A Simple Game

Premier League for Tots
Football is meant to be a simple game and that is why it has such global appeal. You simply need a ball, players and something for goals. You can play a version of it just about anywhere.
In the Premier League for Tot’s however we have made things rather more complicated with formations, tactics boards, plans for defending corners and lots and lots of jargon picked up from the experts on Sky. ‘Second ball’ shouts the coach and looks around for appreciation at the parents, failing to notice one of his track-suited players throw one of the spare match balls onto the pitch. One team is playing with the original ball while the other team scores a goal with the second ball that has been thrown on the pitch by the obedient sub. The more the under eight’s set up resembles the professional game we see on TV, the better the coach, in some parent’s eyes.

Some more examples of jargon shouted at children’s football matches and possible interpretations by the children.
· “Find space” – Build a one man space rocket and travel in a vertical direction until you leave the earth’s atmosphere. (may take a while)
· “Man on” – Sounds as if a strange man has wondered onto the pitch. Do not accept any sweets from him and find the nearest policeman. (may take a while)
· “Hit the channel” – Nip down to Dover with a large stick and start thrashing the sea.
· “Hold” – Grab the nearest opposition player and don’t let go.
· “Relax” – Sun lounger + strawberry milkshake + Gameboy.
· “Gamble” – Poker, 3 card brag, snap, old maid?
· “Get rid of it” – Stick your fingers down your throat and bring up your breakfast.
· “Work” – Help mum with the dishes, dad wash the car and knuckle down in Maths.
· “Travel” – Pack your suitcase were off to Spain!
· “Close down” – Bring in the washing for your mum (may of misheard instruction)
· “Do we want it?” – Oh yes, a new bike for Christmas please.
· “Spread yourselves” – Cover yourself from head to toe in chocolate spread (something dad occasionally does with mum on a Saturday night – unknown to the kids)

The simpler the better
Brain Clough has had the greatest impact on the club game in England by taking an unfashionable provincial team from the bottom of the old second division to two European Cup triumphs. As well as his incredible achievements at Nottingham Forest, Clough was equally as impressive in his time as manager of Derby County. The greatest manager England never had!
But what did Clough attribute his amazing success too? Well it would probably have many mini soccer coaches spinning in their monogrammed bench coats. How on earth could he send out a team so ill prepared?

Nigel Clough on the ITV DVD simply called ‘Clough’ explained his father’s philosophy.
“Very simple, you have 10 friends, 10 team mates out there on the pitch, look after them. Look after the ball and give them the best possible ball (pass) you can. I can’t remember one time, in 9 years or even watching training before that, what you would call a tactical session. Stopping it, working on the back four or pattern of play - you just played 6, 8 a side or however many it was. A bit of possession, a few games and everything came from that - very simple. We never talked about the opposition; you just went out and played.”

That philosophy won them two European Cups, - Brain himself explains further;
“I tried to make sure of one basic thing in management. Educated people would call it a fundamental but I’m not sure what that means. I know what basic means and my basic was that there should never ever be the slightest sense of complication in my dressing room. I would rather have my players rolling about the dressing room floor laughing than have them trying to fathom a list of instructions and tactics before they went out to play a match.”

The more complicated we make it the bigger the smoke screen we can hide behind and the more important we become. The more coaching we do the more the players will rely on us and the greater power he will wield.
It is time for a reality check and to make the game fun, accessible and simple for children to understand and see it for what it is - kid’s football.

Grassroots and academies
Clough had his theories too on how children were being treated in both the grassroots game and academies.
“Our Simon used to run a team called FC Wanderers and I’ve never seen so many up- and- coming Alf Ramseys in my life – parents on the touchline thinking they were coaching their kids. There were about twenty of them, the same twenty every week, shouting their heads off. The mothers were the worst offenders and they hadn’t a clue what they were shouting about. They’d heard some self-styled expert trotting out the same phrase on telly.”

