Re: "Coaching To Win" VS "Playing For The Future"
Reply #31 –
I think its important for players to win their spot on the team, not be given it for their own benefit.
Effectively we need to ensure that the player's focus is on the team's developement, and contributing rather than their own. They will often find that the two are mutually exclusive anyway.
Where it gets tricky is like Vivian alluded to. At what point are we no longer giving a kid a game for them to learn? When does the team become "ready"? Is it at the point that we start winning? No, I think we should always have an eye on developing people further, be it getting them to learn another role, or getting them to become leaders, or developing them as people outside of football where they take on business and developement of their skills.
In cicumstances where teams have played the kids, you will find that they have moved the senior members of the team playing a similar role on, rather than just replacing a more senior, ready player with the kid and pushing the senior player back in the pecking order.
I don't know the balance. Im not a senior coach. I don't know what instructions are given, but focussing on team form can be tricky also as we don't know what is going wrong with some players performances, where the system is falling down and what impact that has and what the next guy has done to get a game.
I.e. Watson. Many were critical of Jones and his inability to play well as reason to get Watson into the team. He got his chance, and due to the way our team is playing, he tanked in a fairly big way. Was that Watson? I suggest partly. It just compounds the issues we were facing because he played differently to Liam.
The lesson to learn, is that familiarity to the system is more important than anything else. People denigrate the game plan, the coach, the players, but stepping back and looking at things holistically it appears more as though we can get things going well (evidenced by some really good quarters of footy by our guys), and then something changes within the way we are playing or our opponent is playing to result in a chain reaction where things start falling over.
The coach will wear the heat, and so he should, but I would suggest that when you have elements of a team that are so unfamiliar with what is trying to be achieved, or perhaps doing something that is unusual, you get excess pressure falling on places where we are not as strong as we could or would like to be. I.e. Watson. For all Liam Jones shortcomings, despite how badly things were unravelling he was hitting contests, putting on a chase (even infrequently) and trying to give an option despite it not working. Watson seemed unfamiliar with what the expectation was, or completely off the pace (not for the first time). This will probably result in a lot of game plan's failing, but here is where I think we have an important point. How do we expect our guys to become familiar with a game plan, if they don't play it because they are not very good at executing it? Sure, people can say they are unsuited to said plan, but I think that this might be a bit of a firthy, as one of our major problems seems to be execution of skills, rather than option. I saw Menzel miss Murphy with a fairly regulation handball on the weekend by roughly 2 metres. Menzel can handball he is better than that, he just forked it at that moment.