country.

The Analyst Behind Manchester City's Rapid Rise (Part 1)
SportsMoney |8/16/2012 @ 9:23AM
Zach Slaton, Contributor
I write statistically informed articles about MLS and the EPL

http://www.forbes.com/sites/zachslaton/2012/08/16/the-analyst-behind-manchester-citys-player-investments-part-1/


Gavin Fleig, far left. Literally the man behind the players who won last year's championship.

Gavin Fleig is more than just an analyst. He’s the Head of Performance Analysis at Manchester City Football Club, which means he’s both an analyst and a manager. When one speaks of his roll in player investment it goes beyond the hundreds of millions of pounds in player transfer fees and wages that the club has invested to go from 10th place the season before Sheikh Mansour’s purchase to Premier League champions four years later. It’s about the investment the club makes in the player as a whole person from youth academy to first team, a large part of which is supported by the performance analysis department.

The manner in which this interview is titled is not meant to short change the enormous efforts of everyone at Manchester City who contributed to such a fast rise in the Premier League ranks, as the Performance Analysis group and Gavin Fleig specifically are but one part of the club’s success. It is meant instead to recognize the unique role played by Fleig in the soccer analytics community in general and the club specifically. When Fleig joined the club in the summer of 2008 it was not yet purchased by Sheikh Mansour and Sven Goran-Erickson was still the manager. Fleig was coming into an organization eager to leverage statistical insight to improve its standing within the game, and he brought with him an impressive resume of success at Bolton and Newcastle. In a single three-month off-season in the summer of 2008 the whole plan changed with the purchase of the club by Sheikh Mansour. What Manchester City has been able to do in the four short years since – mold a collection of high priced stars into a cohesive team that won the club’s first championship in more than four decades, identify key areas for improvement year-over-year and develop training plans to implement them, and support City’s ambitious youth academy program as the club develops elements to sustain their success – has been supported in part by Gavin Fleig and the Performance Analysis department.

In this nearly 6,000 word, two-part interview Gavin Fleig provides insight into his years at Bolton, what he learned at his brief stint at Newcastle, explains Manchester City’s business and player development strategies that are supported by analytics, and communicates where he sees the future of soccer analytics going and how clubs can help jumpstart the use of soccer analytics in the public domain. Herewith is the interview of Gavin Fleig, Head of Performance Analysis at Manchester City Football Club…

Zach Slaton (ZS): First off, congratulations on both the championship and the wedding! I know it’s been a very busy summer for you.

Gavin Fleig (GF): Yeah, clearly my wedding was the most important one. That’s what I tell my wife.

ZS: That’s what you better keep telling her!

GF: She’s already warned me about that. She’s already told me that’s the priority.

ZS: Let’s just get into the questions I had for you. I’ve read a lot about your background and watched the Sloan conference your were involved in. Could you give me your background on your relationship with soccer analytics and performance analysis before arriving at Manchester City?

GF: My original background is a bit of an academic route. I did a lot of coaching when I was younger. I did my coaching courses and spent most of my teen years coaching. When I went to university I got engaged in my undergrad in a sports coaching degree. I did a lot of work in the sports analysis and analytics space, which at that time, twelve years ago, was quite in its infancy. It was based upon a lot of work done in football, squash, tennis, and racket sports. When I finished my undergraduate degree I did my final thesis in performance analysis, and as I finished there was a course in its first year, an MSc in performance analysis. It was the first of its type anywhere in Europe, so I went right into it. I spent a year full time doing that, and very fortunately found a position at Bolton Wanderers at the end of my first year. Bolton Wanderers at the time were the leaders in performance analysis and I got the first full time roll in the academy analysis setup focused on youth development. From Bolton I spent some time working in the youth development set up. There were a few changes in the internal organization where the roll in the first team opened up and I took it. That then led to the roll at Newcastle United with Sam Allardyce when he moved there. When Sam left Newcastle I shortly moved to Manchester City.

