One of the pursuits cherished by a cast of zealous sports theoreticians and perceptive media is to search for formulas that could set the trend for winning. Such findings would eventually determine what changes should be considered to upgrade the status of any sport to the level of ”modern” as perceived in the international context.
In football, an abundance of statistics, analyses and experiments provides a vast ground for finding answers to why and how top competition matches are won.
When major European club and national team competitions are played, anything that could be precisely measured or recorded in the area of performance parameters is scrutinised meticulously.
The masters of match statistics in England, Germany, Italy, France and others assume that information about the ”modern” demands of football can be universally applied.
For instance, they can produce evidence about the running distance and number of sprints Manchester United players cover during their matches. They argue that their success in recent campaigns in the English Premiership and the European and World Club Championships highlights winning components of ”modern” football.
In some technical articles those players who run more than 10km in a game are idolised and singled out by physical trainers as models to follow. A player’s excellence in this advanced kind of football comes at a cost. There was no bluffing when Manchester City offered Chelsea captain John Terry a weekly salary of £200 000 in a recent transfer proposal. Other recorded attributes of today’s football matches include the number of jumps, turns, area of movement, number of attacks, shots, long and short passes, faults, corner kicks and so on. Even a novice would notice that almost everything considered an important match statistic or analysis actually refers to quantitative aspects.
The missing calculation
Very little space is allocated to investigating other crucial factors such as ball skills, individual and collective tactics, movement disguise and improvisation or creativity (a 70% to 80% deciding element in creating and scoring goals).
We are made to believe that when Cristiano Ronaldo runs 10km, sprints a total of 820m in a match, scores a goal and creates another one, he plays ”modern” football.
Is it then ”not so modern” when Lionel Messi — playing in a Barcelona league match — runs only 8,7km, sprints a total of 670m, scores two goals and creates another two? There seems to be an anomaly in the way ”modern” players are recognised.
Why the obsession with distances and numbers of various things a player does in a match when it is mainly the efficiency and quality of technical and tactical executions that decide the performance?
Beyond quantity
The proponents of quantity should know that, in any match, other factors could determine a player’s running distance and speed and power expenditure — things such as the opponents’ approach and playing style, field conditions, altitude and even the referee’s style quickly come to mind.
Last season Barcelona achieved a record for winning the Spanish Cup and the European Club Championship with the highest number of goals and consecutive match-winning records. Yet, amazingly, their overall game statistics were significantly below the best figures on running distance, number of sprints and other details recorded in the so-called ”modern” football game.
It is puzzling to see how superficially the nature of the game is treated. The meaning of ”modern football” is not the same at Barcelona as it is at Manchester United.
South African style
At a recent workshop for aspiring youth coaches, I was asked to talk about the heated issue of South African football’s style of play versus ”modern” football style. There are two serious difficulties. First, there is not yet a distinct style of play in South African football. Secondly, even if there are some sustained efforts to develop one, the huge confusion created locally by so many contrasting coaching techniques makes it unrealistic to reach a definite conclusion.
The amalgamation of poor ball technique, the fast-and-furious play mentality, uncontrolled aggression and occasional individual brilliance witnessed in almost every Premier Soccer League match does not allow the creation of a distinct national football identity.
The temptations of copying irrelevant features from European football philosophy succeeded in suppressing the local players’ natural flair in a specific environment. This reality has to be acknowledged before there can be changes.
Brazilians always say that their football is not English or Italian or French football. Spaniards and Germans say the same thing. Their game reflects their respective national mentality and culture. They are not replicas of other successful football nations although they share a few common elements.
In South African football there was never a comprehensive attempt to identify the predominant strengths of the players and then define a distinct approach to the game. This is only noticed, in a limited way, in the style of play espoused by Bafana Bafana. At club level, youth development and in schools the concept of ”fast and furious” or, worse, ”kick and chase” resembles the South African version of ”modern” football.
Physical trainers foolishly disregard pertinent needs for quality work on the players’ technical and tactical abilities with large amounts of long-distance running, sprinting and hours of non-specific football work.
Run till you drop
I found a strongly dominant conviction, even among the youth development coaches, about the value of exhaustive training. It insists: ”The longer and harder players run and work on their physical strength, the closer we get to the way ‘modern’ football should be played.”
Going for 10km to 20km hard runs and pumping iron in the gym, these coaches say, is all that’s needed.
The most acclaimed sport scientist in the country, Professor Tim Noakes, has concluded — along with dozens of other football scientists around the world — that stamina, speed, muscle strength and power must be strictly trained according to the specifics of each sport. But in South African football nobody wants to listen.
Two very successful technicians, Vágner Mancini (who won the Brazilian Cup in 2005 with Paulista FC) and Antonio Mello (who has innovated training methodology in Brazil), agree on the specificity of fitness. They ask: ”What is the purpose of a player running 8km or 10km in training or sprinting for 600m or 700m when the decisive factor in a game is very short-distance runs? They [physical trainers] can affect and dilute the quality and dynamics of football!”
In all my experiences as a coach I never allowed my players to be punished by the negative effects of long-distance running and the results were highly rewarding — four league championships and 21 cup victories.
Still, very influential on the local coaches and physical trainers are some of the foreign training models where, in the name of ”modern” football, the players are worked out beyond safe physiological limits. The consequences for the players’ health and their longevity in the game could be devastating.
We have just learned that another professional player, the skipper of top Spanish side Espanyol, Dani Jarque, has died of heart attack while on a pre-season camp. Such tragic incidents should never happen in the name of ”modern” training.
Ted Dumitru is technical director at Mamelodi Sundowns