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By Professor Patrick Murphy, Renowned academic and author, on behalf of the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) Riding a hobbyhorse
The saying ‘they don’t know their left from their right’ is generally employed with pejorative intent, the imputation being that the person in question is embarrassingly awkward. It is the more respectable version of ‘not knowing their arse from their elbow’.
Both phrases are uttered with dismissive aplomb. And yet, surprisingly, when another variation is employed in the context of professional football, it is more akin to a neutral observation, seemingly devoid of negative connotations.
The vast majority of professional footballers are very aware of which is their stronger and weaker foot. Their stronger foot is the one with which they predominately control the ball, pass with, lead a tackle with and shoot with.
Very often players will forgo an apparently good opportunity to shoot with their weaker foot, in order to try to move the ball on to their stronger side, and, in the process, they are often closed down and the opening is gone.
Their weaker foot is the one they stand on. It’s sometimes affectionately referred to as their ‘swinger’. It plays an auxiliary role in all their movements. Less obviously, it is a bias that is not confined to the feet. It tends to find expression in the ways in which players move their bodies as a whole.
This can be illustrated by inviting them without further instruction to run to a certain point, turn and run back. If left to their own devices, they will invariably turn off their favoured foot. This pattern has implications for their defending and attacking styles. It enables their usually equally handicapped opponents to read their game more easily and channel their play by encouraging forwards to attack defenders’ less favoured side and for defenders to usher attackers down their weaker channel.
It may be that many people who watch professional football are untroubled by this perennial feature of the game. For me it has been a perpetual irritant and, I confess, a personal hobbyhorse. For an example of the impact of this limitation, look no further than the England team and the way the absence of naturally left-footed players has been a thorn in the side of a succession of England managers.
It fell to their weaker foot
If a manager or coach has to decide between two players of identical ability and character, save that one is predominately one-footed and the other was equally dexterous with both feet, which one will he select?
Even if the manager or coach in question is a stalwart of the ‘up-and-at-em’ brigade, an officionado of the long-ball game, the question is still a ‘no-brainer’. Clearly, he would opt for the latter player because, at the very least, he offers him greater positional flexibility. More generally, however, the argument that players would be more effective if they were equally comfortable on either side seems unanswerable.
Yet, notwithstanding this fact, the majority of professional footballers go through their entire careers accompanied by the observation: ‘it fell to their weaker foot’. When we hear commentators making this observation about a player, we could be forgiven for thinking that it is intended as some sort of justification.
I don’t doubt that it does contain an element of justification, but my impression is that it is also a self-justification. Why? Because it is a remark often made by ex-professionals, now commentators, and as players the majority of them were constrained by this same limitation. Use of the phrase ‘it fell to his weaker foot’ is doubly unfortunate because it seems to carry with it the implication that: ‘this is the way things are and, therefore, nothing can be done about it. While one might get the odd player who is naturally blessed with two-footedness, the majority of us are not so lucky, therefore, we have to make the best of our singularly’.
The reader could be forgiven for interpreting the above text as a scarcely veiled criticism of the professionalism of professional footballers. It is not. The target is not the player as an individual, but prevailing coaching system, the way in which young footballers are nurtured and taught.
It seems reasonable to suppose that scouts and coaches of professional clubs select youngsters for their academies and schools of excellence on two counts: the existing qualities they display and some estimation of their developmental potential. I don’t for one moment doubt that the primary aim of coaches as a group is to produce the best possible young talent for their respective clubs It is, however, undeniably the case that the prevailing system of development excels in producing one-footed or predominately one-footed players.
This cannot be in the best interests of their clubs and there in lies the puzzle. How can coaches as a body have the best interests of their respective clubs at heart and yet, notwithstanding their best efforts, contrive to ensure the mass production of one-footed players?
Not the finished article
It is surely safe to assume that the ‘other foot’ of mature professionals did not featured prominently in their football education. But why is this the case? An obvious, but important point to recognise is that people don’t choose to be right or left-handed, right or left footed or right-handed and left-footed or left-handed and right footed. Nor do they opt for the facility to switch under certain circumstances, as, for example, is the case with a minority of boxers that find themselves equally comfortable in the orthodox or southpaw stance.
These are inborn potentials, not consciously chosen preferences. These biological biases are no more chosen by us than are the colour of our eyes. When a manager signs a young professional from another club, he is apt to say that ‘he’s not the finished article’, the sub-text being ‘give us time and me and my staff will hone him into the fully-fashioned article’.
If so many young adult professionals are held to be unfinished footballers, what then of academy entrants? Yet their one-footedness is not treated as something to work on and counter-act. Rather it appears to be viewed as an unalterable condition. What accounts for this assumption on the part of coaches?
Firstly, this approach mirrors their own experiences as young players and the neglect that their own one-footedness received. This interpretation is confirmed and reinforced by the prevailing consensus. It is a consensus indicative of an insular, insider culture. Members of this culture tend to disregard outsider views that diverge from the prevailing insider ones. I suspect that it is a disdain that gains its sustenance from an uneasy mixture of arrogance and insecurity.