At the time, Simon Wilson was head of analysis at City, and was creating a new look department with specialist rolls. Historically in performance analysis departments you have one or two or three guys working all areas – pre-game, post-game, data analysis. A roll came up here where the focus was very much rather than committing only 30% of one’s time to each of those areas we had a [dedicated] specialist in each of those areas. I came in as pre-match analyst, focusing exclusively on pre-game preparation for the team and players. From there that role evolved just over two years ago into head of analysis when Simon moved on internally.

ZS: What was your time like working with Sam Allardyce at Bolton, and how did it compare to other analytics work that was going on at the time?

GF: It was good. Not forgetting that when I moved there the analysis department was already established. Sam Allardyce and Phil Brown, who was first team coach at the time, were instrumental at that time to allow the department to add value to the work they were doing. I think that probably the biggest thing at the time was that Bolton was an organization that had a real vision and identity as to where they were at and everyone had a voice towards their success.

The staff was really such a young and enthusiastic group of guys, a lot fresh out of university. They had new ideas and wanted to make a difference. They were hard working, and they weren’t ingrained into a certain way of working. It was almost everyone’s first go in professional football in some senses. [Sam was] a manager who had a real open mindset and allowed people’s opinions to be put forward and use those in terms of his team development. In my opinion it was the most advanced department at that time, and certainly had the greatest impact on the team in the way in which Sam and his coaches embraced analysis. They built it into their game model, and allowed it to contribute towards his development of scouting and recruitment, working with sports science and medical departments in terms of tracking players’ fitness levels and availability. It was a good place to be.

ZS: Your time at Newcastle was short. Was their anything you picked up in your time there, or was it more transitionary in nature compared to the other experiences you’ve had?

GF: It was a short period – it was eight or nine months. I had been at Bolton for a number of years and Sam had been there for seven or eight years and built a philosophy and a way of working which everybody bought into. It was the club. It was the identity and how we worked. Everyone outside of the club even knew that. It was such a streamlined approach to everything.

The real challenge in going to Newcastle was there was a group of staff that went up there – about six of us I think that went in total. The lesson I learned from that is that it’s very difficult to bring new ideas into [an organization] overnight. What might be three or four additional pieces of work you introduce over three or four departments means that suddenly the players are being introduced to ten or eleven different types of day-to-day activities and ways of preparing for a game. It’s a lot of information. You have to be willing to say “let’s slowly start to introduce new ways of working and new ideas.” Certainly that experience helped at City, where it came to working for two different managers here. It allowed me and the rest of the analysis team to adapt and understand the best way how. Although sometimes you may have a concept as to how you want to work, you can’t force your work upon people. You can’t force your way in which you see game preparation and analysis. You have to take people on that journey.

ZS: When you went to City they had not been bought yet by Sheikh Mansour, correct?

GF: Correct. I joined in June 2008, and I think the takeover was in mid-September.

ZS: When that happened you came in under one group of assumptions and ownership group, or was it well understood that you were transitioning into something new because they had already been shopping the club?

GF: When I came in, I left Newcastle in February/March timeframe of that year. Sven Goran-Erikson was manager [at Manchester City] at the time. Even Alexander MacIntosh, who was CEO and is now at Fulham, [was running Manchester City]. It was a complete management and ownership transition. It changed at all levels.

When I came into the club there was an opportunity to specialize in that one area – pre-game analysis. Everything changed over the summer. I remember going on my summer holidays, and Sven Goran-Erikson left in May. I had met him three or four times, but I spent most of my time between March and May doing project work from afar. I went away in June thinking, ‘OK, who is the new manager coming in?’ When it was Mark Hughes it was fantastic, then immediately after the takeover happened and the direction of the club had changed. It’s evolved over the last four years to where it is now. Certainly it’s not why I joined Manchester City in the first
ZS: How would you explain your roll inside City today?

