TJ Whalan, I think this is new from earlier this year!

I don't think we did this in the C Licence.

I wonder if Steelinho, Saftaasi, or anyone else on here who has done a recent C lIcence can remember this?

I know this stuff from teaching, but not football coaching courses.

Youth Football Development
A random mixture of postings from coaching sessions and ideas to sharing information on the future of youth football, from The FA perspective, linked to my role in the game.

03 September, 2013
http://youthfootballdevelopment.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/being-perceived-as-talented-is-great.html?spref=tw

Being perceived as talented is great, but it comes with some challenges...

We have a habit of labelling things in modern society and we like to do this; frequently when making comparisons of one against another. They are often subjective by nature, “I think Messi was better than Pele”, and on many occasions, never even something that can be quantified. But this extends from harmless pub chat to labelling in schools and sport – “this young person is talented or gifted” (whatever they mean) and therefore better than others. But what is the impact of being labelled this as a young person? Too often we do not see the impact through their eyes and what it actually may mean to them. Let’s look at this using football as the example but you could replace football with any sport or indeed school subject.

1. From an early age being labelled as talented increases expectations and they come to realise that when playing games the pressure is on them entirely; because they are talented and others aren’t. More becomes expected every game and can build and build.
2. The knock-on effect for their own self-perception can become dangerous if others around them are deemed less talented by themselves or adults, bordering on developing an air of arrogance in many as that comparison kicks in.
3. Parents can have inflated expectations, and whilst that child may be happy just playing football with their friends, the parents habitually expect massive things and game winning performances every week.
4. Internal pressure on their own ability creates added weight with the child feeling that if they don’t produce these performances every week that their parents will stop loving them. This can stem from positive feedback only coming from a positive performance. This is produced from within but is a dangerous feeling to have for a young person and is linked to causes of stress and anxiety.
5. Being talented in one sport leads to frequently being talented in others, using athleticism and game skills as the core underpinning of skill application. However, this may not always be the case, it could be domain specific. Expectations from teachers and peers because of a talent in one sport can lead to increased pressure when playing others.
6. Sibling rivalry can have a major effect in a family dynamic. One sibling that gets praised for being mediocre in a sport (“trying their hardest”) leads to even greater pressure for the talented sibling to perform every week. There are no allowances for anything different.
7. The constant need for approval and basing their own self-worth on what other people think of them is a dangerous place to be. It can lead to greater anxiety, because they never fail at anything, and don’t want to let others down. Managing this carefully is vital.
8. In fact, the opportunity to ‘learn to fail’ is sometimes missed because of this pursuit of excellence. Failing is a huge part of learning and feeling like its ok to shoot for the moon and sometimes miss is essential. However, we need to create an environment that makes it ok for this ‘miss’ to happen.
9. A feeling of jealousy from others towards them is something that is often passed by and helping young people deal with the feelings and comments from peers is something we can help them manage.
10. Constantly managing high expectations is incredibly difficult. There are two options; if they perform great, that is expected, and if they don’t that is a failure. It is either neutral or negative.
11. The journey towards becoming an elite footballer is incredibly difficult and can also give a false sense of security. Being labelled as ‘talented’ from a young age just means they are talented today, not necessarily in five or ten years time. Helping them understand the journey and its challenges is important.
12. Equally, young people are often deemed talented within their peer group, but what if that peer group is below average? Compared to their peers they are talented, but put them in the wider world and they become average. Having had a build up of expectations and self-worth about being talented to then see this come shattering down is difficult and tough to manage and internalise as a child.

The role of a teacher or coach is to help the child; help them understand the nature of the dynamics above and what it may mean to be talented (today) compared to your peers. Emphasising the need for hard work, recognising that it is ok not to be amazing every game and developing a growth mindset (see Dweck, 2006) in young people is essential life skills to help them with ongoing challenges.

The journey towards long-term talent is never easy and dealing with disappointment is inevitable. Helping them understand this may come in different forms is important; this could be getting de-selected from a professional football club, not being selected by the manager to play or dealing with a bad injury. But it is going to happen at some stage – we don’t always win.

As a parent, regardless of their performances, achievements or otherwise, they just want to know you still love them.

http://8by8mag.com/this-could-get-messy/

This Could Get Messy
Posted by Eight by Eight | October 18, 2013 | Issue 01 | No Comments

Unlike Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, Pep Guardiola didn’t have his audience at “Hello.” But he did have them at “Guten Tag, Grüß Gott.” All it took for the 42-year-old—on his first day running FC Bayern Munich—was to address the more than 250 journalists in the Allianz Arena in very passable German, garnished with a Bavarian idiom. The writers marveled at his command of the notoriously difficult language, they laughed at his self-effacing joke (“All the answers for the most important questions are pre-prepared—if I don’t know the questions, I’m kaput!”), and above all, they appreciated the two key messages Guardiola sought to get across. First, he’s an obsessive worker determined to arm himself with the communication tools every successful manager needs. According to his brother Pere, Guardiola studied German “like a madman” since accepting Bayern’s job offer just before Christmas.

Even more important, however, Guardiola’s sometimes slightly ropey German spoke volumes about his humility. No one would have been too upset if “the world’s greatest coach” (according to Bayern executive-board chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge) had conducted his first presser in English or Spanish, but doing it in the local language drove home the point that he is determined to adapt to his new surroundings.

His low-key speech that day was in marked contrast to the rock-star fever that had gripped Munich (and a hefty chunk of the rest of Germany) before his unveiling. “Buenos dias, Messias!” wrote local tabloid Abendzeitung, with a mixture of irony and admiration. Never before had so much hype greeted an incoming Bundes-liga manager, and Bayern’s historic, treble-winning season only amplified expectations. Everyone seemed to be wondering if Guardiola, the man who in just four years made Barcelona the world’s best and most aesthetically pleasing team, could usher in an era of European dominance in Munich.
Guardiola was extremely careful to avoid promising that level of success in the press conference and, in the process, made himself seem to be quite a bit smaller than he really is. “It’s a gift to be here, a gift that Bayern even thought I could be here,” he said with a smile, adding that he had taken the job because of Bayern’s “special history” and “high quality of players.” His modesty is genuine, close friends and confidants insist, and they point to his background by way of explanation. Guardiola is the son of a bricklayer from Santpedor, a small town in the Catalan hinterlands. “The stereotypical attitude of Catalans … [is] pessimism,” writes his biographer, Guillem Balagué, in the excellent Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning. Maybe that’s a little strong as far as Guardiola is concerned, since he won every conceivable trophy as a novice manager at Barça. But there’s no question that he’s prone to self-doubt of the healthy kind. More than that, “his doubt is methodical,“ wrote Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Spanish correspondent Oliver Meiler, “he was never sure. Not even after many titles. And that’s one of the reasons for his success: the perennial, manic, at times unnerving search for ways to make football, the unpredictable game, plannable.”

Guardiola understands that players like the irrepressible maverick Thomas Müller would be ill-served by a slavish reproduction of tiki-taka.