“The introduction of youngsters to the professional clubs today has gone from the sublime to the bloody ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with competiveness. All kids want to win and have to learn how to lose, but these days too many parents put too much pressure on little lads who should be enjoying every second on the football pitch. They’re grabbing kids almost before they’ve lost their milk teeth and although these places no doubt produce some good players at the end of the conveyor belt, I’m not sure they will produce enough to justify the investment and expense. Call me old- fashioned but I think some of these good players would emerge anyway without the need for such intense teaching processes. I’m scarred the kids are being brainwashed and by the time they’ll all be walking round in the same way like robots. There will be nothing natural about them because their individuality will have been coached out of them.”
Games

What we don’t have at present is enough alternatives to the current children’s league structures -alternatives that focus on inclusion, fun, encouragement, plenty of touches of the ball, games and simple instruction that the children can understand.
Games are very important to children as that is exactly what they would do if left alone. Coaching is fine, but we do far too much of it, sometimes for the sake of the parents, to let them know just how knowledgeable we are. Better then we give nuggets of information, as and when it is needed and of course Keep It Simple!

“A good coach coaches joy. Ask Wayne Rooney, the last of the backstreet footballers. That's what saved England's bacon in Kazakhstan on Saturday - not Rooney's lust for victory but his soul-deep joy in the physical action of sport.”

By Paul Cooper

07875 283093

http://www.footballfootball.org/

Simon Barnes – The Times
References
Brian Clough – Clough the Autobiography (1994) Corgi Books ISBN: 5791086
Cloughie (Walking on water 2002) – Headline Book Publishing ISBN: 9780755314300
Clough (DVD) 2009 ITV Sport

Kids Football & Failure

The one consistent factor in England’s 0-0, World Cup group round draw with Algeria was the fear in England’s play.

When the Three Lions failed at the World Cup again and England was once more gripped by the inevitable heart-searching, analysis and post mortems, did anyone remember the words Sir Bobby Charlton spoke after the 1966 triumph:

“The World Cup wasn’t won on the playing fields of England. It was won on the streets.”
It was street football that created those World Cup icons – kids with their backsides hanging out of their shorts, kicking a bald tennis ball about with their mates for hours on end, learning how to play and how to love it.

Speaking as a youth football coach for fifteen years, unless we can revive street football, or something very like it, I believe we can kiss goodbye to world supremacy in the beautiful game, because football’s not beautiful for our kids any more: it’s ugly.
In a world where children can no longer play outside without supervision, parents and coaches have taken over, and the competitive drive adults bring to the game means that youngsters no longer have time to fall in love with football, to play for fun and thus to truly develop their skills.

The late, great Alex Stock, manager of QPR & Fulham got it spot on when he said about the modern youth game:

“Everywhere I go there are coaches. Schoolmasters telling young boys not to do this and that and generally scaring the life out of the poor little devils. Junior clubs playing with sweepers and one and half men up front, no wingers, four across the middle. They are frightened to death of losing, even at their tender age, and it makes me cry.”

Those street-bred footballers Bobby Charlton spoke about had fewer distractions than modern children. They weren’t kept holed up indoors by parents terrified by traffic and the possibility of predatory ‘strangers’. Kids in those days not only played football but climbed trees, rode their bikes, built dens and explored their neighbourhood. The self-confidence, social competence and risk-taking skills these experiences bred made them better able to enjoy their play.

In street football, every child in the neighbourhood was involved. You might have the embarrassment of being the last to be picked but at least you played, and if the game was too one-sided and lost its fun, ‘Billy the dribbling wizard’ swapped with ‘two left feet Larry’ to make it even. Children also learnt to play in different positions. You might be in goal one day and playing as a striker the next. One thing for certain was that you got a complete football education.
You also played against older kids, and if you couldn’t match them physically, you had to use new technical skills and insight in order to compete. Children learnt from each other.

