by Anon, Anon
FUNCTIONS
This leads on to functions, which is the second aspect of coaching. This time we might only set up half a pitch with the aim of teaching our left-back how to stop crosses. Every coach and manager is different; for me, I’d like my left-back, where possible, to get to the ball as quickly as he can without “selling” himself, then show the winger away from the goal – down the line ideally – or better yet, get the winger to turn back so that my defence can squeeze up a few yards. Another coach might want his defender to show the winger on to his weak foot or encourage him to cross from deeper areas because he knows that he has two dominant centre-backs and a goalkeeper who will always come to catch the ball. It also depends on the left-back: is he quick, in which case he can get to the ball, or is he slow, in which case he has to try to stand the winger up and narrow the angle for the cross until he can get near enough to make a challenge or encourage him to pass back?
Depending on how a person wants to coach, the session might be set up in a variety of ways. You might choose for the opposition to start from a quick throw-in that the left-back has to get out to, or you might start from the left wing and shift the ball across the pitch to the right winger. Utimately the result is the same: the left-back has to stop the cross. You can expand on this by introducing an overlapping full-back to complicate things or a third man runner, a midfielder, who goes in behind the full-back as the ball is laid back.
In a first-team situation a coach or manager would work on this sort of thing during training just prior to a match against a big team. I can remember working on how to restrict the space in the full-back areas for a week before playing Arsenal at the Emirates. The answer is very simple: you don’t come out of your shape. If everybody stays in their “hole”, there is no space to run in behind. But there are so many little nuances to this. You’d have a striker on Arteta, for example, trying to pinch the ball from him and stop him from playing. You’d have your goalkeeper starting 10 yards off his line in case Cazorla slips a ball through that beats your back four. You’d have a deep-lying midfielder shielding every little two-yard movement that Giroud or Podolski makes so the ball cannot get through to them. And the biggest thing of all when playing against Arsenal is: never follow the ball, always follow the man. Much of Arsenal’s success comes from one-twos around the box and balls slipped between the full-back and centre-half. Never ball-watch; always know where the man is. Sometimes it works: Wigan have had a fair amount of success, as have Swansea. How did we get on? They stuffed us. “C’est la vie,” as they say in the Arsenal dressing room.
SMALL-SIDED GAMES
The small-sided games, traditionally seen as a bit of a jolly at the end of first-team training, are actually the most important aspect of taking your coaching badges because this is where everything that a coach has learned can be implemented in one session. It isn’t just tactics – it’s how you engage with the players and when you step in and correct something.
For the Uefa B licence the game will usually be 9 v 9. The tutor will give you a topic that he wants to see implemented in the small-sided game; nobody is supposed to know what that will be but most of us tend to find out a week or so in advance over a beer with the tutor. As I said, most tutors want to pass the players and ex-players who take the course, and offer them help above and beyond what is expected. For everyone else, they don’t really care too much.
This is the main test of your coaching ability and the best thing to do is to go away and ask a couple of friends who are already in coaching for tips. Then you draw up a session plan: this needs to include the size of the pitch that you want to work on, how many players you need, what equipment you’re going to use (ball, bibs, cones etc). And, of course, what session you plan to put on and what you are looking to achieve.
You’ll also need to recognise the ability of the players who are available for the session. There is no point in writing a training plan that is beyond them. Most of the time you’ll have a youth team to work with at the training ground; they will be fairly decent and well drilled, but if you are working with a very low-level, non-league club side, there is no point in saying that you are going to set up something that involves overlaps, third man runs and filling in because that won’t be second nature to them. They may not even be fit enough to do it.
After determining how fit your team are and how quickly they are likely to get the hang of things, you set out a time frame. Twenty-five minutes is plenty for a small-sided game.
The first thing to do is to get all the players around you in a huddle on the pitch and outline your plan. Introduce yourself, name the teams and sort out your players. This has to be done really quickly because footballers soon lose interest. The amount of times I’ve been standing in these huddles and gone on to screensaver before hearing, “Right, everybody, take your places …”
First you do two or three minutes’ free play, then you go into the session and coach what you see – the directive from the English FA is to stop the session when you see something that needs addressing. Blow the whistle, step in and explain what the problem is before offering a demo and making sure that everybody understands. If somebody still doesn’t understand, you replay the exact same thing again. If somebody gets it wrong again or still can’t do what you’re telling him, then get rid of him. That’s my advice, by the way – not official FA protocol.
* * *
In these sessions you will be marked on the way you deliver your information; this is the part of coaching that a lot of footballers really don’t appreciate. Whenever I talk to players who are about to take their badges, they always talk about having played for 15 or 20 years and knowing everything. In a way they do, but so many of them have no idea how to get what they know across to others – and that, after all, is coaching.