When he finished his playing career in 2006, at age 35, Guardiola went on holiday in Argentina. He wanted to meet César Luis Menotti and Marcelo Bielsa, two coaches he admired. He hoped to learn from them before becoming a manager. This unpretentious inquisitiveness has remained with him. It’s natural for him to imitate, copy, and absorb everything. His art has been to take all his influences and bring them together in his own superior concept.
Xavier Sala-i-Martín, a professor of economics at Columbia University, has an interesting analogy. He got to know Guardiola’s modus operandi while he was working as FC Barcelona’s treasurer from 2004 to 2010. “Look at Zara and H&M, the two big European clothes chains,” he says. Both have similar business plans: fashionable clothes at affordable prices. But H&M produces their stock as cheaply as possible in great volumes. Half a million yellow pairs of trousers, for example. Zara, a Spanish chain, produces smaller quantities—say, 20,000 pairs of yellow trousers. Production is more expensive, but the stock in the shops changes every week. “If Madonna wears a purple pair of trousers in a concert, there will be purple trousers in the Zara shops the next week,” says Sala-i-Martín, “whereas the H&M trousers are still yellow. Guardiola is Zara. He surprises his opponents by making small changes to his tactics each week. An economist would call it flexibility. Pep stands for continuous innovation.”

Some would scoff at this description and point out that no team in recent history has been as uncompromising in their approach as Pep’s Barcelona, the grandmasters of tiki-taka. It’s a fallacy to think that Barça was always playing the same way, insists Sala-i-Martín, because small, incremental variations of their tactics made them untouchable. Guardiola pushed the envelope until only two defenders were left behind in their own half. “Suicidal!” screamed the traditionalists. These days, most top teams have copied that strategy, including Jügen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund and Jupp Heynckes’s Bayern, the two German teams that contested the 2013 Champions League final at Wembley. Pushing players forward enabled Guardiola’s team to win the ball in the final third of the opposition half; they defended in attack. Getting to the opponent’s goal was quicker that way. This “high-pressing” has made football faster, more attractive. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Guardiola has modernized the game.

Many assume Guardiola is out to replicate this winning formula in Bavaria, but he insists he will “adapt 100 percent” to his players and that only “small changes” would be made. Bayern successfully combined elements of Louis van Gaal’s possession game and spells of high-pressing in 2012–13, but at times they were very direct and muscular. Guardiola understands that such players as the irrepressible maverick Thomas Müller, a man who defies categorization, or Arjen Robben, the narcissistic winger, would be ill-served by a slavish reproduction of tiki-taka.
Guardiola was heavily influenced by van Gaal and Johan Cruyff—winning with style and beauty is important for him, but he lacks the two Dutchmen’s dogmatic streak. His most important tactical decision at Barcelona offers a good insight. “Pep Guardiola changed the history of football on May 1, 2009,” says Sala-i-Martín. There was no game that day, but Guardiola was spending hours locked away in his windowless office in the bowels of the Camp Nou stadium, watching videos of Real Madrid, the next evening’s opponent. He stopped the DVD, rewound, played it again. There it was! The best moment in the life of a manager, Guardiola once said, is the moment you find a weakness of your opponent that your team can exploit.

Guardiola called Lionel Messi, his small winger. “Come to the stadium, I have to show you something,” he said. When Guardiola played him the DVD, Messi got it instantly: Whenever Real Madrid attacked the man in possession in midfield, their defenders didn’t push up. There was a gap of 25 meters between defense and midfield.

The next step, in hindsight, seems obvious. Messi started the Clásico against Barça’s archrivals in his customary position on the left but then switched deep inside as a hidden striker, or “false number nine,” as football experts would later call the role. Messi proved unstoppable. Barcelona won 6-2 and celebrated a historic result. Even more important was Messi’s transition into a “secret” striker, which turned a very good Argentine international into the world’s best player. Since that evening, he’s been voted the footballer of the year every season. Guardiola couldn’t have known it would work out like that; he was simply looking for the best strategy for a particular match.

Barcelona’s breathtaking football made Guardiola the most coveted coach in European football, so why did he chose Bayern rather than a club in the English Premier League? Joan Laporta, Barcelona’s former president, thinks that Guardiola mistrusts the setup of nouveau-riche clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City, which are controlled by billionaires. “Bayern is not a club with a rich owner who has made his millions outside football and who might decide from one day to the next to go home again,” says Laporta.
Guardiola is not naive; perhaps he’s not even a romantic. He knows that football is big business these days. But growing up in Barcelona, he was taught that a club should be “mès que un club,” as Barça’s motto has it, greater than the football team it employs. During Franco’s dictatorship, Barça was a stronghold of Catalan resistance. In the stadium, thousands could speak the forbidden Catalan; Real Madrid, the perceived representatives of the state, could be insulted and beaten. “Barça is the Catalan army without weapons,“ wrote Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. To this day, Barcelona aspire to stress the otherness of Catalonia, be that by having many local players for the side or by playing the game in a special way.

The ability to identify with your team remains an important part of being a football fan in the 21st century. While Barcelona’s social relevance has a basis in history, marketing and branding experts are busy creating identities elsewhere. Bayern have had a head start in that respect: They have been actively playing on a heightened sense of Bavarian-ness, on a confidence that verges on arrogance, and have described themselves as “a family” to create a us-and-them dynamic for decades. “We cultivate this polarization,” Rummenigge admits, “partly because it means that we have constant media exposure.”

According to various studies, Bayern have approximately 12 million fans in Germany—a number that is dwarfed only by those who dislike the club with equal passion. And the club would not have it any other way.

There are other similarities. Both Bayern and Barcelona pride themselves on developing young players, and both are run as clubs in the pure sense of the word, according to democratic principles. The members—in other words, the supporters—“own” the club and elect their presidents. Among the top clubs in Europe, only Real Madrid operates along such traditional lines; most of the rest are privately owned.

Despite all their relentless sporting and commercial ambition and their wish to be a truly global player, Bayern still recognizes their responsibility to their loyal supporters. Season ticket prices for the most hardcore fans are subsidized. Every Christmas, the members of the playing staff are dispatched to visit a fan club, and most training sessions are open to the public. Guardiola, according to Uli Hoeness, Bayern’s president, was surprised to hear of that arrangement, but quickly agreed to adhere to the culture of his new club.
It’ll be fascinating to see his progress. “It won’t be easy for him in the Bayern family,” said Guardiola’s mentor, Menotti, who won the 1978 World Cup. “But his ideas are good, and he likes the city. I think he’s more nervous than he should be; he’ll find it easy to communicate. German won’t be difficult for him. He is a very ‘German’ Catalan—organized, serious. He works and trains hard. His personality suits Munich; it’s a good town for him.”

As long as he delivers results, that is. Bayern don’t expect him to defend the Champions League trophy this season—no club, not even his Barcelona, have been able to do that—but he needs to win the league. “The league is the most honest title,” said Rummenigge, implying that luck and form are much smaller factors than in the cup competitions—and that there is no excuse not to win it with Bayern’s stellar squad.

Pep’s much more demanding task will be to keep Bayern at the very top of European football. Privately, the bosses at Säbenerstrasse expect him to lift another Champions League trophy before his three-year contract is up. It’s on that stage that Guardiola will really earn his wages of $13.34 million per season. Or to put it in Jerry Maguire terms, that’s where the money must show.

Additional research by Ronald Reng
A feature article from our debut issue. Order Issue 01 from our Shop.

Saturday November 23 2013

Prandelli: 'Italy must invest'
By Football Italia staff

Italy Coach Cesare Prandelli demands more investment in youth academies. “If you can’t afford to buy champions, you need to create them.”

The Nazionale boss spoke to the Gazzetta dello Sport in the lead-up to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

“Italy has great potential, but we’ve got to stick to some rules, objectives and get ourselves back on track. No more waiting, as the time has come to sow the seeds for future success.