Today’s children learn from the grown-ups. Without the freedom of the streets, their early experiences of football are organised, supervised and coached. They have no real say in what happens, and they don’t have time to develop and learn. Just as there isn’t time any more for families to make a proper meal and sit around the dining table together, there’s no time for coaches to waste developing children at football.
Development is long term and takes years of patience, but in today’s ‘win at all costs’ society coaches need success now, so they pick the biggest kids and get a giant to whack the ball up field as hard as possible to an even bigger giant who wallops the ball in the back of the net. 10-0, we are the business and the other team is rubbish

Watching the youngest age groups play today is like watching a Premier League for tots. Seven-year-olds with David Beckham haircuts and the latest Adidas boots pull on their ‘Dudley Tyre Care’ sponsored shirts and raintops sponsored by ‘Boothroyd, Cripps and Pottinger, Family Solicitors’. They totter up and down the pitch in front of a full house of mums, dads, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandparents, second cousins and all.
This enthusiastic gathering can become very rowdy and explodes into sheer ecstasy when their team scores, but rarely applauds either goals or skilful football from the opposition. What do the children learn from all this? Not that football’s a beautiful game, that’s for sure. They learn you’re a hero if you win and go home with the Man of the Match trophy and a Mars bar, your dad telling you how one day you’ll play for England. But if you lose you’re a villain – and it’s a frosty car ride home with your dad analysing every mistake.

I once watched an under 9s game where one team had the coach and assistant coach standing by each goalpost continually barking orders to the keeper. Meanwhile, a parent on each touchline ran up and down shouting other instructions. When they won a corner at the other end their coach hollered “Wait” and trundled the entire length of the field for a minute’s discussion, cupped hand in the ear of the poor flustered corner-taker who knocked his corner kick straight out.

The next game I saw was an under 8s. The team came out for a 30 minute warm-up which would have exhausted a crack team of US Navy Seals, involving running around the pitch, shuttle runs, sit ups and press ups with not a ball in sight. The substitutes weren’t used as, according to the coach, the game was too close, and the kids were all kept in the changing room for 30 minutes after the game for a debrief.

If we want to breed ‘winning’ footballers again, we need to give the game back to the children. In 21st century, traffic-infested Britain, street football may be a thing of the past, but at least we could try to provide something equivalent in a safe, fun environment at children’s clubs and elsewhere.

It’s all a matter of backing off as coaches and letting the children play. In small-sided games, such as 4v4 and 5v5, where children can learn through play and different types of goals and features can put emphasis on different skills and insight. To the children it is still just a game and most importantly fun. They need to learn to solve their own football problems on the pitch, to work it out for themselves before we give them the solution.
Parents, coaches and kids need to work together. Grassroots clubs should have pre-season meetings with the parents and children to discuss rules and agreements so that everyone understands what their contribution is. In the club I coach at we’ve had fantastic results using this philosophy.

We’ve found that by putting the children first and making it their game, they’ve not only had great fun and developed better as people, but they’ve also developed a passion for football. What surprised us most was we also saw almost instant results on the pitch. The kids expressed themselves, had no fear of failure (no one shouts at them) and they played with imagination and skill.

We’ve also seen improvement in the less naturally gifted children who would have been thrown on the scrap heap years ago by many ruthless coaches. It’s as if the kids are back on the street again, everyone playing with smiles on their faces, watched by beaming parents and coaches.
There also needs to be alternatives to leagues and clubs especially in the inner cities where, as in the case of London children’s participation in football is 50% less than the national average.

We should be looking at giving children a life-long love of the game and a return to the values that made it a fun game to play and an environment where there is no fear of failure

Maybe, if this message can spread, we could rear a generation of footballers who play with creativity and without fear, who solve their own problems on the pitch, and who enjoy the game. Footballers who play to win, instead of losing through fear.

Paul Cooper 07875 283093
http://www.childrensfootballalliance.com/
giveusbackourgame@gmail.com