Pre season training.

[Psaw]

Ive played football in four different cities, as an amatuer, training twice a week is priceless, it shows you what your team mates are capable of, how fit they are, motivation, behaviour etc, attitude.

Then pre season in friendlies.

Compare that too full time football, pre season you spend all day getting to know how you all play, you would think that on the first game of the season you are prepared, not so.

How does that work?, you might as well not bothered. These are professional people, they are paid to get it right.

When you rehearse something, understand something, agree on something, then on the day all do something different, what is the problem?

Its presence of mind, clarity, its playing sub consciously, not consciously, reverting to old programmes. Like panic, scrambled thinking, hysteria, all in the moment, clarity becomes a casualty.

Learning is repetition, new programmes even at its simplest needs grounding, that takes time, a lion tamer who teaches not only by punishment but by example, repetition, and praise.

The lion tamer is the manager, and in pre season is faced with pimply youths unable or uninterested in learning, never mind acting. Maybe allowing players to evolve without interference is the way.

Like in the old days. There was a documentary of the old QPR team long ago with Rodney Marsh, apart from pre season training, they never trained, and on training days just played five a side, never exercising, and they got promotion.

Old Bill Leivers signed players for what they did on the pitch, not because they did what they were told, footballers are the experts.

Maybe its time to trust them, after all instructions go in one ear.

Maybe the manager is there as a parent, offering advice, nothing more, but with the sanction of being dropped, and that the culture of how they play on match day should be entrusted to the players, and pre season is about evolving, not instruction. Evolution will be pre conscious, or unconscious.

If evolution happens, it will be observable, present, it will make an observer purr.

[griff]

Then along came playing out from the back.

[Psaw]

Tippy tappy football is an abomination. Go for the throat from the tart.