The Most Important Thing

My son recently changed football clubs. He moved from the one I coached and reluctantly folded to one where a lot of his friends play. In one of his first few games at his new club, his team were losing at half time. A father of one of my son’s team-mates who I had talked to at various birthday parties, knew that I had coaching experience and plenty of opinions, asked me what I thought we should do to turn the game around.

A Wrong Question

Well, I said, we should really try to actually pass the ball to each other. Sadly the amount of successful passes in the first half was pitifully few. In fact, they did pass the ball better in the second half and lost anyway.

It wasn’t a good answer, although I like it over answers you hear repeated by football managers: “Didn’t win the 50/50s”, “Didn’t win our individual battles”, “Didn’t win the second balls”, and the classic “Didn’t take our chances”. For reasons of brevity I answered the question as if the question was “What’s the most important thing we can do”? Which was a mistake because that’s what Lemony Snicket would call a Wrong Question.

The Most Important Thing Is…

Paraphrasing Malcolm Gladwell’s views on spaghetti sauces. It’s a wrong question because there’s no Most Important Thing, there are only Important Things.

What are these things? Well, just for starters, I dislike the slowness of throw-ins and free kicks, a lack of a plan for throws, corners, goal-kicks and set pieces. The way the full backs are positionally static and don’t join in with attacks but the centre backs are positionally dynamic, racing out of position to engage the opponents. The lack of positional discipline in the midfield generally, the centre midfielders are everywhere but where you would expect them to be, and the wide midfielders shirk a lot of defensive responsibility and play as ersatz forwards, sometimes one of them does and the team ends up in a lop-sided 4-3-3 and sometimes both of them do and it ends up with four attackers. What should be the attack is two flat in a line strikers neatly arranging themselves so it’s easy for the CBs to mark them. In spite of the quantity of them, there’s scarcely any pressing from the forwards. There’s no depth to things, just flat lines, little control of the space and of counter attacks. Individually, one player does everything in slide tackles, one player is entirely motivated by doing what are basically stunts such as back-heeling the ball “blind”, one player has a dribbling technique which is OK for playing on the left but causes him to be easily dispossessed when he gets switched by the coaches over to the right side. Almost the entire squad takes very little care over their passing, chipping the ball around at knee height. I have further beef with individual techniques and playing styles but some of it overlaps with ability and it’s not really the purpose of this blog for me to highlight it here, other than to say team dynamics are one thing but beneath that there is whole load more of those important things at the individual and technical level.

Which is not to say that you can’t prefer some things over other ones. I would always want to know why you rank one item above another – is it based on some objective measures? Perhaps some items are low hanging fruit and more easily addressed than others. Prioritising coaching individuals over team factors seems reasonable too, developing kids to be good all-round footballers who enjoy playing as adults strikes me as your primary responsibility and much more important than winning.

The idea of a Most Important Thing is mainly a distraction from reality, an imaginary and comforting label. There’s no silver bullet, there never is. In so far as there is a Most Important Thing it’s just paying attention to lots and lots of tiny little details.