GF: My role here is head of performance analysis. Within that we have a really extensive support structure for our coaching curriculum and our coaches across all age groups. We have four full time analysts (including myself) that work in and around the first team, and underneath that we have six analysts that work around youth development. We provide age-appropriate learning from 21’s down to under-9, dependent upon the learning age of those players. My role is really to oversee that, and certainly in the last couple of years it’s been working closer to other departments in order to really help collect the right information and run project/analytics work that will help take us forward. Not only from our team, but also as a business as well. I think that’s really where it’s probably evolved the most in the last couple of years. As football clubs across Europe become more intelligent with the information they’ve got and try to make smarter decisions there is a greater need for collection and sharing of more objective information.

ZS: What were the key enablers that allowed you to evolve a statistical or analytical mindset across the three clubs for which you’ve worked, and how did you approach people that may have been skeptical of such mindsets when you joined?

GF: For me it’s all about value added. It’s about the people you can support across the business and the coaches and players in the football department to make smart decisions. Certainly at Bolton I was lucky that there was an accepting group of people. Mike Forde worked there at the time. Dave Fallows, Sam Allardyce, Mark Taylor. These guys were very open to new thinking. There was no real techniques or approaches that needed to be made.

At City, again, it was Simon Wilson who had a background in performance analysis and had been at the club for a number of years. I think the door was already open. The fact that the analysis department was backed to create its own department, its own budget, its own resources and worked along the football and the business side. Skepticism only really exists in a form of a lack of understanding. People’s skepticism only often comes from bad experiences.

One thing that we do is that we don’t try to push our work on people. We understand the space where people need support. There’s that awareness across the club. We find ways of working to actually add value to other people’s roles. One thing I would always ask is ‘What player doesn’t want to be better? What manager doesn’t want more information going into a game? What business doesn’t want more information to make smart decisions?’ It really is about understanding people’s needs and delivering on them. That’s kind of the way we go forward, and challenging the way people have worked previously. We do that in the formative stage, and then help them along that path if you think there’s a better way of working.

ZS: You seem to have a very comprehensive approach going all the way down into your youth ranks. You have a very clear understanding of the statistics, but how do you make this material understandable for a player who is very young or may not have gone to university?

GF: From the youth side it is about developing players. It’s an educational environment. These guys are still learning the game. Every level, whether it’s nine-to-fourteen, twelve-to-fourteen, fifteen-to-sixteen, or eighteen-to-twenty one, which are the categories we break it down into. The players go through different transitions and phases of their development.

In the early ages from our analysis point of view we use our technology to build excitement and enthusiasm about the player’s game. We use the unique content in-and-around the first team to get players to have a sense of ownership about the football club. It’s very much about a fun and interactive environment.

When you move into the ages of twelve-to-fourteen it becomes about decision making. It’s about player’s movement from what is a 4v4 to an 8v8 to an 11v11 environment. It’s about making these players feel comfortable in the different spaces in which they’re playing the game. It’s about helping them understand the differences in formation of play and how their role differs within those different systems. A player who might have defensive characteristics might not get pigeonholed as a defender at the age of twelve. They have to have a broader understand of all the aspects of the game. Our goal for the analysis department there is to work alongside the coaches to enhance the education.

When we start getting into fifteen-to-sixteen and eighteen-to-twenty one that’s where we get into the use of more statistical and analytical information. It’s there to support player’s development, almost to act as a benchmark to let them know where they’re at. The top line statistics and a lot of the third party data you can collect is very generic and maybe doesn’t really relate to that player’s development. What we try and do is whilst we’re capturing the elements of the player’s game and their need to develop, we create our own unique database to support that. Maybe we identify a player’s need to improve the way he receives the ball across his chest during a switch in play. There’s no data that you can collect from a third party resource like an Opta, Prozone, Amisco, or StatDNA. The more unique data comes from your own collection and coding for analysis. So for the fifteens-to-twenty ones the data is more individualized for their own development program so that, we hope, gets them into the first team.