“There’s no time for jealousy or focusing on our own little patch of land. We should sow the seeds and remember the harvest will be for the good of everyone.

“If you can’t afford to buy champions, then you need to create them in-house. This is why I constantly urge development of youth academies. That is where we must invest.”

Prandelli admits his job as Italy Coach is made more difficult by the influx of foreign players, as younger Italians aren’t given a chance to shine.

“The problem isn’t mine, but of Italian football. When we arrive in Brazil and our national anthem is played, we mustn’t complain that the Azzurri have little international experience. Every Coach would love to train a national team that brings together players who gained experience at club level and brought that back to the squad.

“In my case, it was the other way round. I had to call more than 60 players because so few get to measure themselves up against the best in Europe. If anything, playing for Italy gave these players more international experience.

“Brazil prepared for and won the Confederations Cup by giving the priority to the Seleçao. Last year they planned the Italian Super Cup in Beijing four days before a FIFA-imposed friendly.”

Prandelli also has complaints about the stadiums and the crushing pressure placed around Serie A sides.

“The context and surroundings help you to play better. Overseas the teams go into games with a completely different spirit and when it’s over, if you’ve given your all, there’s a pat on the back and you’re off. In Italy it is always treated like the match of your life and fans are called up in a way that is frankly a bit much for what is still a game.”

http://www.football-italia.net/42057/prandelli-italy-must-invest

Hungary's 1953 Wembley tactics revealed in newly found notebook
• Coach masterminded 6-3 win, England's first home defeat
• Claimed England's style of play was '20 years out of date'

Reuters
theguardian.com, Saturday 23 November 2013 09.29 AEST   

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/nov/22/hungary-england-wembley-1953

Alf Ramsey was slow and easily tired, Stanley Matthews was "nothing special" and England's style of play was decades out of date by 1953, the coach of Hungary's Magical Magyars wrote in notes discovered recently.

As Hungary prepares for the 60th anniversary of its national team's 6-3 thrashing of England at Wembley, a game credited with revolutionising football, the notebook of their coach, Gusztáv Sebes, was found in a private collection.

"If soccer was fine art, this would be like finding an unknown painting by Leonardo da Vinci," said Gyorgy Szollosi, communications chief for Hungary's Puskas Football Academy.

In the ragged notebook, half-filled with handwritten observations, Sebes was dismissive about some of the great names of English football.

"Alf Ramsey is slow, tires early but strikes the ball well," he wrote. "He is good at free-kicks.

"Stanley Matthews … technically the best English, but nothing special. Likes to dribble outwards. Jackie Sewell is stocky and short."

Sebes noted that England tended to kick long balls and defend only loosely, adding: "The English play against the European teams in much the same way as they did 20 years ago."

His observations allowed Hungary to control the ball easily and they became the first continental team to beat England at home.

"This is a piece of history that no one knew about before," Szollosi said of the notebook, which was found last year.

Looking like a schoolchild's exercise book, it has a checked cover, Sebes's name on the front in capital letters and the handwritten title "The London match tactical plan".

Much of the handwriting inside was almost illegible and a team of people were given the task of deciphering it. "We spent almost a year working on the notes and putting them together," Szollosi said.

As he prepared the notes for publication in November's Hungarian edition of the football magazine FourFourTwo, Szollosi said he realised how well Sebes had orchestrated the Hungarian team and their style.

The coach was helped by the genius of players such as Ferenc Puskás and Nándor Hidegkuti. It was probably the best game in the career of Hidegkuti, who scored a hat-trick, while Puskás grabbed two goals and József Bozsik scored one. Sewell, Stan Mortensen and Ramsey scored for England.

The game, played on 25 November 1953, became known as "the match of the century" in Hungary.

The team, Olympic champions at the time and runners-up in the 1954 World Cup, went into decline in the second half of the century. They have not qualified for the World Cup finals since 1986 and lost all seven of their subsequent matches at Wembley.

Sebes was a powerful sports leader in Hungary, then mired in the deepest years of Stalinism. Besides coaching the national football team, he was a member of the Olympic Committee which functioned as the sports ministry.

The coach took his first notes about the English team a couple of weeks before the big game when England drew 4-4 against a Rest of the World team.

"At first England show no fear and dictate a great pace, playing with a short passing style," Sebes noted. "As a result of the high tempo and passing, the English begin to tire after around half an hour."

With no video recording technology available to him, Sebes instead asked Hungarian top-league footballers to impersonate members of the England squad, so that Puskás and his team-mates – who had no idea what their opponents looked like – could imagine them.

According to reports at the time, Sebes was so confident that his team would defeat England that he promised the feared Hungarian Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi the win and that "Hungary will not disappoint".

He left nothing to chance. Two weeks before the match he ordered English balls, which were heavier than the customary Hungarian footballs, so the players could get used to them.

He employed tactics of aggressive all-pitch pressure and advocated technical, physical play that was little known in England or the rest of Europe.

General Football
The Enigmatic Marcelo Bielsa – El Loco
November 16, 2013

http://thelastlibero.com/2013/11/16/the-enigmatic-marcelo-bielsa-el-loco/

The story goes that one evening when he was in charge of the Chilean national team, Marcelo Bielsa felt a twinge of doubt, a mental block. Any other coach would normally turn to his mentors, delve into the video shelf for old videos looking for anything to help him or in some extreme cases, turn to alcohol (we know who it was). Bielsa went straight to the Santiago Zoo to find his motivation.

That’s just who he is and where the nickname comes from – El Loco, The Mad One. His unique personality shapes every team he manages, his philosophy a blend of passion, obsession, eccentricity and to a certain extent, craziness. He does not give exclusive interviews and prefers to answer those seeking his presence in his press conferences. Even then he refuses to look into the journalists’s eyes, preferring to keep his head lowered and his eyes on the microphone.

Another fascinating tale about El Loco goes that for 12 hours straight over a barbeque session (or asado, as some may prefer), Guardiola and him spoke of nothing but the beautiful game. Guardiola had spent the previous 11 hours travelling just to seek Bielsa’s advice. Salt shakers and ketchup bottles became the center of attention as talk of positional and possession football became intense and ideas flowed freely. Guardiola, being a football man himself, was completely taken by this mad Argentine who had left a mark on him. Pep would, of course, imbed this philosophy of possession football and high pressing on arguably one of the finest club sides the world has ever seen.

He had this to say about Guardiola during his first press conference as the Athletic manager:

“Guardiola has recovered the idea of multifunctional players: right backs to wingers, left backs and midfielders to central defenders, etc. He has taken advantage of his versatile players, something that was not appreciated not long ago. It is crucial that a coach, when he manages great football players, does not interfere with their talent. But, he has improved them. He has made them to do things they probably do not master, but his players still make the sacrifice. They do it for the team.”

Before he took the Athletic Bilbao job, his last spell in Spain ended in typical Bielsa fashion – he left Espanyol after managing them for just 6 games (of which they only won one). 12 days before his first official game, he knew he was going to go. The Argentina national team post was up for grabs and there was no one who could stop him.

