Knowledge and perceptions of sport psychology within English soccer.

That’s the title of the paper to which this summary refers:

Pain MA, Harwood CG.

School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Loughborough University, UK. m.a.pain@lboro.ac.uk

The aim of the present study was to examine knowledge and perceptions of applied sport psychology within English soccer. National coaches (n = 8), youth academy directors (n = 21) and academy coaches (n = 27) were surveyed using questionnaire and interview methods. Questionnaire results revealed a lack of knowledge of sport psychology that appeared to underpin some of the most significant barriers to entry for sport psychologists. These included lack of clarity concerning the services of a sport psychologist, problems fitting in and players’ negative perceptions of sport psychology. Overall, however, lack of finance was the highest rated barrier. Six barrier dimensions emerged from the interview data: negative perceptions of psychology, lack of sport psychology knowledge, integrating with players and coaching staff, role and service clarity, practical constraints, and perceived value of sport psychology. These findings were broadly compatible with the survey data, with finance emerging as a major barrier and misconceptions of sport psychology being common. Our conclusions are discussed in relation to the practical implications of the study for both applied research and the provision of sport psychology services within English soccer.

PMID: 15513275 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Whilst that reflects my own thoughts on the matter, the item about financial barriers is new to me.

As for the misconceptions about sport psychology - the longer I look at this, the more forgivable they become.

For better or worse, British football has history, tradition, a way of speaking. Now, I can write all I like about that history being misapprehended, and I can complain about how tradition is preventing us getting what we say we want from the England team, and I can shrug wearily at the more-working-class-than-you competition that football-speak encourages.

All that is just the way it is. I might not like it, but I can tell when I’m in a tiny minority, and I’m in one here.

And is it just my observation that sport psychology has rolled into football town, with its caravan stuffed with medicines for golfers and tennis players and athletes, crying “roll up!” expecting “the peasants who inhabit these parts” to gather gratefully round?

Of course, the locals ignored it. I don’t blame them. The longer I pursue this career, the more hot my embarrassment that its public faces are Oliver James and Paul McKenna. (And what is it with psych stuff and balding, short-sighted men? That’s quite a good description of me, for a start. And think Freud, Jung, Adler.) If that’s how I feel, how is someone with no need to know much about all of this going to respond? With suspicion, at the very least?

And I begin to wonder if there isn’t something just a little bit rude about the failure to express sport psychology ideas in the language of the sport being addressed. If I were to compile a list of the top ten all-time British sports psychologists, six of them would be football managers from Scotland and North-East England. And I don’t think I’d make it to ten even with their help. Did any of those men use psychological terminology to their players (some did in interview, but that’s a different matter) or did they find a more successful way to put things across?

The very word “psychology” doesn’t help. That tricky quintet of consonants at its front, the OED’s equivalent of a dirty mac. For most people, the introduction of the word into conversation means that something has gone badly wrong. It has illness, madness, all over it. And that’s psychology’s fault, not sport’s, not football’s. After all, this is the body of knowledge that found it necessary to say “object relations” when all it means is how well you get on with folk. You can’t blame someone in sport if they suspect that sport psychology is a conspiracy to get them into a straitjacket. Because there are psychotherapists out there who say that “we’re all broken”, that we all need “therapy”, we all need it for all of our lives..

That’s part of what’s behind the “history” on this site. There are problems in playing football that aren’t to do with physical practice or tactics or fitness. Some of the answers to those problems are to be found in the game’s history, surely? Or at least some idea of them? (Albeit I also enjoy the history purely for its own sake and always have).

And if we do want to import ideas from outside football, in the way Clive Woodward did so briefly and yet successfully for rugby union, can we not at least have the basic politeness to say, when in Rome?

UPDATE: Serendipitous smiley. And why not.

Humphrey Walters on the future of British sport

I was encouraged to find some of my own themes in an interview with Sir Clive Woodward’s colleague and mentor Humphrey Walters just before New Year. At least, I was encouraged to find one of my themes - that another, different one was confirmed by the interview is just downright depressing.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve come to realize that sport holds a different place in the national psyche in Britain than it does in Australia, Germany or the United States. In Britain, sport is still primarily fun, a distraction from the serious business of life. It’s something you can do at the weekend, or, if you don’t want to be quite that active, it acts as a kind of real-life soap opera, with colourful characters bouncing off each other week by week on the back pages of the newspapers. We become serious about sport when big competitions come around - our place in the Olympic medals table, our performance in the World Cups of football and rugby, mean a lot nationally when they are thrust before our attention. Once the circus has moved on, however, our attention is apt to wander. Walters says,

“If you sat down and studied what is going wrong with British sport you would find some very common traits,” he says. “The real problem is that we as a nation don’t know what we want to do in sport. Do we want to retain the public school mentality of ‘play up, play up and play the game’ or do we want to win?