Secondly and crucially, it is the easiest path to follow. By the age of ten or twelve the vast majority of young recruits have already developed a one-footed approach to the game. As such it is so much easier to play to their strengths and carry them forward on this narrower track, than it is to take them back to basics. It can be done, but the preferences of the coaches and the young player conspire to make it an unattractive option.
After all there other lessons to impart and, of course, matches to be won. Even if this alternative path entered the consciousness of coaches, it would quickly be dismissed as an unnecessary distraction that could consume a recruit’s first year and delay the onset of the ‘tramline’ development programme they have in store for them. The underlying principle informing this approach seems to be ‘let’s build on their strengths’.
It is important to recognise that this argument is not without merit. I concede that, if on arrival at an academy or school of excellence, the coaching staff immediately set about dismantling a youngster’s game, this could prove to be a disconcerting, frustrating and confidence-draining experience.
A youngster could easily experience this detour as a retrograde step. It would be very much akin to taking a ten-year old who has been taught to write with one hand and who is beginning to derive satisfaction from this newly developed skill and then require him to start again with the other hand, once again first mastering the letters, before moving on to joined-up writing.
It should be recognised that slowing a young player’s development with the aim of ensuring that he acquires commensurate or improved ability with his weaker foot has to be done with great sensitivity. To do otherwise runs the risk of demoralising young players who just wants to play the game. Therefore, it is probably best done in conjunction with other activities aimed at ensuring the retention of the immediate gratification element that led them to want to play football in the first place. But once mastered, in the longer-run, greater two-footedness would surely provide an even stronger basis on which to advance.
While habits can be unlearned, I recognise that by the age of ten or twelve the selected boys may be already sufficiently set in their ways to ensure that the easiest course of action is for coaches to go with the flow. This in turn may encourage the pragmatically inspired reflection that: ‘we will never know what kind of players they would have developed into had they been two-footed, so let’s not waste time pondering that question. Let’s just make the best of what we’ve got’.
In other words, when a young lad has shown himself to be good enough to be recruited by a professional club, thereafter, the downward slope of the institutional landscape only adds momentum to his one-footedness.
An alternative approach
One-footedness can be undone, but it isn’t easy and the older a player gets the more difficult it becomes. But there is an alternative way. To instil in youngsters an appreciation that two-sidedness is an advantage when playing football and, indeed, a wide range of other sports doesn’t require that we wait until ‘bad habits’ have already been embedded. We can try to ensure that, even before they can walk, we begin to encourage them to circumvent the cul-de-sac of one-footedness or, more accurately, one-sidedness. This is the underlying principle of the SOCATOTS approach developed by Simon Clifford.
From the age of six months up to five years the programme aims, on a phased basis, at encouraging young children to engage in a series of carefully designed exercises involving bean-bags, skittles and half-balls and balls, the broad objective being to develop their general balance, co-ordination and dexterity. Moreover, it’s worth reiterating that these are not just attributes that can be applied to football. They are central to the development of a range of sporting skills.
Of course, the extent to which people are one-sided and one-footed will vary considerably, as will their level of co-ordination. Therefore, it may be that under a similar intensity of coaching one person will be better able to develop a two-sided dexterity than someone else. But this isn’t a reason to uncritically embrace this limitation.
On the contrary, it’s an argument for recognising that even the least flexible of youngsters can improve their dexterity at the margins, while the majority can almost certainly make great strides. Balanced assessment also requires that we recognise that the presence of elements of un-coordination can prove to be an asset in some sports, including football.
The SOCATOTS programme aims at trying to offset the tendency for youngsters to develop a one-sided bias before it becomes entrenched. This is what makes Clifford’s project, his experiment so interesting. If over the coming years he does succeed in producing a stream of youngsters who quite literally don’t know their right from their left then he will have demonstrated that the Football Association, the Premier League and the Football League don’t know what is best in their claimed area of expertise; that their neglect of this younger age group and distain for Clifford’s approach testifies to their seemingly incorrigible myopia.
And so while the leaders of Football Association busy themselves fighting crises, many of their own making, and the owners of Premier League clubs continue to be parochially absorbed with defending and advancing their own interests, Clifford swims against this prevailing tide.
Whether Garforth Town achieve promotion next year or the following one is, in one sense, neither here nor there. He is not into ‘short-termism’. It will be many years before some of the products of SOCATOTS go on to graduate from the Brazilian Soccer Schools and play for Garforth Town. While, of course, he has ambitions for Garforth Town FC, first and foremost, he sees this club as a means to an end and the end in question is the long-term future of football in the round.
He is playing the long game. His aim is to produce a generation of footballers that don’t know their right foot from their left and, in the process he wants to transform an insult into a prized attribute. Those readers who have followed my interviews with Clifford over the last seven years will, I hope, acknowledge my willingness to ask some pointed questions.
That having been said, over this period I have formed the strong impression that he is in it for the long haul. He sees it as his mission, one that is both a privilege to enjoy and a burden to carry. I find it difficult to see how he can fail. The more meaningful question is to what extent will he succeed in the face of an intransigent football establishment? |