Broadly speaking, there are three styles of coaching: command; question-and answer; or both. Which you favour will depend on what sort of person you are and at what level you are coaching. When I coached our youth team during a Uefa B session I found that I was a combination of command and question-and-answer, but that was probably because you can be forceful with a youth team while encouraging them to participate in the answers.
Let’s go back to the left-back trying to stop crosses: if you’re a person who coaches command-style, then you might talk to your full-back like this: “Look, if the wide man is running down the wing I want you to show him down the line. Don’t let him inside; get your body shape right like this and watch the ball. That’s what I want. OK, play.” If the winger does happen to get the cross in, you would stop the session and say something like, “Right, when the wide man gets into a position to cross, I want you to get tighter to him and stop that ball. Don’t stand off him – stop the cross and force him back. That’s what I want. OK, play.”
If you go for the question-and-answer approach, however, you’d talk to your left-back like this: “How close do you want to get to him? Do you think that your body shape is right here? Why do you want to show him inside? Could you be closer there? Why not?”
A combination of these approaches seems to work best, especially at first-team level. You don’t want to boss seasoned professionals around, or to talk to them as if they’re idiots. After all, they see what you’re trying to tell them up close on the pitch every week.
And at first-team level you also need to start dealing with egos. I have seen some of the most enthusiastic coaches in the game come into a club fresh from the FA’s coaching course with all the enthusiasm and ideas that you’d expect, only for the team to feel as if they are being treated like youth team players. One of two things happen: the players don’t respond and the coach leaves; or, far more common, the coach stops being so busy and fits in with the approach that already exists at the club. Remember, we’re talking about coaches. It’s different when a new manager comes in – everybody is on their best behaviour and generally does what is asked of them.
The Uefa A licence is more about 11 v 11, and here it c
an make a difference where you take the course. As a friend told me, “Some of the other nations are said to be easier: they want you to pass the course so there’s more help available. But in the English version the FA are right up their own arse and they absolutely will not bend. It’s more like a declaration, ‘We’re the FA and this is how we do things.’”
At this level the scenarios given to a coach are very specific and on a full-size scale. So your tutor might give you a topic such as team pressing and sitting back, and then he’ll give you a specific scenario. So for the above topic he might say, “Right, you need to get the ball back but you’re 1-0 down with five minutes to play – go!” Then you need to coach the players for that scenario, so obviously you’re going to press the life out the opposition to win the ball back. You might even sacrifice a man at the back and go to a three to help the midfield and forwards press.
The FA are very big on zones, such as where the ball is delivered from and where it is cleared to. They seem to place quite a lot of faith in these statistics, and I’ve heard that they do a lot of statistical research themselves. Most of the research that goes in to the A licence comes from games at the World Cup, the Champions League and the Premier League. This means that the whole licence is based on the elite in the game, which is fine, but what about the guy who goes back to Rochdale in League One where every other goal has come from a set piece that hasn’t been covered? That’s why the A licence really isn’t essential. I believe the B licence is the right way to go because it gives you a good grounding while allowing you to put your own unique approach and ideas over the framework. Otherwise you might as well be a robot.
Last year I took a walk over to the youth team pitches to talk to the manager. He’s a good guy who really cares about the way the kids learn their trade and he was very helpful when I asked him about the path I could follow in coaching. I’ve told him that I’m not overly keen but he has been very persuasive in encouraging me to get involved, and in fairness I have always preached that there is a lot of knowledge wasted in this game when players simply retire. I remember talking to him about it during one of his youth team training sessions.
He turned to me and said, “Look, it isn’t rocket science. They’re kids. You have to teach them the basics and then keep improving them as quickly as you can so that they’re ready for the first team, while accepting that only a couple will make it. The most important part of coaching these kids is how you deal with them, how you treat them and how you get your point across. What do you think is the worst thing you could say to one of these kids during a session?”
I thought for a minute. I thought about what I wouldn’t want to hear from a coach whose playing career was of next to no interest to me. Then it came to me. I had no idea if it was the answer he was looking for. After all, you could tell one of them that their mum has just died, couldn’t you? That would be a bit of a morale-crusher.
“‘In my day we did it like this,’” I said.
“Fuck me, lad,” he said. “We might just make a coach of you yet.”
COULD I BE A DIRECTOR OF FOOTBALL?
Of all the jobs in the game that a footballer can do when he finishes his playing career, director of football is one that I have always fancied – and I think I’d be good at it. As with many jobs, you need to serve an apprenticeship, which is another way of saying that the money you earn will be crap while you prove yourself. In the summer I was offered the chance to come into a good-sized club and train under the existing director of football – something that I mulled over for a very long time.