Even his arrival at Athletic wasn’t without that element of ‘Bielsista’. Inter’s then President Massimo Moratti approached him about the managerial vacancy there only for him to say no without even blinking an eye. Why, you ask? Because he had already promised ex-Athletic skipper Josu Urrutia that if he was elected as the club president, Bielsa would follow him in. As things turned out, Urrutia won the presidency and Bielsa followed. That sense of loyalty and sticking to his principles is a wonderful sight in today’s money-grabbing football environment.
One of the biggest followers and disciples of Marcelo Bielsa is the current Barcelona manager Gerardo ‘Tata’ Martino. Martino was Bielsa’s leader on the pitch during his early managerial career at Newell’s Old Boys in Argentina. Martino even resembles Bielsa on the touchline – sporting spectacles, always thinking about the next move, pacing around on the touchline with his head down wondering how to outfox the man in the opposition dugout.

When he took over at Chile, the national team were a joke – the fans were used to seeing them finish near the bottom of their Copa América and World Cup campaigns and were resigned to their fate when he arrived. The impact he and his coaching staff had was not immediate – the first six games were the same as in previous times – lethargic, lacking confidence and looking every bit a beaten side. And then the Bielsa effect kicked in. The team (a talented bunch from the outset) started buying into his philosophy and the results started to flow. The high pressing game was embedded into every player and for the first time in a long, long time, the whole nation was riveted and rallying behind their national football team. During his tenure, Chile finished 2nd in World Cup 2010 qualifying, above both Argentina and Brazil.

One of the main beneficiaries of his time with Chile was Alexis Sánchez. Sánchez was always a very gifted and blessed footballer but he lacked that final polish which separates the true greats from the rest. He had a knack of dribbling one too many times and a very frustrating tendency of losing possession at the most inopportune moment. Under Bielsa, he went from a gifted yet erratic footballer to the wonderful player he is today with Barcelona.

Pep Guardiola summed up El Loco’s philosophy when he described his Athletic team before the Copa Del Rey final in 2012:

“They run up, they run down, they run up, they run down, they run up, they run down …”

He may never land a job in Europe again because of the unique culture he brings with him but his mark is indelibly etched in European football and will be remembered fondly by those who’s life’s he touched. The only person coming close in terms of his influence is Zdeněk Zeman (the current Italian crop of youngsters have him to thank). Wonderful manager and an even better man.

Interview With Jed Davies, Football Coach and Author

By Arnar Steinsson.

Jed Davies is author of ‘Coaching the Tiki Taka Style of Play’. Arnar interviewed Jed for TTT on Youth Development back in August.

Hi Jed welcome back to The Tomkins Times and congratulations on the book being published. I would like to ask you first of all what inspired you to write it?

Great to be back Arnar, you’ve got a really great community on TTT – I can’t remember the last time I saw such a positive comments section than the one under the interview with me from this summer.

The book was never meant to be packaged and sold as it is but I can remember the moment I realised I wanted to find out more, or the moment when I realised I really knew very little about football after years of championing myself as someone who knew a lot anyway!

There’s a great quote from Oscar Wilde that sums up this ‘ignorance’ to the many layers of football that goes along the lines of “I am not young enough to know everything” and this school of thought is only truly understood when you come out of the other side of the ignorance of youth or the short-sighted ‘know-it-all’ culture that exists in football (a culture I was once part of).

“I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” Socrates.

You see, more than ever, I know far less about football right now than I have done at any other point in my life. That sounds bizarre given that I have just dedicated the last two years of my life to researching Spanish training methodologies, tactical history and tactical evolution. But don’t be mistaken, I am far from profoundly lost – I’ve just come up with so many more questions that I want to find the answers to. More recently, I am working on a study in conjunction with Watford U15/18 and Level 5 coach, Louis Lancaster, looking at the phases of play before goals are scored and what that might mean in relation to a defensive theory that Louis has come up with from his Bayern Munich (Heynckes) analysis. From this study I can tell you the differences between each of the professional leagues in England and that if we were to take an average from over 600 goals and 200 games so far this season, roughly 30% of all goals are scored from the phase of play directly linked to set pieces. We’ve looked at wide play, central play and everything else in between to see if the statistics support Louis’ theory – which if they do, would be truly revolutionary to the way that we educate our coaches in how to defend in this country.

“The wider the searchlight, the greater the circumference of the unknown” Dick Taylor

Nowadays when I watch a football match, I watch the game in a completely different way to how I would have done four or five years ago. I see football through a sort of analytical framework (both inter-activity and individual activity analysis): (a) building up from the back and through the middle third [formation, attitudes, patterns], (b) goal scoring creation [formation, attitudes, patterns], (c) the two or three different defensive blocks used by a team in a single game [formations, triggers] and how we transition (what we do in between having the ball and not having it). Transitional moments are broken into (d) the attacking transition when the opponents are organised, (e) the attacking transition when the opponents are ‘out of balance’, (f) the defensive transition when you are organised and (g) the defensive transition when you are ‘out of balance’ [note: ‘out of balance’ is the term the FA use to mean out of defensive shape and still in the attacking shape].

Now, that might all come across as over the top and reducing football to a game of strategies and plans but it really isn’t. Essentially I’ll watch one team and try to understand their game plan, trying to link together all those moments after breaking it down – it is only then you can really begin to appreciate how much work goes into football training methodologies and begin to understand tactical changes as a response to a tactical problem.

The moment I realised I in fact knew very little about football was during my first conversation with Chris Davies who is now Liverpool’s Head of Opposition Analysis, as he went through the thinking behind different Premier League and Championship clubs and began to reel off how you could combat each game plan, one by one. I was simply blown away.

I left that conversation with so much disappointment in the education I had received in football beforehand and a new reality that effectively renders games of my youth like Championship Manager and the typical Match Analysis we see on TV today unsatisfactory in the way that the game is portrayed to us.

When I got home that evening, I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to watch every football match I had ever loved again and analyse each and every game individually. I started with Liverpool vs. Milan (2005 – my favourite game of all time, despite not being a Liverpool fan) and stayed up all night until I had a pile of game plans on a desk. Benitez’s Liverpool, Riijkard’s Barcelona, van Gaal’s Ajax, Wenger’s Arsenal, Ferguson’s Manchester United, Lippi’s Juventus, del Bosque’s Real Madrid, Mourinho’s Chelsea – the lot!

The next stage in my mind then was for me to start telling people about what I had learnt and how certain managers will have distinct game plans that they carry around with them – to details that I had never imaged before. However, I quickly realised that nobody particularly cared and people were generally satisfied with how they saw football. This really did bother me at first, how can someone love football and even work in football but not want to understand it?

But then I remember that Einstein had come up with the idea of the light-quantum hypothesis in 1905 and nobody accepted this until 1923. Einstein’s belief in the existence of light as particles was uncared about for 18 years – Einstein! – so who the hell was going to listen to me, a young twenty-something injury-prone failed football player turned-coach about new theories and ideas that exist within a game that they ‘already know everything about’.

After nearly a year of obsessive observations from a number of different teams, I became fascinated by the different schools of thought in football and I moved on from Mourinho, Capello and Sacchi research that I was in the middle of to start to look at the philosophy of football that the media had branded ‘tiki-taka football’.

I wanted to know EVERYTHING. At first it was just the game models and movement patterns, then I wanted to know why certain tactical changes were made and then I started to dig at how the training methodologies directly translate to the tiki-taka game model.

Tiki takaAs I said, it was never originally meant to be a book – it was a self-directed research project that involved me being extremely fortunate and speaking to some fantastic football coaches along the way (80% of them were able to permit quotes and context in my publication). The book itself was suggested to me by quite a few friends who saw the research I had and from there it started to become a book.