“I’m not sure we’ve got over that hurdle yet and I’m not sure that the people who are running these sports really understand what professionalism is.”

I’m beginning to suspect that we do know what we want - and that the real answer might be Soap, rather than either of Walter’s alternatives of winning or Corinthianism.

Mr Walters, who has also advised several Premiership football clubs, says it is easy to despair at Britain’s sporting failures but much harder to find the solution. The biggest sin, however, is not to look for answers. “Winning businesses ask ‘why?’ all the time,” he says.

“That’s what happened at Marks and Spencer. Stuart Rose came in and he looked at every aspect of the business and asked: ‘Why do we do that?’ The problem with sport is that it is such a closed shop that people are suspicious of anybody who is not steeped in their sport.”

That’s an excellent one-line summary of the Woodward/Clifford experience at Southampton, professional football’s great missed opportunity of the last 12 months.

I’m not sure if I trust in his solution, however:

“I know where I would start,” he says. “Everybody talks about the Aussies, the New Zealanders and the South Africans and their winning mentality. Nobody sits down and figures out just what it is. So what I would do is commission a study to examine whether there is such a different mentality and, if so, what is it?

“I would ask questions like how is it formed? Does it begin in school? Is it because they have a chip on their shoulder? I’ve no idea, but it wouldn’t be difficult to find out. Then I would ask, what is our mentality?”

My problem with that is, who are you going to commission to undertake the study? It would have to be someone from outside Britain merely to avoid a “national curriculum” type situation, where the outcome mysteriously perpetuates the status quo contrary to all good intentions. Britain really, really does not understand where it is coming from on this, and the lack of perspective would be fatal. But would British sportspeople treat a study conducted by people from abroad with anything other than the usual reluctance and denial? And what if the study concludes that we actually prefer things this way - sport as Soap, sport as a place to escape the demands of being an intelligent nation, perpetuating the myth that “passion” and “inspiration” are the national traits and not pessimism, cynicism and weariness?

There’s more to this, of course, and read the whole interview, but this was depressing to see:

What irks Mr Walters is that much of the wisdom acquired during the Woodward reign at Twickenham is now being ignored. “It’s very important to examine success,” he says. “There was no proper debrief after winning the rugby World Cup. Reports were written but they didn’t ask for the view of some people on the bench, the groundsman, the bag man.

“Everybody looks at things differently and every view is just as important because it’s a game of inches. Everybody brings an inch. It’s about sticking them together.”

Mr Walters cites an example of how knowledge from the Woodward era has been jettisoned. “One of the things we did was to change our kit at half-time. Now it’s not happening, or at least some players do and some don’t.

Once the World Cup was won in 2003, all of that silly newfangled stuff could be pedalbinned so we could get back to the proper British values. With the consequent results. I’ve asked the question before, and it remains: what’s the real “bullshit” here - innovation that feeds into a World Cup win, or all the verbiage about “passion” and “inspiration” with all that goes with it?

UPDATE: see how many Britishisms you can find in this Guardian account of Ashton’s first England rugby squad!

Lowe, Clifford and Woodward: A Revolution Postponed

A brief “links” post today, as busy between now and Monday morning.

The departures from Southampton of Rupert Lowe, Clive Woodward and Simon Clifford represent to me in stark form the present unwillingness of English club football to do what is necessary to bring the best out of our players and achieve what our national game is capable of. What could have been a story of rebirth and regeneration has become yet another tale of football’s version of the Old School Tie.

Simon Clifford tells his side of the story (Woodward hasn’t yet, and may not) in two Guardian articles this morning. Jeremy Wilson has done a good job of putting Clifford across here and here, although his reference to Humphrey Walters as a “motivational guru” is tiresome and another reflection of our game. For all that it bewails the loss of street football, in most important respects it refuses to leave the playground.

Over at the always superb Hobo Tread, here’s an account of Clifford’s non-league side, Garforth Town.

By way of contrast, the comments on this post of Tim Worstall’s aptly demonstrate what I’ve been saying about sport being the place where the English opt to be stupid. Woodward gets airily dismissed with a world-weary wave of a hand. How obvious it is, that Woodward is nothing but a bullshit merchant: all we need to do is stuff our players with raw steak, “motivate” them, and if all’s not well after that, there’ll always be a scapegoat for the clever people to stick pins into.

