When you coach a football team, or even when you follow one as a fan, either from the sidelines, in the stands or from watching them on the tele, no matter what your level of experience is with football, you end up forming opinions and making observations about players and their quality.
Since I’ve been involved with the QPR Ladies I’ve encountered many ways to interpret quality and have recently learned some valuable lessons that keeps me on my toes and constantly makes me review the way I study football.
When I first got involved I had to pay a lot of attention to what was going on around me, seeing as I’d not seen much of the women’s game before and I didn’t know anything about any of our players.
I remember re-evaluating my impressions regularly in the early period as I watched the team train and play matches. I have always been fascinated by the way some people can appear so differently in both training and actual games.
It’s something I’ve always noticed throughout my experience of football, men or women, adult or child. Some players who train superbly and look the part don’t necessarily carry that through to the matches. But you also get it the other way around, where some players don’t look so hot in training, but they look the business when playing in games. And of course you get the norm too, where some are great in training and great in matches and vice versa.
This process over a prolonged period of time allows you to assess the quality and development of your players. You can add fitness and form to the equation too of course, but generally it’s a good indicator in terms of working out someone’s abilities and skills and what you need to do to improve them.
Some of our players have improved and got better over time, more than I may have expected too. Some haven’t done as well as I initially thought they would either, though that doesn’t necessarily mean they are any better or worse than my initial thoughts.
What has surprised me though, is how much I’ve learned whenever I’ve taken part in training matches and played alongside them. I realised that some of them are much better or not as good as I thought after playing with or against them, which fascinates me and makes me question how I see things from the side.
I also don’t mean that in an overall sense, because sometimes it might just be something small. For example, maybe in a match I may have felt someone’s passing technique could be better, but then seeing them at close quarters and after having a kick around, it may have turned out that their technique was far better than I thought from watching on the side and often measurably so.
You also get a much better understanding of positional sense from other players and how their body language anticipates and reacts to danger or how they read the play, which isn’t as evident from the sidelines even though these are things I’m always paying attention to whenever I watch.
Or you get the little bits of communication that you don’t pick up from afar, which helps you understand what’s going through their minds and what they’re seeing as the play unfolds. All of this stuff has made me say on more than one occasion for more than one player “oh, she’s a lot better than I realised” and it’s nice to be able to look at players in a new light as a result.
It works both ways of course, with some of them perhaps not spotting or responding in a way I thought they would when I’ve been running around with them, but generally the experience has been much more positive than negative and has been an unexpected bonus.
I enjoy trying to work this all out because I’m not the sort of person to have set in stone opinions about football as it’s a subjective game and changing and evolving all the time. But this has certainly made me more aware that interpretation can be different from numerous perspectives and that they’re all equally important, even if some of them are less practical than others.
I’m still working it out. But whenever I’m taking part in training drills or matches now, I’m asking myself ‘how would I be looking at this from the side?’ and trying to use what I’m learning as a guide to re-educating myself for when I’m not involved, because you can’t expect to be all the time and I think it’s important to not get stuck in your ways.
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