The biggest hurdle (and the reason for the nine month delay) has been permitting quotes, training sessions and including tactical methods with an attached coach’s name. Thankfully all of that has been overcome and the relevant media departments helped bring a 200,000 word book(s) down to something closer to 80,000 words. Which in truth, has only pushed me further to use the information but detach it from the original sources or to do my own analysis that have led to the same conclusions – there is always a way around this sort of thing.

Right now I’m in a role with Oxford University as an assistant head coach, working under former Reading skills coach Jon Collins (who has spent a number of years dedicating his life to researching Spanish training methods). Jon was one of the coaches that helped me with parts of the research and is one of the most knowledgeable guys in football in terms of training methodologies – he is an encyclopaedia of training sessions and has a fantastic personality on the training ground too – even his video analysis is first class! When Jon informed me about the opportunity to work under him, I was in the process of considering a full-time position at a football club. Within half an hour of consideration, I told Jon I was ‘in’ and turned down the job offer on the table, knowing that I would probably struggle to pay the rent in Oxford without a full-time salary.

Since moving to Oxford and working with Jon, I’ve learnt more about training methodologies than I could have ever imagined. You’ll know from the contents of this answer that I am someone who strives to learn more at the cost of my own sleep or financial security – you only live once and you’ll be forgotten about one day, so why not? “Ars longa, vita brevis.” [interviewer note - ancient greek aphorism, direct translation: “art is long, life is too short” and this is to be interpreted as either ‘our lives are too short to master the techniques and craft of our chosen field of artistry’ or ‘art lasts forever, but artists die and are forgotten’]

Find a passion in life and just go for it – great things will come of it when the time is right. Right now, I’m not ready yet for a full-time position at an individual club, but in a year or two I’m going to put up one hell of a good argument to why the club I want to work at should not only employ me, but give me an opportunity to be daring, trusted and pass on my insight without following the strict week by week framework I would have had to at the club I turned down. After all, that’s all tactics are: the ability for players to demonstrate their qualities of “daring, trust and insight” (Johan Cruyff).

So what inspired me to write this book? A passion, a way of telling people who are interested in what I’ve learnt from those in the game and the knowledge that this book will hopefully help me connect with others who have been, are currently on or are about to go on a similar journey of what football really is about in the future. Essentially, this way of thinking also helped me set up the idea for inspirefootballevents.com and secure some of the greatest coaching educators, most important figures in coaching and innovative coaches in England today for our first event in December this year.

I think if you mention tiki-taka, people will come up with a wide variety of interpretations. Can you describe the elements of what the style is made up of?

I’ll try to keep this answer short enough to keep your attention, but my own view is that ‘tiki-taka’ is not just about possession, short passing or pressing but about controlling the game through understanding the spaces on a football field and understanding moments that occur in football.

“The intention is not to move the ball, rather to move the opposition” [“La Intencion es a mover la pelota, sino a mover la oposicion”] – Pep Guardiola

Possession football, believe it or not, was an ‘invention’ by the Scottish in the late 1800s to combat the stronger, quicker and better dribblers of England – it was a defensive solution to a tactical problem. Barcelona’s model thinks about defending at the same time as it does attacking, it thinks about warm-ups and training sessions at the same time as it does about losing the ball in the 89th minute. It’s the most complete philosophy in football in my view.

For example, you’ll notice that these ‘rondos’ that Barcelona use are generally in 8×8 metre squares and these 4/5 v 2 rondos start off primarily as warm-up drills before leading onto positional rondos (in Spain anyway!). Why 8×8 metres? Well the Spanish coaches at Barcelona have an answer for this! It turns out that 8×8 metres is also the desired distance that Barcelona coaches want their players positioned when in a defensive block and 8×8 metres is also the typical fast-pace passing phase of a game in a congested midfield or in amongst the defensive team’s block right on the edge of their box.

So Barcelona players, whether they know it or not, are being trained to habitually react to moments they recognise in football. They cut out the 0.3 seconds reaction time of an elite athlete to nearly half – being 0.15 seconds quicker than your opponent in football wins you the ball.

Therefore, when Barcelona players are involved in a 5 vs. 2 rondo in an 8×8 metre square and working on components such as first, second and third line passing, or the defenders working together to tease the third line pass only to both know they’re about to win the ball or that moment of lightning transition, or the famous half-touch of a player who has just received the ball from a player whose pass has been targeted at the third man all along (rather than the player taking the half-touch). The rondo is so much more than ‘piggy in the middle’, there’s a lot of coaching detail we Brits haven’t been told – it’s like the Spanish want to keep it a secret! It took me a while to find out myself through a translator observing a session with me. I remember he turned to me and translated something the coach said and I responded “wait, what?!” – this was just the rondo, how could the coach be talking about the 89th minute of the previous match with his coaching intervention.

It’s ‘a whole’ approach and takes ‘total football’ to the next level of ‘totality’. In my book I explore tiki-taka football in a historical context and go all the way back to the late 1800s right through to today; detailing each major paradigm change in football that has led us to modern day tiki-taka: the overloading of central areas, pressing techniques, possession, formation changes, transitional moments.

Are there any common misconceptions about the style that you have come across?

The biggest misconception is that tiki-taka football is simply all about possession and short passing. Sure that’s the most obvious component of the philosophy but that makes up maybe about 10% of all things considered. You’d also be a fool to think that everything in this style of play is down to moments of genius from individual players on the ball – so much of the play is developed through pattern (or choreographed) play, everything is done in this controlled and thoughtful way that allows for the coach to set up scenarios in training sessions that he knows will occur in the upcoming match.

Think about it for a moment, how often do we see the same player (Busquets or Xavi) in exactly the same space on the field with exactly the same problem facing him ahead of play? Well in a truly chaotic game of football, you’d argue not a lot. But in this controlled philosophy we have ‘repeat scenarios’ that allow for the coaches and players to come up with patterns of play (something similar to that of the play books in American football) that, once again, are performed habitually and gain the players the milliseconds in a football match that are going to enable you to keep possession of the ball. We at Oxford University use the “up back and through” a lot in training sessions of late and it was fantastic to see three or four of these being used in the attacking areas of the field in our most recent match [up, back and through is a three player movement with the ball. The ball is played up to the furthest man, back to the middle man and through to the man making the run into the space behind - up to the top, back to the middle and through the gaps that have occurred]

So it’s not so much a misconception, it’s just that the coach who wants to achieve a similar style of football perhaps doesn’t realise how much habitual control the philosophy looks to have over the game. That’s not say that sometimes it still comes down to a moment of magic, or as Stanley Matthews put it to a journalist – a moment of ‘warm blood’:

“Please, Stanley would you show me your famous body swerve?”, to which Stanley replied “I’m sorry sir, but I can’t do it in the cold blood.”

While reading the book I became aware first of all the amount of history that has shaped this style of football and how many tactical and positional variations there can be within it and as you wrote in the book “I have been mindful of directly imposing any suggestion of a correct formation” And proposed a concept of form follows process instead of form follows function. Can you tell us a bit about that?

My biggest criticism of the modern day understanding of football is that formation is static and relatively simplistic. OK, we’re all aware of the formation changes between Barcelona’s 4-3-3 (or 4-3-2-1) when out of possession to their in-possession 3-4-3, but can this same positional system be achieved in one or more different ways?