As a player you can tell a good director of football by how happy everyone is with your contract terms. If you sign your contract, then in principle you are happy, but it isn’t quite as simple as that and a good director of football will have secured you for not a penny more than he had to, so that – in theory at least – the chairman and the fans are happy too.
It suits me because I’m a pretty good negotiator and I know the market rate of most players. But there is far more to it than that: it is a job that requires you to be at the beck and call of just about everybody linked with the club, from board level through to players and their agents and the scouting system. That last one is particularly important, because yours is perhaps the only job in the game that is completely dictated by budgets, and balancing transfer and wage budgets can be tricky when people around you are trying to convince you to sign the next best thing. You need to be principled and have a lot of faith in yourself.
And there is another string to the bow, too. You are involved in a lot of the hiring and firing that goes on at the club and, as you know, the turnover of staff within a football club is both considerable and frequent. And that is the part that appeals to me: of all the jobs in this game, a director of football has a chance to build something from the ground up. Providing he can sell it to his owner, he has a chance to go into a club and lay out a blueprint for the future. That involves picking a manager who will play the new style of football, on the budget that you have determined, with players you have chosen to sign, on the recommendation of scouts that you employed. You cannot overstate the importance of a good director of football, and mark my words, behind every half-decent manager there is a talented chief executive or director of football subtly pulling the strings. I don’t care what level of the game it’s at or who the manager is – it’s a fact of football.
And I think I’d be good at that. I think I’d be very good at getting rid of the dead wood and starting again, and I love the idea of building a football club up from an also-ran into a force that is recognised around the world. I have the same naivety and blind faith in myself for this job as I did when I became a player. Why not become a manager? Because I don’t want to deal with the players, I don’t want to deal with tactics. Those are not my strengths.
So I made a few calls, all of which produced the same initial response, namely that I was too young to be a director of football. It made all the times that I’ve heard those same people say “If you’re good enough, you’re old enough” appear a little hollow, to say the least. But it’s true that I have never hired or fired a manager. I’ve tried my best to get rid of one or two, of course, but I never officially had the power to make it happen.
Fortunately, when my peers were turning left to talk to celebrities, I was turning right to talk to the people in suits. The result is that I know an awful lot of people who have important jobs and who like mixing with the common folk from time to time. Some of these guys own football clubs and are more than happy to share their wisdom with me.
The first person I met up with was the director of football of a big club. He’d previously been my director of football. He was really supportive even when I told him that his job would be perfect for me.
“When we signed you, what did I tell you over the phone?” he said.
“You said how much you wanted me to sign and that the manager was going to build a team around me,” I said.
“So there you are,” he said. “It’s the little things that are important. You’re like the UN. You meet people, negotiate, try to make sure everybody is happy, while always remembering what numbers you have to play with. Never, ever, forget about budget, no matter how badly you want to sign a player. I can tell you why you’d make a good director of football. Can you remember what you said to me on the phone when I offered you the first deal?”
I laughed. I certainly could. “I told you it was a piss-take and that I wouldn’t sign for less than double that.”
“Exactly, and you were how old, 20-something? You’re the only player who has ever negotiated with me. It’s natural for you and you ended up with more. So there you go. You can do this job – you’d be good at it.”
“Yeah, I remember all that now,” I said. “Either I’m good or you’re lucky to be in the job.”
“Well, there is that,” he said. “You were a fantastic player and exactly what we wanted. I’d probably have gone to an extra £5,000 a week
, actually.”
“Yes, well, you would say that now, wouldn’t you? I’ll tell you what I do remember,” I said. “Negotiating the player bonuses with you.”
He turned, stony-faced, “Yes, you nearly cost me my job over that. The chairman was furious.”
Years ago, as I mentioned briefly in I Am The Secret Footballer, I led a player revolt over a paltry player bonus sheet that the club offered us based on Premier League survival. It was late in pre-season and the team photograph was our last bargaining tool. I was determined to make it count. I’m not sure why the club’s hierarchy were so worried about a team photograph, but they were. It must have been because all the sponsors were there waiting for their snap with the team. On team photo days, you don’t just have one shot and go home – you’re there all afternoon having individual snapshots, head shots and personal shots, signing things, giving interviews and so on, and every affiliate of the club sends a delegation to the stadium to have their own shot with the squad. So if you’re sponsored by Samsung or DHL, those companies will send a delegation of half a dozen people to mingle and have their own individual squad photo. And so it goes on: kit manufacturers, training ground sponsors, match day catering delegations, stand sponsors, stadium sponsors, “friends of the club” …
They were all there, and now that I think about it, our actions would probably have painted the club in an awful light if the standoff had continued much longer.