It’s going to be a bleak and unsuccessful few years in British sport. We just don’t seem to be aware that there’s a choice to make. Either accept that we care more about fun and entertainment than winning, in which case our John Smith advert phoney no-nonsense amateur hour approach will do, or accept that winning things on a regular basis involves a change in attitude and practice on a fundamental level. Every time we seem to be on the cusp of taking the second route, we come over all CAMRA. We’re doing it again, now. What makes people think it’s going to work this time?

The Transfer Window Closes

Thank heavens for West Ham. From absolutely nowhere, this has become the most interesting week in the transfer market since Ardiles and Villa joined Spurs.

I don’t really have to say here that the arrival of Teves and Mascherano at Upton Park comes as a surprise. I was as shocked as anyone else. Pleased for Alan Pardew, who is one of the genuinely good coaches in English football, and who deserves to have that kind of young talent in his squad. And looking forward to watching them play. For all that I want Reo-Coker to join Manchester United this evening, a good part of me wants Nigel to stay where he is, as West Ham are beginning to remind me of many an excellent non-mainstream side from the past - 1979’s Palace, the Greenhoff Stoke, but above all Robson’s Ipswich: if Pardew can keep his current team together, they can do great things. He’s done it cheaply, too…

But there are rumours flying around that Roman Abramovich is involved. I’m not sure that I believe them. For one thing, the company that owns the rights to Tevez and Mascherano has also been involved in takeover talks at West Ham. That could signal the end of West Ham’s time as a popular, intelligent, attractive team forever on the margins. Rather than this transfer being some kind of subterranean corruption seeping eastwards along Bazelgette’s sewer, it could be the start of great things for the club that won England the World Cup.

Yet there are sides to those rumours that are not being talked about and that should be talked about. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that someone in Abramovich’s position could have been involved. What would that mean?

In the first place, it would mean that someone was prepared to spend that much money - more than many times enough to set most of us up for a lifetime - on the game. He would want to win that much, and that’s funny. Enough, that if his own team is already sufficiently overloaded to prevent him buying them still more players, he’s willing to buy them for middle-ranking clubs just to keep them out of the hands of his rivals. Enough to pay to see them put out of harm’s way. (I don’t think West Ham is out of harm’s way. Their current squad is now as good as any of the top four save Chelsea).

And, in the second instance, suddenly the game starts to even out. An Abramovich figure (and I do stress that I don’t think he’s involved) distributes the players he can’t have himself to clubs who could do with the talent. The top-heavy finances of the Premiership start to do the unexpected thing - even out the talent differentials between all of the clubs save the top one. It begins to resemble, as though in a broken mirror, that laudable American Football set-up where the best new players each year go to the previous year’s worst franchise, keeping the competition open and interesting.

Otherwise, it’s been a strange, undistinguished-strange, transfer window. What were Newcastle doing, trying to offload James Milner, after his Bellamyesque start to the season? (On-the-pitch Bellamy, of course). Arsenal seem to have won last year’s principal target, Julio Baptista, for the price of the principal target of the season before, Reyes. A good deal for both parties, for all the confusing time travel element.

All kinds of rumours are circulating about Manchester United, all mad and all Decline of Rome. Solskjaer to Sunderland (now scuppered) - and, both real and worse, Rossi to Newcastle on loan, quite the stupidest move of the night. Of course, moves for Senna, Hargreaves, the aforesaid Mascherano and Tevez, Berbatov and a host of others have come to nothing. What price the same happening to Reo-Coker?

For whatever reason, it’s perfectly clear that top players do not see Manchester United as the place to go at the moment. There’s no blood in the water at Old Trafford, but it’s obviously leaking out somewhere. My own suspicion - sorry, George, and it’s not a lack of faith - is that this is Ferguson’s last season. I also see this as Mourinho’s last season - at Stamford Bridge. The two facts are connected. Mourinho has always sought personal growth and new challenges, and I don’t think he’s enjoying Chelsea for all his success there. He’ll have a year in harness with Shevchenko, which he’s wanted for a long time, and then move on.

It’s the only thing tonight that you’ll read here first.

The quietest, most important news of the day is Sir Clive Woodward’s resignation from Southampton. I can’t help connecting this with the fallout from England’s World Cup, and the country’s subsequent, increasingly obvious flight from intelligence where its football is concerned. Adrian Boothroyd has had the sense to bring Clive in on a consulting basis. Will anyone else?