On one hand, we have the system whereby the wing-backs push on, the central defenders split and the anchor man fills in to form a 3-4-3 formation. On the other hand, what if we had the changes that are details in the diagrams that follow:


What we have are the regular 4-1-4-1 defensive block coupled with the subsequent 3-4-3 building out from the back formations – two formations that go together really well and are often seen with clubs employing a possession-based formation.

Look again – only this time, study the numbered shirt given to each player and follow his movement. What we have is a different system to the one you’ll have probably anticipated: the right-sided wing-back pushes on, but the left-sided full-back tucks in, much like the full-backs of the Ajax days in the 90s, one of the central defenders becomes a libero (again, like Ajax) and the left-sided central midfielder spreads out wide to become the left midfielder when in possession. This isn’t totally unrealistic right? In my view, Bielsa has achieved a more radical system in reality. However, the exact same positional system has been achieved.

So all of a sudden, formation is a little more complex than we first thought. This is something you fans at Liverpool have witnessed since the arrival of Rodgers – I remember seeing the ‘central midfielder’ Jordan Henderson becoming a left-sided midfielder as the team lost possession of the ball last season – this movement between positions is something that should facilitate your ability to attack – think Arsenal under Wenger back in the early 00s, late 90s; Arsene Wenger played with a 4-4-2 with Henry and Bergkamp up top, Pires and Ljungberg in the wide midfield positions and Vieira and Gilberto in central midfield. Bergkamp would drop off into the number ten role, Henry would spread wide into the left wing position, Ljungberg would get into the centre forward’s position and Pires would float inside – it was a flurry of movement that left defenders not knowing who they were meant to mark and often created space ‘in between’ markers. Wenger took the 4-4-2 and did something genius with it – he made it unpredictable and fluid. Liverpool fans have become accustomed to this complexity of formation.

Therefore, with this concept in mind, I feel it would be foolish of me to detail ONE system and suggest that this system is the only system conducive to tiki-taka football. The system however, does require there to be certain features: overloads in central areas (4 (diamond) vs. 3 or 3 vs. 2), one v ones in wide areas and a comfortable overload in your own half of the field when building possession out from the back. Study the formations I provided again and begin to think about how these elements exist within the more recent 3-4-1-2 formation used by Liverpool – there really isn’t anything new here.

Now, “form follows process” is essentially something I grew to understand from my own academic background in architecture after a seminar and meeting with Zimbabwean architect Mick Pearce and his own design philosophy. The processes in football however, are that of: (a) building out from the back, (b) attacking in the opposition half, (c) defending in high spaces, (d) defending on the half way line and (e) defending in the deep block. These five (or more) moments in football all often require a different formation and attitude from your team.

Perhaps you play with a 4-2-3-1 in high spaces (see following diagram – used by teams like Everton, Southampton etc) and fall back into a 4-4-2 on the half way line to channel the opposition down one of the flanks into your set-up traps and into a 4-1-4-1 formation [all defensive], then when you win the ball back you transition into a 3-4-3 and then something more adventurous in the opposition half. Therefore, ‘form’ (encompassing everything from formation to attitudes on and off the ball) follows the process or moment of the game – it’s a concept that is relatively clear in my own mind these days and isn’t specific to possession football alone but to all of football.

his idea of formation and attitudes changes depending on the moment or process of the game is what leads me to detail the idea of “form follows process” in my book: an idea based on the concept of an eco-system of formations and attitudes within the same game model.

There isn’t any one correct set of formations or even any one correct set of methods in how you can achieve these positional systems (as you saw in the previous diagrams) and that should tell you that it is nearly impossible or rather, inappropriate for anyone to tell you that you must play with a particular formation or system as so many other tactical aspects need to be considered before hand. For these reasons, I am against the idea that all teams must play with a 4-3-3 formation (as detailed in the recent Australian FA curriculum) – 4-3-3? – In which moment of the game? How will this be achieved? What if 3-4-1-2 or a different movement suits my player profiles better? OK it offers a decent platform as a developmental tool given that players will play in positions relative to how they will when they progress to the adult game, but we have to be really careful with being so prescriptive in a top-down heavy curriculum in my opinion.

Surely the more important factor is the understanding of what your formation is trying to achieve in each moment of the game (process) – defensive overloads to allow for a maximisation of interceptions or overloads to allow for a scenario that means it would be better to pass through the opposition and one vs. one in wide areas? These objectives can be achieved through a multitude of solutions.

It is for these reasons that I refrained from instructing that there is one particular system (let alone formation) that is conducive to playing a possession-based game. It is simply not true that any team in the English Premier League will use one formation during all moments of the game – formations are not static and are far from simplistic.

What is your impression of Brendan Rodgers and his staff like Chris Davies for example and what do you think of their work so far?

For me, Rodgers understands football better than 90% of football coaches and managers in the professional game and you should be very lucky to have him. He understands the problem of formations and systems as discussed in the previous question clearly and given that Chris Davies is under Rodgers’ mentorship and I have witnessed just how much detail these guys analyse football, I have the utmost respect for how they both conduct themselves in a footballing environment.

I’ve learnt more from analysing Rodgers’ systems of play than from any other manager in football and know that from my conversations with Davies that each and every change is every bit as purposeful and considered as the last. As in the diagrams shown in the previous question, I found it fascinating how Henderson played two or three positions in a game of football and exactly where the line should be drawn under what formation Rodgers’ in using at any one point of time.

But more than this, I’ve seen how Mike Marsh and others run specific training sessions that relate right through to the game model – a positional rondo that details that players must play through a double pivot for example, a common scenario in a Liverpool match nowadays.

The most interesting aspect of Rodgers’ regime to date is, however, how he decided to take a very pro-active approach to (re)educating fans so openly on his arrival last year. Knowing the man to be as thoughtful and calculated as he is, I can’t help but think that these were moments of genius in itself.

You see, often at a youth football club it is a question of winning the parents over and getting them to buy into what you are trying to achieve. I feel that what Rodgers did was something very similar. Brendan Rodgers understood that his way of playing would take six months or more for the group of players to grasp and needed for fans to begin to emphasise with this rather than jump on the back of players and the coaches alike. Instead, the buzzwords “transition” and “adapt” were repeated in interview after interview to ensure than fans supported the slow transformation that went underway at Liverpool and for the most part, fans bought into the purist way of playing football. You have to remember however, that you’ll never win everyone over. I remember seeing Martinez talking about the Swansea promotion parade after their promotion to the Championship – they had one particular fan chasing the bus shouting “PLAY FOUR FOUR F*CKING TWO” at Martinez – unthinkable right?!

So for me, one of the most interesting aspects of Rodgers’ regime was analysing just how he has managed the fans’ expectations and looked to get fans to buy into his vision of football. I have myself been involved in a similar transformation with the Oxford University team I am assistant head coach for. We, like Rodgers, started with playing out from the back as our first micro-cycle, we then worked on our defensive shape and pressing. We’re now moving onto the final third and constructing play in the opposition half – all of these micro-cycles take time and if done well begin to come together after a few months. This is something I believe the Liverpool fans went through and were well prepared to go through – it really is a ‘different way’ of playing and it isn’t as simple as expecting a group of technically gifted players to understand the principles in only a few training sessions. Recently, I even went through great lengths to give the lads at Oxford a detailed statistical report from their last game showing each individual passing accuracy, the number of passes from each player and things like the overall game possession percentage (all taken from a few viewings of our film footage). The result? Well it turns out our figures were almost identical to Cardiff City’s (v Newcastle) from this season – a team that aren’t thought to “over play” – so there should be no questioning the philosophy that we’re trying to install as something “too tiki-taka”, as I once overheard one player saying impatiently after years of playing with a more “traditional method” used throughout grass roots football in England.

