Seriously though, it is like a classroom.

I can go back to 1993 and the first school I worked at. The head of PE then was in close contact with the club, and still is. I’m not going to name him, but he has a role on match days. He told me of a conversation with Mike Walker, and Walker had said the team were like a bunch of school kids and he was the teacher. Not as in imparting knowledge (although that was occasionally what he had to do), but classroom management.

A class of kids with one or two very dominant personalities can function well without intervention if the rest of the class can tolerate them and not allow them to affect their own behaviour. If the rest of the class just spectates or (worse) is cowed into subservience, then as a group they are unhappy and don’t perform well. That’s when intervention is needed and the form it needs to take is different every time. That’s why it’s hard if you can’t just remove the problem.

Sure the club has to look at the raw results, as schools do. But there’s also a human element to it and unless you get that right the results won’t happen.

Posted By: APB, Jun 10, 12:39:27