ZS: I don’t know if you read The Blizzard at all, but there was a good article by John Sinnott that profiled similar approaches. The educational component of the player in the youth system has the added benefit of making them not just a more complete player but also a more complete person.

GF: Our football club as a five-pillared approach to everything that we do around the players and business. The areas we focus on in football are: performance analysis, coaching, sports science and medicine, scouting and recruitment, and player care and in the youth system this focus is on player education.

Our philosophy and vision as a football club is about four areas. “Team evolution” which is about how our team evolves over the years allowing us to be sustainable and to win every competition that we enter every year. Our second focus is bringing homegrown players into the first team. Our third area is maximizing talent value through managing our assets effectively. The fourth area we focus on is integrating our business and football. Although we appreciate that we’re about getting players into our first team and winning trophies, there’s a holistic approach to player development and we certainly appreciate the value of areas such as player education and performance analysis. We’re trying to make players more self reflective, smarter players, players who are more responsible for their own actions. Ultimately, if football players don’t make it here we have a responsibility to help them get a career in the game whether that’s through playing somewhere else or coaching. We try to create a framework around the players that allows them to do that.

The interview is continued in Part 2 where Gavin talks about what Moneyball means at Manchester City, the career path for those interested in professional soccer analytics, a specific example where match data helped the club improve their goal scoring capabilities, how clubs like City can help push the discussion of soccer analytics in the public domain, and what models and frameworks he sees being developed over the next five years.

SportsMoney |8/16/2012 @ 9:26AM |3,493 views
The Analyst Behind Manchester City's Rapid Rise (Part 2)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/zachslaton/2012/08/16/the-analyst-behind-manchester-citys-player-investments-part-2/
Zach Slaton, Contributor

This is the second part of a two part interview with Gavin Fleig, Head of Performance Analysis at Manchester City Football Club. Part one can be found here.

Zach Slaton (ZS): When people talk about sports in general they often use the term “analytics” interchangeably with the term “Moneyball”, which is specifically about finding hidden talent on a limited budget. We know City has spent a lot of money on players to build up its squad, but you also can’t “buy stupid”. How do analytics play a role at such a large club that spends money like City has over the last few years?

Gavin Fleig (GF): First and foremost, Moneyball was a huge success story at Oakland. I think it’s often a term used wrongly in football. It’s one that’s thrown around to put everything under one roof. For me Moneyball really is a concept that at that time was about undervalued talent and breaking down a sport into its analytical components to really understand what winning baseball games was really about. It’s not one size fits all for me. It’s about work that involves smart decisions and the use of data and information that historically hasn’t been available or where decisions had been made previously around subjective assumption and people’s experience. Of course that still has value, but every club is different. The way you use your data and information is fit for purpose.

I think at Manchester City you touched on the way in which we’ve built our squad. There has been a lot of money to spend. Now, undervalued talent was the focus of Moneyball in baseball in that particular example. Moneyball here would be about how we have used and continue to use our resources to find better players, identify the differences between those players, how they will fit into our model, and how much value they will bring to our business as well. Our focus in the last three years therefore has not necessarily been finding undervalued talent, although that is an extremely important element of our future going forward given our business desire to operate within our means, invest smartly and of course financial compliance. But in order for us to get the club from where they were to where they are now in four years it required a certain level of investment in the top players around Europe. I think we’ve done that successfully.

ZS: In your interview with Howard Hamilton at the Soccermetrics blog you mention the diversity of your performance analysis talent that covers the youth development program. How do you recruit for this job? If someone were looking to get into this field is that considered an entry-level job, or do you put people directly into senior or first team roles?

