For one reason or another, on Saturday I spent the day watching two full football matches: one from the sidelines trying to film things for Callum’s A-Level PE and the other from my car, on the sidelines of a senior game.
What became clear (remember I’m not from football but I have coached boy’s football for more than a decade) are that patterns create efficiency.
What happens is that people have habits in football games. In the afternoon game, watching the senior team, I watched one of the guys I had coached for a long time at juniors who then went on to a much higher-level football and has now returned back (a familiar pattern)
He has a pattern where he turns inside the ball. He’s very comfortable doing this and so returns back to it, particularly under stress. I watched him do this in a senior game four or five times and lose the ball almost every time.
If he turns inside twice and then stops turning inside and turns outside, he may get a better outcome which may lead to more of a chance.
This is what coaching is all about. It’s about identifying patterns and negative patterns, to stop repeating the patterns and having a better process and therefore a better outcome.
It happens everywhere. If you can see the world like that then you can make things better in so many different places.
Not identifying the pattern there is probably why that certain individual is not at much higher level of football, because as a youngster they were streets ahead of everyone else.
Everything’s a metaphor, isn’t it? Everything can be applied everywhere else.
The patterns related to the senior game were obvious and, as I dictate this blog with about 30 minutes of the game left, our team are losing 4 – 1.
Blog Post Number - 4281
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