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'When he's under maximum pressure, pass it back to the keeper.' Alamy Stock Photo

The dogma of sports management is anti-player

Top level athletes are so often compelled to do the ‘outright barbarous’ rather than break a rule.

BY THE TIME George Orwell wrote his six rules for writing he had good things to say.

My favourite one is the last: break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. I feel this is wisdom underappreciated in the playing and, particularly, coaching of sports.

Perhaps competitive sports and Orwell are just not aligned. He made his views plain, it was all “mimic warfare” and an “unfailing cause of ill-will”. So he’s not really up there with Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Legacy: What the All Blacks can tell us about the Business of Life when it comes to inspirational texts for managers. This is a shame.

If an aspect of your cherished game plan is not about to work; when everybody from the fan behind a pillar in row x to the player about to undertake the prescribed move knows it will more likely backfire than come off . . . then don’t do it.

Break any of these rules!

The most everyday example of this is a football team playing out from the back. The lack of enough technically capable footballers to play out while under pressure from speedy, aggressive opponents who know what you are going to do because that’s what you do every time is not an impediment to the plan.

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Because the plan is the plan! We’ve got our identity. If part of our identity is scrambling around the zone between the six yard box and the penalty spot trying to recover possession we’ve lost during a give-and-go between a bewildered keeper and the right-sided centre half who plays on the left of a back three, so be it. This is a matter of process.

If we have to concede four clear shots on goal per half and inflict as many cardiac events on middle aged fans who lack a progressive mindset and clear arteries then that’s collateral damage – acceptable payment for the time we got third on goal of the month after we opened up Ipswich.

If you can’t appreciate that then you’re better off watching reruns of Match of the 70s on YouTube – should you be able to resist the videos thrown in your path about how the 12-week military workout for men over 50 will make you cut.

Before this column becomes entirely a Richard Keyes blog tribute act I should say I do like playing out from the back. My entertainment levels are stratospheric for the games I watch as a neutral. You’re guaranteed far more goalmouth action this past decade due to the inevitable blunders. Also, when it works, which it does most of the time with decent teams, then it’s a satisfying thing to watch. Win-win for the viewer.

As a fan though, I could do without it, especially if you happen to have been born a Tottenham supporter – and your team is going through a period of playing with keepers who are either inexperienced or experienced and not capable enough to pull this off. In which case, please just clip it down the channels at least once every four times to keep the others guessing.

It’s a little like what Jim Carey said while dressed as an ageing hippy at the 1999 MTV award. “I like rap music as much as the next frightened Caucasian, but, you know, would it kill you every once in a while to play a little Foghat?”

This is not to single out Spurs boss Ange Postecoglou. I like him. He’s only doing the same as almost everybody else. His is just the team I am honour-bound to watch twice a week from behind the couch.

A rigid approach to gameplans goes beyond Spurs and beyond football.

Examples are almost too numerous to contemplate, but how many times have we seen a Division One Gaelic football county side in urgent need of a late point shuffle the ball laterally from hand to hand around the 45? They want to get the ball to the shooter. The shooter happens to be triple marked with another standing in front of a potential pass. Rather than a non-shooter take on a shot they will “recycle” and “probe”. In reality few players get to play at that level without being able to kick it over the bar from 40 yards. Yet if they take on the shot they will face major reprimand – and that’s just if it goes over.

It gets worse. During an O’Byrne Cup game (more nostalgia) I was at last year a midfielder got fouled around the centre of the field. He looked up and saw what everybody else in the place saw: his full forward one-on-one on the edge of the square.

Everyone in the ground implored him to kick it in. You could see him shaping to launch. He must have started and stopped his run up five times, bored and freezing people everywhere willing him to let fly. Even the full back wouldn’t have minded it landing in for the sake of a bit of action. Yet just as the midfielder was about to pull the trigger, he stopped and kicked it 10 yards to the side and a little back. There was a communal sigh. At least we had the brief idea he was going to do it.

Dogma is what prevented him from doing the right thing by his talent, his team and the game. 

Eamon Dunphy, writing in the Sunday Independent in 1994, explained how many of the teachings from the FA establishment at Lilleshall were, at their core, anti-player.

stuart-carolan-launches-eamon-dunphys-book-the-rocky-road-at-patrick-guilbauds-restaurant-featuring-eamon-dunphy-where-dublin-ireland-when-14-oct-2013 Eamon Dunphy: 'More about destruction than creation.' Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

“In very simple terms this coaching was, and is, more about destruction than creation. Players are harnessed to a system rather than freed to play the game, their own talent being the primary resource,” he wrote.

People who “fall in love with the power and jargon” of management had succeeded the player as the main architects of what took place on the pitch, Dunphy said.

You’d sometimes wonder whether this has been going on so long now that some players are suffering from Stockholm syndrome. How often do you hear that rugby players, among others, crave clarity and detail from coaches?

Of course there should be a plan, but that should all be disposable should it be superseded by events. Teams are allowed to react and upend your plan. You shouldn’t have to wait until Monday’s review session to decide your own response.

In some cases a gameplan gives everybody a chance to abdicate responsibility. A coach can criticise a player for not adhering sufficiently while a player can say they stuck to the programme so if it all went south then it’s not my fault chief!

Naturally this would all be denied by players and coaches. They’ll talk about a degree of autonomy being baked into the plan, about them being allowed to play it as they see it when the time arrives. Only it doesn’t look that way a whole lot of the time.

Strategy, contingencies, general preparedness; these are all essential things. So too is the appreciation that, ultimately, control is an illusion. In sport, as in life, we are subject to chaos and the infinite number of possibilities the universe can conjure for every given moment.

The human brain, the players’ instinct, remains the most sophisticated means of dealing with all of this in real time, and is the part of the process which should be trusted above all others.

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