GF: That’s an interesting question. There’s been a real boom in recent years in the UK with universities running courses around analysis, and there’s already a single-minded direction that says, “If you want to work in analysis you need these qualifications or this level of experience.” It really isn’t like that. Within our department we have such a huge, diverse skillset in our staff. We have people working in our youth development structure who have been teachers and coaches in their background. Their skills are really about working with players one on one and developing them. We’ve then developed some of their analytical skills so that they can take advantage of the technologies required. Ultimately, their sports science background allows them to understand where analytics and objective information can support player development. We’ve got people who have been purely coaches before, and they’ve moved into a role where they’re now supporting our team’s pre-game preparation. There’s myself who has an analytical background from a university perspective and game knowledge through coaching. I am not a statistician, nor would I ever claim to be a statistician, but I am getting there. We identify gaps like that and we then work with people who do understand the deeper statistical models and how they can get the best use out of the data you’ve got.

There’s no really set path to me. I think every club will be slightly different. I know a lot of the clubs across the Premier League have models where performance analysts come through university programs. They have experience from lower league clubs or volunteer experience, and they work their way through the ranks. We’re in an industry now where every Premier League club has full time analysts. Every Premier League club has a performance analysis department. Actually it’s now even in the Championship and League One, we’re starting to see the emergence of performance analysts at every football club. Everyone’s route into that is different, and it ultimately depends on the club’s value they place on that as a discipline and the skills they’re looking for in those people.

ZS: Your work with the club was profiled in the second edition of Soccernomics via a visit from Simon Kuper. I did an interview with him earlier this summer, and he stated he really views match data as the cutting edge of soccer analytics. Can you describe how match data has helped Manchester City during their rapid rise, or maybe a specific match or two last year where you used match data to your advantage?

GF: I can go maybe 18 months back for a good example of how match data helps. We talked before about selling the value of analytics. A couple of years ago when Mark [Hughes] was here we did a piece of work at the end of the season. It basically identified that we had scored one set piece goal in 21 games towards the end of the season. Anyone who does research around football that around 28% to a third of goals come from set pieces in the Premier League if you exclude penalties. That’s one area [in which] we felt we were underperforming significantly when we looked at the numbers. We ran some analysis across all of the European leagues. We looked at around 400 to 500 corners with goals scored across Europe, and put forward a research piece to the coaching staff and manager at the time saying, “You know, we looked at this one area and we think we’re underperforming. Here’s some evidence and data we’ve looked at across the leagues, and some recommendations we would like to pass forward about more effective methods of taking corner kicks.” It was about how to increase our probability of creating goal-scoring opportunities.

We created a two or three level piece of work for that. There was a very number driven, tabular, Excel-based research report that as an analysis department we picked the bones out of. We scaled that down and presented it to the coaching staff to show them the process and the outputs. They agreed to it and went forward to give it a go and change the things we were doing. We then presented it to the players in a video format and pulled out the two or three key points we wanted them to focus on. That evolved into some evidence based coaching and practice techniques where they worked on some new strategies. That next season we scored nine goals in the first fifteen games from corners. That for me is one of the best examples that shows how the use of data can really help drive the success of the team in some areas and one I have used before so don’t mind telling it.

think some of the challenges we’ve got if we’re going to talk about player evaluation and really understanding player performance is the data that is available. The accuracy of player evaluation and from a recruitment perspective the transferability of their skills into the Premier League is still really difficult because of the data that is available. A lot of it is so dependent upon the teammates that you’re playing with and the opposition you’re playing against. Also, the way in which the coach of those players is asking them to play [has an impact]. If you’re a winger playing for a team and you’re going to be judged analytically on how successful your performance is, the very top line data that previously has been used to make judgments and assessments on players is so dependent on the guys around you. If you’re a winger and you’re playing with a poor striker who doesn’t score many goals you’re ability to create assists is going to be pretty slim because the guy you’re passing the ball to is never going to score. A lot of clubs have moved a long way beyond this simple approach now knowing its flaws.