It’s safe to say we’ve won over the players now, even those who’d be better suited to Stoke than Barcelona – we’re on the path to achieving something pretty special at our level. After all, it’s one of the game’s greatest myths that you need a group of technically gifted players to achieve this style of play – you only need to be as technical as your opposition are. It’s a question of automatism and spatial awareness more than anything else.

Chris Davies is someone I will be eternally grateful for, given all that he has done for me during the researching and writing of my book – purely because he shares the same passion as I do and not for any other reason. Davies is on his second or third year into his ten-year plan with Rodgers to go into full-time first team management himself. I really wouldn’t bet against Davies becoming a household name in football over the next decade and as I say, I was simply blown away by his knowledge of every single Premier League team and then his own tactical solutions of how to combat each and every tactical problem that different teams pose. For someone so young, it was really interesting to see every single Liverpool player acknowledge Davies as I sat with him next to the Melwood cafe as players entered the room for lunch – he really is a man respected and considered significant by those at both Swansea and Liverpool as someone who has a great expertise in footballing problems and tactical solutions.

One of the aspects of the book which I really liked was the amount of information covering the historical timeline of this style of football. I think it will surprise many readers that the player who was the first to play as a false 9 did so in the 1930s for example. Out of all the people that you that you researched for that part of the book, who do you think was the most influential – of course if that’s possible as they all had an important part to play? If not, then who’s your favourite person within that timeline?

While figures like Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Viktor Maslov (father of the 4-4-2), Gusztav Sebes and Matthias Sindelar all fascinate me, I really do feel that it was Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff who began to package all the individual elements together. It was the Dutch who first brought together the pressing, fluency of positional interchanges and the short passing game together – none of that however, was invented by the Dutch as such.

Michels actually didn’t like the term ‘totaal voetbal’ (total football) [just as so many don’t actually like the term ‘tiki-taka’, both of which are media-branded] and referred to his own tactical approach as the ‘pressing approach’ – a rather defensive term for such attacking artistry, but this shows you how the Dutch began to understand that all of football is intertwined and overlapping. That is to say Michels considered the defensive tactical elements to be in a sort of cyclical relationship with the attacking tactical elements of football – everything was now considered, the whole of football.

I thoroughly enjoyed researching the very linear line of history and learnt a lot about why particular things are the way they are today from doing it. “Why things are they way they are?”; analysis in the way that I described in question one of this interview will only ever tell you how elements on the game are played – to understand why, we need to dig a little deeper. It’s a lot like taking apart the components of a car. Do you think that by taking apart the car, you’d be able to tell me why the engine is positioned at the front of the car? A historical study however will inform you that of course, the position of the engine was influenced by the idea of the horse and carriage (with the engine being the horse). I didn’t just want to explore how Barcelona, Spain, Villareal, Swansea and other teams play possession-pressing football – I wanted to understand why certain things are the way they are and get a true understanding of the quote that says “the whole is greater than a sum of its parts” when it comes to football tactics or playing philosophies and in order to achieve this, a historical timeline was necessary.

I stressed in the book however, that like the game, it is extremely difficult to construct any such linearity and that this timeline expresses those who were most influential. Matthias Sindelar, for example, may well have not been the first ‘false 9’ in world football, but he was certainly the first great one and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that a young Nandor Hidegkuti of Hungary was directly inspired by Sindelar, from just over the border in Austria. There may well have been a player playing his football in a park somewhere in Mexico doing the exact same things a few years before, but given the lack of technological advances in the 1930s, you have to credit Matthias Sindelar for how he brought the idea of overloading midfield areas through his movement away from the defensive line – in particular, against England in 1932, some twenty years before Hidegkuti played his integral part in bringing down England in what was billed as “the game of the century” by the press at the time.

Throughout this historical timeline, the reader is shown the brief stories of twelve men or movements I feel to be most significant to the changes that have led to the modern day understanding of ‘possession-pressing football’ or ‘tiki-taka’. But it’s the smaller details that interest me the most, like the fact that Gusztav Sebes had his Hungary side training with a heavier football in the training sessions during the build-up to the England fixture in 1963 on a training pitch with the exact dimensions of Wembley’s, or how it was actually a Scot who moved to Uruguay in 1909 who was later credited for Uruguay’s 1930 triumph at the World Cup – a Scotsman (capped 17 times by Uruguay) who managed to transform a long-ball nation into a short-passing and aggressive (off the ball) who would look to play patiently out from the back. It’s these smaller success stories that have gone lost in many of football’s history books; these smaller success stories that captured my imagination and inspired me to spend the best part of 3-4 months devoting my time to researching possession football back to the Scottish in the late 1800s through to Pep Guardiola and Barcelona.

From Brazil’s Tabelinha to River Plate’s La Maquina, through to the Mighty Magyars of Hungary, Totaal Voetbal, more scientific football approaches found in the east right through to tiki-taka, I’ve covered a lot in the book and I truly believe that without each and every daring game-changing ‘inventor’, we wouldn’t have had many of the great footballing sides in the last few decades. I hope those who read my book notice that I’ve credited Shankly, Bielsa and others not covered in the timeline, because they too have played their part in strengthening the belief that football can be both innovative and beautiful and will continue to capture the imagination of football fans for the eternal game of football. A game that will never stop evolving. A game that stands still for nobody and simply won’t wait eighteen years for innovative thinkers to be proved right

http://tomkinstimes.com/2013/11/interview-with-jed-davies-football-coach-and-author/

Interview
Dennis Bergkamp: Arsenal, aesthetics and a blueprint for British coaching
The former Arsenal and Holland forward Dennis Bergkamp, now a coach at Ajax, on learning and teaching technical excellence

Amy Lawrence
Amy Lawrence in Amsterdam
The Guardian, Saturday 19 October 2013 09.11 AEST   
Jump to comments (160)

Dennis Bergkamp biography presentation
'The basics for me is the first touch,' says Dennis Bergkamp. 'With that you can create your own time.' Photograph: Koen Van Weel/EPA

Staring at a nondescript brick wall in the west of Amsterdam, a clue to the great English coaching conundrum stares you in the face. The wall is outside Dennis Bergkamp's childhood home, in a modest apartment block around the corner from a canal in Bos en Lommer. It was here that the young Bergkamp refined his technique with the kind of specifics that would not occur to most footballers. He worked his technique with such precision he would aim for a corner of a particular brick, time and again, with different pace and power and spin to see how it changed the ball's trajectory and challenged his ability to tame it.

It was fitting somehow that Bergkamp returned to this spiritual spot to talk about his philosophy. The pursuit of control in football inspires him as much today as a coach with Ajax as it did when he was on the pitch as a player trying to change games with a flawless moment. Control is so much his obsession that he is completely frank when he says he prefers the first touch that started any of his most memorable goals than the strike that finished them. Others might say that, but it is doubtful they really mean it. Bergkamp does. The glory, for him, is all about control and touch.

Can that be taught? "The basics for me is the first touch," he says, as if a perfect first touch is some kind of alchemy. "First touch in football is so important. If you talk about Mesut Özil people say he is not marked properly, he always has a lot of space but he has got that space because he can create space by his vision and his first touch. With that you create your own time."

