Last night, @Thesecretcoach1 re-tweeted a number coaches and
clubs who were posting results of junior games, a big no no in the eyes of the
FA now. I’ve sorted of wanted to confront these tweets myself in the past (some
from coaches I know!) but never bothered as it was an argument I just wasn’t
willing to start. But someone with over 5,000 following coaches confronting it
probably makes more of an impact. So I thought I would post up my views on the
subject (not that many would be interested, but ah well)
Ok, so coaches and clubs posting up results doesn’t really
bother me at all. I would find no offence if someone published the result of my
team on social media, although I can’t speak for parents etc. It doesn’t even
bother that much that some coaches and clubs feel the need to highlight their
triumphs and often won’t post poor results. It’s clear that some people judge
themselves and their teams on results alone; fair enough that’s the nature of
sport I was the same a few seasons ago for sure.
What bothers me is that there are 17-0, 19-0 games happening
across all ages and whats worrying is that these tweets of crushing wins are no
one offs and seem to be an almost bi-weekly thing. I don’t want people to think
that I’m one of these coaches who claims to not care about winning at all, I think
it’s important to play to win, in my opinion we’re in danger bringing up
players who don’t have the desire and hunger to win, I think there’s a
balancing act to it (although that would be its own post entirely). My
questions to these coaches would be; what
are your team getting from winning 15-0? Obviously it’s probably not much fun
for the other team and your players will of course enjoy getting the chance to
score a handful of goals for their tally. Without being challenged and playing
in competitive games I would personally find coaching a team that wins heavily
every week a bit pointless, in fact this part of the reason I stepped down from
coaching our “A” team (shouldn’t call it that) to coach our other team they
were winning easily most weeks and I felt there was little motivation for the
players to want to improve. It may be a case that when you play a team who can
hold their own and attack you that your side struggles to deal with it,
especially if you lose players to academies etc.
So what can we do?
Well I know some who will say about taking some of their
players off, which I don’t really agree with as they want to be playing!
Letting the other team bring on their subs is a good idea and i’ve seen it
happen. But one idea that still sticks out in my mind was when I was watching a
u16 or u18 game down at St Teath and they were playing Newquay. The home side
were a fairly well established team but the visitors were a different level and
got to the 9-0 limit used in the league after about 30/35 minutes. Now most
games usually carry on into crazy scores and just record the 9-0 or whatever
but the Newquay coach (can’t recall his name) called to the ref after the 9th
goal and came on to speak to him, they called the other coach on and all the
players and began to mix the players up into 2 new teams. They played a couple
of 30 minute halves swapping around more players between. The game was so much better
to watch and clearly became more of benefit to everyone playing. For me as a
coach its something that I still remember, I had so much respect for the
Newquay coach for how he went about this, a lot more than if his team had won
20-0 or whatever. It was a touch of class, he was obviously an excellent coach
but he had such an interest in making the game as beneficial as possible for
everyone. I’ve heard of people doing this but this is the only time I’ve seen
it.
So my message if it’s worth anything is if you have a team
that are clearly very strong and the game is completely one sided, do
something! Make that Sunday morning worth it, a 20-0 isn’t much good for anyone
involved. Personally I have only swapped players around in one game where we
gave the other team (new to playing) some players at half time, it made the
game more enjoyable for all the players and it’s something I would do again if
appropriate.
I’m lucky that our games have been pretty competitive, I’m
hoping that it will benefit the team in the long term.
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