I think there needs to be a lot of work around the data that’s available, and more so with the operational definitions. I read a very interesting piece from Graham MacAree who you may or may not have heard of who lives in the States. He did a piece last year on the Chelsea/Benefica game which I thought was fantastic. It really highlights some of the challenges in the data that we’ve got now and outlines that we need to really understand the data if we are to use it. Kalou was on the edge of the opposition’s penalty box. He’d beat a player up to the byline, pulled the cross back across the box, and 99 times out of 100 Ramires would have scored. Now he didn’t get a touch on the ball, so from a data point of view and from an operational definition point of view because Ramires never technically had a shot Kalou never created a chance. He never created a key pass, and obviously therefore got completely discredited for the work he did to set that chance up. In the same game Mikel made a headed clearance of a free kick in his own penalty area in the 90th minute. The ball bounced about 30 yards away from the goal. Meirelles got his toe it, beat two players to the ball, ran the length of the pitch and stuck it in the top corner of the goal. Mikel got credit for an assist, which you could argue was significantly less impactful than Kalou was at the other end of the pitch. There are actually other measures now which would credit Kalou with an ‘intended chance created’ and that really highlights how the industry needs to continuously look to go forward and evolve.

This is why some clubs are still really relying on subjective data collected, which is so closely linked to the club philosophy. The club is in control of the data and can create their own metrics around team performance.

ZS: I know that Graham emphasizes the network-based analysis of soccer. He just wrote a three-piece series on applying Moneyball and Jamesian theory to soccer, but we need a lot better statistics before we get there. He also highlighted Sarah Rudd’s work a bit too from the StatDNA design competition. It’s a consistent theme from Graham, and I think it’s good that he keep’s pushing it.

GF: I agree. We’ve got a close relationship with a European university, and there have been a few pieces of work that we’ve done with them. We’re looking into the patterns and the relationships between the players via the X and Y data. I think that’s where a lot of the future lies. The X and Y data gives you a positional sense and contextualization around the pitch. I think only then will we be able to take player analysis and team analysis to the next level. That’s certainly one of the areas we continue to look at.

ZS: It seems like we’ve got a huge appetite here in the States for statistics and analytics. You’ve pointed out that analysis of the game is very data intensive, even to the point of going beyond what groups like ProZone and Opta can provide. Beyond using analytics at the club level, how can we get the use of this data expanded in the public domain? We’ve had some challenges at conferences like Sloan given the lack of publicly available data, so how do we push the value added discussion in the public domain?

GF: Interesting you should say that. We’re currently working with one of the data providers now to try and resolve that. I’d like to touch base with you in a couple of weeks to launch that.

It is a frustration of mine. I’ve said it before – the clubs are responsible for taking this forward at the minute because the data is just not there. I know there were a couple of organizations that pushed some of their data out there. I know that Infostrada do it a bit to push some of their data out there. The thing is that I really believe in the way that the NBA developed their analytical framework. That’s to allow the people out there with the skills – the bloggers, the university students, the lecturers, the consultants – all those guys to go out there, do this work, and really snowball this forward. The reality is most clubs have a performance analysis department, but the very demands of the day-to-day requirements around the team, if you playing around a 40 to 58 game season, it’s real tough for clubs to spend real time developing and working analytics. Also, the reluctance is there to share it with the outside world. There are a few clubs in the Premier League you could point to that focus more of their attention on taking analytics forward. For me, I really do think that the availability of the data is something that’s going to really take this forward.

There’s something that data providers can do, which is open the doors and allow their data out there. It may take something like the Premier League outright buying the data and sharing it publicly. They currently have deals with certain data providers. There doesn’t seem to be a desire to push out just yet.

In the UK market I don’t know how much the public are interested in the data if I am truthful. I think they’re becoming more interested. You can start to see it live on TV and in newspaper articles in the way that games are getting reported. It’s still at a very granular level and any bad examples of it’s use really discredit the use of analytics within the public domain, and I think people’s perception is very skeptical because of that. What it needs is more intelligent use in the media, it needs to be used smarter, and it needs people in clubs and people like you continuing to push the value of it.

