adminCosmas Zulu Talking Football
NOWADAYS the demands from excessive media coverage of football, means that the coaches’ public appearances are not confined solely to the pitch.He has to count on competent assistant coaches to share other functions, for example dealing with executive members and other elements in the club as well as dealing with the media and sponsors.
The coach has an unquestionable role to play within this group of decision making staff. He is often the one to determine the style of play.
He has to be able to decide when faced with the perennial dilemma of whether to play entertaining football or just to settle for results.
At present the trend is towards attacking play especially after the introduction of new rules concerning the back pass to goalkeepers, offside and also rewarding three points for a victory.
Professionalism now demands the coach to exercise his duties to reinforce his status and his influence on the game, although the coach never will be a “ miracle worker.” He will nevertheless be able to exert an influence on performance related factors.
• Leadership: A team needs leaders. The coach and one of the players are moral leaders with strong personalities and know how to assert themselves firmly. The player is the intermediary for his teammates and the coaches (club), such players are not often found unfortunately. They need to be moulded from youth.
• The team: Seven different type of players have to be identified – the team leader, goalscorer, the energetic “lung of the team” player, the creator, the versatile midfielder, the support player and the protector. The team’s performance will be enhanced if the inter-play between all these functions can be optimised.
• Tactical strength: It sometimes happens that the team changes its playing system in the course of a match for this reason players should have tactical awareness, training players accordingly is obviously a key part of this development.
• Mentality: A lot of work still needs to be done in this area. From now on education will have to be based around three areas with emphasis on technique, tactics and personality.
• Coaching: There are basically three types of coaching methods currently being applied, free coaching where orders are given. Creative (Persuasive) coaching where suggestions are made but not enforced. Today’s football demands an increase in creative coaching by introducing coaching situations and drills that allow for several different solutions this will help players manage the situation own their own.
This method is therefore much less “hands on” as far as the coach is concerned and the creativity practised in the training sessions will inevitably have a knock-on effect in match situations.
• The artist: Now more than ever football has to ensure that great emphasis is placed on creative players. These players are capable of swinging a match in their team’s favour with a simple piece of individual brilliance, such players therefore have to be allowed to blossom to full potential. In this case 30 percent of goals are either scored or made as a result of an individual’s actions. BEWARE!! The artist also has to fit in with the game played by the rest of the team.
• The team behind the team: We have already seen that the modern game is not restricted to what happens on the pitch. There are many other elements to be taken into account. We can list three categories of people who influence the life of the team. Either at close quarters or from afar.
• The pitch people: Fans, technical staff and medical staff.
• The executive members, sponsors and the media.
• The enemies of football and parasites.
Club officials, supporters and sponsors if you go through the things the coaches of today have to do, you cannot give the man six games to turn around the results even one year is not enough.
Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger are two coaches with over 38 years between them in charge. Here at home Barry Daka and myself had 15 years at Highlanders and we won every trophy which was on offer in this country so please give the coaches enough rope to hang themselves.
Until next week.
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