From the Technical Director

If there is one thing I have discovered from coaching young players, especially over the last few years, is that they know much more than they are often given credit for. All too often coaches still tell kids what to do, rather than including them on what to do. Several examples have come to my attention in the last few weeks alone. Members of the Athlete Institute Football Club’s Ontario Player Development League teams, aged 12 and 13, were asked to relate their thoughts on the following: What is a winner? We talked about it for a while and then away went 50 odd players with a week to come up with an answer. The replies were remarkable, particularly in that hardly any of them talked about soccer. One 12-year-old girl actually came back with a question of her own, which one is the winner, the person who fights through poverty on a daily basis or the person who wins a trophy at a soccer tournament. Others wrote about their families, relatives and friends who had fought against illness, some losing that fight to cancer. Others talked about people escaping war torn countries to forge a new life in Canada. All of these people were described as winners. Overall, said the players, anyone who does their best on a daily basis is a winner. Interesting, because the definition of winner as found in a dictionary does not match any of those above. Youngsters, some of them not even teenagers, having such a true perspective on living. On another night I asked for volunteers, not offering any idea on what they would be volunteering for. All hands went up and I randomly picked two out. Their homework: To design and run the next training session. A few days later they did just that, with a great deal of success. The session was progressive, active and even included a small sided game with conditions. Asked later how they thought it had gone, one said it was harder than they expected, especially when things did not quite go as they expected. Welcome to the world of coaching, where adjustment is more often than not the order of the day. And the two 13-year-old girls who ran the session went home wiser and stronger, as did the players, some of whom will get a similar task during the season. One of the reasons I decided to ask players to run a session stemmed from something I heard at the Ontario Soccer summit in Oshawa last weekend. Renowned English Football Association coach John Peacock, one of the presenters, also works in the academy at Manchester United. Player led sessions are part of the syllabus, as is Futsal and free play games, or cage games as they call them. Such free games, he said, are a way of recreating street soccer. Related to that was something else he said, how some of the greatest Manchester United teams of the past had shared a training field with the reserves and youth teams. Compare that to now, where such teams have training facilities that include numerous fields and indoor turf plus a pile of other modern amenities. As Peacock said, fantastic training grounds do not necessarily translate into fantastic teams. Talking about fantastic, Barcelona’s comeback against PSG on Wednesday was one of the most remarkable games of all time. To return to Spain four goals down and then somehow win 6-1, with three goals in the dying minutes of the match, is the stuff of fairytales, yet this was no fairytale, it was reality. Of course, everyone then started relating other sporting comebacks and I noticed that one implausible game from the past had somehow crept by unnoticed by commentators and writers. On December 21, 1957, playing at their home ground, The Valley, in London, England, Charlton Athletic found themselves 5-1 down to Huddersfield Town with just 27 minutes to go. At the final whistle Charlton had won 7-6 and one player, Johnny Summers, scored five. Just like the other night in Spain, the winning Charlton goal was scored with seconds left, just after Huddersfield - managed back then by Bill Shankly - had scored to make it 6-6. If all of this was not amazing enough, Charlton had been playing with 10 men since the 17th minute, when one of their players had to leave the game due to injury. Back then there were no substitutes. No substitute for such drama either, whether it be 1957 or 2017.