One of the things we’re looking to do before the start of the season is to open the doors and give something back to the analytics community

ZS: Sounds great, and I’d certainly like to push it. Attending last year’s Sloan conference I felt like after watching the videos from the previous conferences that we really started to peter out on new discussion and information.

Final question. You’ve been in this field for a decade now. I’ve been writing about it for two to two-and-a-half years. It’s grown by leaps and bounds every season. I know it’s dangerous to provide any outlook because of how quickly it’s growing, but where do you see the movement going in terms of the data the clubs will be looking at or the models they’ll be developing in the next 5-year window.

GF: Good question. I know you read the piece that Howard did a few weeks ago. My thoughts would remain the same around that in terms of where I see it going. I think currently the market trends within football are that “financial compliance” is important at the moment. “Moneyball” is a buzzword. I think they’ll start to use their data to work in those domains. Scouting and recruitment is where the biggest advancement will be in the football clubs. They’ll use their data because it’s lived there for a number of years. It’s never really been reported. Certainly at Bolton a number of years ago data was being used for talent ID, but no one really cared back then. Chelsea have been doing a lot of good work for a long time with Mike Forde there and Steve Houston who is now at Hamburg. I think it will become better known what’s going on, and I think it will be a space that develops quickest across all of the clubs.

There’s a lot of consultants out there looking to help football clubs. There’s a lot of data providers who are providing platforms and solutions to manage and house their data. It will be interesting to see how that evolves. It’s a challenging domain as you know, and one in which we’ve lived in for the last few years here. Part of our biggest challenge is understanding what doesn’t work before you can start to utilize what does work into a football club. I think Damien Comolli got a hard rap at Liverpool really because of the media’s interpretation of what Moneyball is or what it was meant to be. I think the more that the use of data and objective information becomes publicly known, the easier it is to be there to scrutinize and to knock down.

Let’s be honest, it’s an evolving field. How clubs use it, and how much influence clubs allow it to have on their future direction and strategy is entirely up to them and how stable they believe the information is. For me at this stage it’s a tool that gets used to support decisions. It always will be a tool to support a bigger process, and that will continue to grow across a number of the clubs. I think there are some great opportunities for clubs in the lower areas of the Premier League were budgets are smaller, finances are tighter, and commercial revenues limitations with Financial Fair Play coming on board mean they’re going to have to be smarter with their money. I think you’ll see the emergence of a lot more analytics being used at those clubs. You can already see it happening at clubs like Fulham where they’re making strides forward.

The data is one area that will be a focus point. StatDNA are a company that for 12 to 18 months that have been looking at taking data to the next level. They’re using positional data and understanding different contexts within the game. For example if there’s a shot on target they want to know where it is on the pitch, how far away it is, how many people are between the shooter and the goal keeper, and really understanding the definition and the context of the data. They will continue to grow, and a number of other data providers are looking at their operational definitions and the data they provide. I think the X and Y data, which I touched on before, is a really key element. It’s people getting a grasp of that and understanding what value can be added by understanding the positional aspects of the data. That brings a whole new level of analysis that can be done. The NBA is going through that right now with their tracking cameras installed. I know in a few of the conversations I’ve had with the NBA clubs over the last few years they were kind of crying out for the data, and they were ready to use it knowing it was the next level. Football’s been sitting on this data for ten years and never used it, and that’s why we have tried to step forward and understand what that means the last couple of years. We’re still a way off, but I think we can get there soon.

http://www.soccermetrics.net/our-team

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/soccer/12/17/blizzard.sinnott.mental/index.html

http://worldsoccertalk.com/podcasts/2010/mike-forde-interview-epl-talk-podcast-34992/

