Soccer’s psychologists

What good did one of the best known soccer psychologists, Bill Beswick, do for poor benighted Steve McClaren and his England team?

Though they now seem to be contentiously in vogue in the Premiership, soccer psychologists are, in fact, nothing new; you could and did find them back in the 1950s. As good a Freudian as anybody, they never convinced me then and do not convince me now. Less than ever after the embarrassing leak of the utterly banal instructions given by Arsenal’s psychologist, platitudinous to a degree where they are not ungrammatical.

At the time when they were distributed to the Gunners’ players, the team was riding splendidly high in the League. But you wonder what use the psychologists’ advice was to the Arsenal team which so embarrassingly crashed at home 2-1 to humble Hull, promoted to the top division after waiting a century.

The psychologist appears perhaps wisely to shelter behind the name of Tim. At the Lowry Hotel in Manchester recently, he issued the players with this earth shattering advice (I won’t oppress you with it all).

A team is as strong as the relationship within it. (Question: what price a band of brothers with splendid relations but no stamina or skills?) The driving force of a team is its member’s (sic) ability to create and maintain excellent relationships within the team that can add an extra dimension and robustness (what?) to the team dynamics. The attitude can be used by our team to focus on the gratitude and the vitally important benefits that the team brings to our own lives. It can be used to strengthen and deepen the relationships within it and maximise the opportunities that await a strong and united team. Our team becomes stronger by: Displaying a positive attitude on and off the pitch. Everyone making the right decisions for the team. (But what, at any given point in a match, are the right decisions?) Always want more, always give more. Have an unshakeable belief that we can achieve our target. Show the desire to win in all that you do. (As opposed, no doubt, to the desire to lose.) Focus on being mentally strong and always believe in our identity and play the football we love to play at home. Stick together.

And so on, mindlessly. A proper response to this nonsense came from the ex-Arsenal left-winger, the red-headed Perry Groves: “If I had been to that team meeting, the first thing I would have asked at the end of it would have been, ‘Who am I marking at corners?’ Can you imagine telling Tony Adams he was going to sit down with a sports psychologist? If I had been told I was going to see someone like that, I would have thought, ‘Oh, come off it, I could be down the driving range.’ I’m sure foreign players benefit from it more, but then there aren’t really any English players at Arsenal.”

Well, to be fair to Arsene Wenger, yes, there belatedly are, as evidenced by the recent astonishing 6-0 win of a Gunners reserve team, average age 19, in the League Cup, at home to an experienced Sheffield United side. One of the six goals was splendidly taken by the remarkable English 16-year-old left-winger, Jack Wilshere.

Come to that, what good did one of the best known and doubtless best rewarded soccer psychologists do for poor benighted Steve “The Wally with the Brolly” McClaren and his England team? Bill Beswick previously worked with McClaren at Middlesbrough. With him again at England, he seemed unable to do anything to stop McClaren making a dire catalogue of errors, one of the most psychologically inept of which was his crass treatment of the Liverpool stalwart Jamie Carragher. A commanding centre-back, Carragher found himself in Tel Aviv fielded at left-back on his wrong foot against Israel, subsequently to be dropped. Whereupon and who can blame him, he said he never wanted to play for England again. Alas, even though McClaren has blessedly gone, Carragher still refuses to play for England stating that it is far more important to him to play for Liverpool; where indeed he was born.

Hard really to sympathise with his continued abstention but you can understand how it happens. But what use was Beswick in this instance? Unless he gave the benighted McClaren proper advice which was ignored.

My mind goes back to the World Cup finals in Sweden in 1958 when the Brazilians brought a psychologist with them. Probably because they wanted to avoid a repeat of the notorious Battle of Berne four years earlier, in the 1954 World Cup, when their players had run berserk against Hungary.

In Gothenburg I met the psychologist and talked to him. He was a little man in glasses, unshaven usually, addicted to grey jerseys. He told me he didn’t like addressing the players as a group and haranguing them. But nor did he believe in talking to them individually, because that could magnify their problems. He would get the players to draw pictures. The primitives drew matchstick men, the more sophisticated would draw fuller figures. The two made good wing partnerships. Defenders, he said, should contain their aggression, forwards should project it.

He became infamous, however, for his advice to the team manager, Vicente Feola, not to pick either Garrincha, that esoteric outside-right, or the 17-year-old Pele. Neither could fit into a team pattern and Pele was far too young to be trusted. In the event, these two won Brazil the World Cup, Pele with three goals in the semifinal against France, two more in the final, when Garrincha turned the game against Sweden with two jaguar bursts along the right-wing. Asked at a pre-final Press Conference what he thought of the psychologist, an interpreter spoke for Feola: “Senhor Feola is not saying he wishes the psychologist would go to hell, but he is thinking it.”

Of course, psychology has a part to play in soccer and always has, but it’s best left to the true experts. Between the wars, Arsenal’s Herbert Chapman and Italy’s Vittorio Pozzo, good friends, were shining examples. Chapman was said to have an almost hypnotic gift for convincing people. Such as persuading a young reserve left-half, George Male, in 1932 that he could become the best right-back in the world. Which he did. Pozzo had hegemony over his well-paid temperamental players. Should two of them quarrel in a club match, he’d make them share a room telling them, “We’re trying to build a team. You must convince yourself that the man is a friend, not an enemy.” It always worked. As did his crafty practice of telling a player who’d disagreed with him in a training game, “You’re quite right, you should be doing so and so.”