It is quite an arresting concept, creating time with a moving ball. "Teach that to children," he says. "Do something with the ball, let it bounce, back, back, back against the wall, left, right, that's the main thing."

The business of establishing technique fascinates him. It is a subject he elaborates on in his illuminating book, Stillness and Speed. On the subject of how young players are "over-coached" nowadays, he becomes animated about getting the right balance between teaching young players, and allowing them freedom to express themselves.

"If I look at my coaches in the youth at Ajax, with all due respect they were two elderly men who would stand at the side of the pitch, shouting a few things," he says. "So in a way you create your own career, you create your own development, and that helps you later on. Whereas now there are a lot of coaches, everyone has got their badge, they all think they are Mourinho or Wenger, even with the 12- to 13-year-olds.

"They know exactly what to do, what kind of exercises they have to do with the kids, and in a way they don't have to think for themselves any more. It is all done for them. It's a problem because they don't think for themselves. If they get a new situation, they look to someone as if to say, 'What do I have to do now?' I believe that is over-coaching. It's too much. Let them have their freedom. You have to create the environment where they can be unique and not a clone."

Bergkamp is not a fan of the way youth football in England is results-orientated. "You have to win these games, so the coach is going to manage to win the game instead of developing the player. In my opinion it should be totally the opposite. Sometimes you put your strongest player on the bench just to let others shine. Or you put a right-footed player who can't do anything with his left on the left side and force him to use his left foot. Of course in that game you will probably lose because you don't use your strongest players in their strongest position, but in the end you have a player who used his left foot when he was 12 and 13 and 14, and he can use both feet when he comes into the first team. That's what we have at Ajax and I really stand behind that."

Bergkamp was in a way a reluctant coach. He found it difficult to adjust his thinking – a player used to the highest technical standards working with aspiring players who were not at his level. "I struggled a bit," he confessed. "You look at a player and think, 'Why can't you control that ball?' But you have to take a few steps back." He still enjoys demonstrating during coaching sessions, although he blushes and sounds slightly reproachful that he cannot be "explosive" any more.

"There are times not to coach," he says. "You have to be balanced to know that. The urge is to step in and show how good you are as a coach and show you know everything and you can tell them. Sometimes it is better to let them make a mistake. Sometimes they learn more from that than being told what to do."

Seeking out beauty and refinement in football still excites him. He sees it in Lionel Messi, obviously, but also picks out Özil, who is expected to be fit to face Norwich today, as a player he is particularly captivated by. Does he see some of himself in the German playmaker? "I do," says Bergkamp, with the caveat that he is not fond of comparisons. "The way he is finding his space, in his free role, and his first touch is fantastic. I really enjoy him. The main thing now is that he will bring more to Arsenal, and push them towards victories, towards trophies."

He reckons something has changed to make for "a different Arsenal" this season. "It looks fresh, sharp, a lot of good movement, it feels like – also because Mesut came – there is an awareness they can do something. Maybe that was the missing link."

While Bergkamp rules out a future in management, he has not been shy about his aim to one day be part of the coaching set up at Arsenal. English football still gets him to the core. The marriage of aesthetic and hectic is perfect in his eyes. "For me, that is beauty," he says. "I saw Arsenal against Spurs. The pace of the game was incredible. An hour later I watched a Dutch game, and there is no point. It was so slow. A lot of things are happening in English football, openings, the high pace, that is beauty too."

Dennis Bergkamp, Stillness and Speed (Simon and Schuste
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/oct/18/dennis-bergkamp-arsenal-british-coaching

From practice sessions to the real match – expert insights into transfer & learning
Posted on 20th September, 2013 by Mark Upton
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The concept of using a game-based approach in practice is far from new or groundbreaking in Coaching and/or Physical Education. Yet the uptake continues to be modest, as the socio-cultural influence of the “traditional” approach (isolated technique drills and high volume of instructions) is extremely strong.

Drawing from practical experiences and knowledge of Skill Acquisition (essentially the “science of sport skill learning”), I have tried to use this blog to explain some of the principles that underpin a game-based approach and why they may be more effective. In this case, “effective” = transfer into improved performance of a skill in the “real match”.

One of the major tenets of this is Perception-Action Coupling (look through some other posts on this blog for an introduction and insight). This coupling between what a player perceives ( in a match that would be teammates, opposition, the ball, boundary markings, goals etc) and how he/she decides to act (with or without the ball) is seen to be a critical one for transfer from practice to the real match. That is why Rick Fenoglio, a Sports Scientist involved in researching and setting up a 4v4 pilot program with Manchester United a number of years ago, had this to say….

When I posted this on Twitter a while back, it naturally led into discussions with others around the question – “do isolated technique drills have any value?”. As far as I am aware there is not any sport-specific research that has proven isolated technique work has NO benefit (ie transfer). Also, anecdotally, many coaches who support a game-based approach would still support and see some value in isolated technique drills.

Another related question, and I think more pressing, is – do children/novices need to develop technique in isolation FIRST before adding perceptual and decision-making demands?

It is a fascinating topic, one that can be further explored outside of the sporting domain by understanding how humans learn to interact with their environment (since sports players are humans!). This concept of Perception-Action coupling is what allows humans to function and effectively complete tasks in any given environment (too a point).

So I thought I would contact a genuine expert in human perception and action for his thoughts. Below are some quotes from Dr Andrew Wilson, from Leeds Metropolitan University, whose research and interests are in perception, action and learning.

“The old school way of thinking about learning is as you describe; the learner has to acquire some core competence, a motor programme that they can then roll out on demand and tweak to fit the current context. This, frankly, isn’t true at all.

Learning really requires that you spend time learning to perceive the relevant information which will support your action selection and control, and this information is only created by the task as it unfolds. So learning to kick in drills is not learning to kick in the game and there really will be relearning required.

Learning a task entails learning to perceive the information for that task and using that information to select and control appropriate actions. Because this is how it rolls, learning is highly context/task specific.

So kicking in drills and kicking in a game is not kicking + context (same basic dynamic plus some other stuff) but actually more like kicking-in-drills and kicking-in-games (two different dynamics which create different information). If that is the case (and it likely is) then you would only expect limited transfer.”

These are some really important insights and a huge thank you to Dr Andrew Wilson for taking the time to share them. (you can follow Andrew on twitter – @PsychScientists)

I will not expand on these comments for now – instead why don’t you let them “sink in” and think about how they align with your current approach to practice sessions and player development…


Mark Upton has extensive experience applying Skill Acquisition and learning principles in the design of on and off field environments for player development. He also has over 10 years experience using Performance Analysis systems to evaluate and inform player & team development.

If you would like Mark to work with you or your organisation please get in touch -

mark at sportsrelations com au

http://www.sportsrelations.com.au/blog/blog/2013/09/20/from-practice-sessions-to-the-real-match-expert-insights-into-transfer-learning/

Bergkamp is not a fan of the way youth football in England is results-orientated. "You have to win these games, so the coach is going to manage to win the game instead of developing the player. In my opinion it should be totally the opposite. Sometimes you put your strongest player on the bench just to let others shine. Or you put a right-footed player who can't do anything with his left on the left side and force him to use his left foot. Of course in that game you will probably lose because you don't use your strongest players in their strongest position, but in the end you have a player who used his left foot when he was 12 and 13 and 14, and he can use both feet when he comes into the first team. That's what we have at Ajax and I really stand behind that."