http://www.soccerbythenumbers.com/2010/09/clean-sheets-and-wins-is-there.html

http://performance.fourfourtwo.com/au/experts/damien-comolli

Neville confirms retirement
http://m.skysports.com/article/football//8766061
Video Former England, Manchester United and Everton midfielder Phil Neville has announced his retirement from football - Sky Sports' Martin Tyler pays tribute.
Former England, Manchester United and Everton midfielder Phil Neville has announced his retirement from football, bringing to an end an illustrious 19-year career.
The 36-year-old won the Champions League and six Premier League titles with Manchester United, and won 59 England caps.
He announced in April he was to leave Everton after eight years at the club, but he has now confirmed that he will not be adding to his 505 Premier League appearances.
"I was speaking to Robbie Fowler about this the other week and he hasn't officially retired," Neville, currently coaching with the England U21 team at the European Championship in Israel, said.
"Three weeks ago, everyone in the world seemed to be retiring. I thought 'I'm not jumping on this bandwagon'.
"I just wanted it to be a smooth, quiet turnover. I didn't want that.
"When I made a statement that I was leaving Everton, everywhere I went I seemed to be getting 'oh you've been brilliant'. I didn't like it. I didn't want to be seen as an attention-seeker.
"In my heart, I knew that I wouldn't be playing again - at any level. I just wanted to drift away.
"The biggest thing I will miss is July 4 when Everton are due back for pre-season training. I loved that day. I lived for it, getting back with the lads.
"My wife, she knows what I'm like. She's saying 'for God's sake, don't have any more time off!'"
Neville has media work lined up and he will be a pundit at next year's World Cup, but he is being strongly tipped with a move to join up with former Everton boss David Moyes at Manchester United.
"I do enjoy the media side but I want to work, I want to coach, I want to get more hours on the grass," he said.
"I have got two paths - one to go into the media, the other to go into coaching and management. I have got offers from both. I will sit down at the end of the tournament."
He is currently in the process of finishing his UEFA A licence - a course he approaches with some advice from Sir Alex Ferguson in the back of his mind.
"He gave us a great lesson when we were doing my B licence, with Roy Keane, Gary, Nicky Butt and Ryan Giggs," he said.
"When you are a footballer at Manchester United, you are probably looking for a bit of a short-cut or can we get someone in to do the sessions for us, sign it off, and he gave us not a rollicking, but said 'no fast track to coaching or management'.
"'But we've got to go to Lilleshall for two weeks in the summer'. He said: 'Get it done'.
"'Can you phone the FA and ask if we can leave a couple of days early?' 'No, I want you to stay longer'.
"It was the biggest jolt that we had. We were thinking, we are Manchester United. We know everything. He said: 'Actually you don't'.
"There's no short cut to being a manager or coach. He sowed the seed early on in our coaching career."

http://www.oregonyouthsoccer.org/assets/coaches/Trends_in_Modern_Football_UEFA.pdf

http://www.footballtechniqueschool.com.au/downloads/French_Developmental_System.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p48ZbEFmQLA

http://www.aefca.eu/sites/default/files/AEFCA%20Symposium%202011_Praesentation_Willi%20Ruttensteiner.pdf

http://assets.ngin.com/attachments/document/0034/9442/liverpoolfcacademycoachingmanual.pdf

http://www.slideshare.net/MaxRogers2/uefa-b-licence-assignment-one-two-max-rogers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXWq34XByjc&feature=player_embedded#!

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/06/how-spreadsheet-wielding-geeks-are-taking-over-football


LInked this article to here as suggested to me by another person.

A few years back there was a coaching seminar arranged in Lismore, Barcelona soccer schools attended but wouldn't allow a copy of the presentation.
Well the yanks recently got them to give them a copy

http://soccertraining.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/fcb-escola-coaches-seminar-day-1.pdf

http://soccertraining.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/fcbescola-day-2.pdf

This is a deliberate double post since I think this is a worthwhile listen:

http://www.tsn.ca/soccer/story/?id=425791&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

http://www.tsn.ca/blogs/jason_de_vos/?id=425882

http://www.tsn.ca/blogs/jason_de_vos/?id=425963

http://www.tsn.ca/blogs/jason_de_vos/?id=426015

If we want players to be more confident why is so much of the junior or emerging players interaction with senior players about crushing their confidence?