It was an unfair contest. The fastest forwards in the world – Thierry Henry, Cristiano Ronaldo and Andriy Shevchenko – against a central defender who lumbered around at speeds typical of park footballers. He did not even have the usual benefit of being tall for his position.
Often, those strikers he faced were taller, stronger and faster. Originally, Jamie Carragher wanted to be a striker, too. Carragher played as a centre-forward for much of his youth, until the age of 16 or 17.
But as he got nearer the professional game, he was gradually moved back – first to central midfield, and then to centre-back – into positions in which his lack of pace wouldn’t be so obvious.
“I wasn’t someone who was blessed with amazing physical attributes in terms of pace, height, strength. I was just average – on all of those, really,” he said. Only, Carragher’s speed came in another way: not from his limbs but from his mind. It did not matter if his opponents were taller, stronger and faster, for, on the football pitch, he was smarter. They could outrun him, but not out-think him. To Carragher, a fast brain was worth more than fast feet. “I had to be focused, always concentrating, and the reason I played at the top level is I had a really good understanding of the game. My reading of the game was very important, and that was something I had as a kid – an understanding of football.”
‘I was probably top level in terms of understanding the game, and would back myself against anyone of my era on this aspect’
Other defenders could use their pace if they got into the wrong position; Carragher had no such insurance policy. But Carragher’s brain turned a footballing everyman into a superman. He enjoyed a phenomenal 17-year career at his boyhood club, Liverpool, including winning the Champions League in 2005. In 2013, Liverpool fans voted Carragher the sixth best player in the club’s history.
Carragher’s career was a testament to how the power of the mind – the ability to understand the sport deeply and use this knowledge to anticipate or “read the game” – can help players make up for relative deficiencies in the physical side of their game. In most sports, the correlation between who are the best pure athletes and those who are the best at their sports is far from perfect. The best players are not always the best athletes; but the best players nearly always have the best minds. Carragher attests to how a player’s mind can elevate them from being an ordinary athlete to an extraordinary player on the pitch. “One of my biggest strengths as a player was reading the game,” Carragher said. “I was probably top level in terms of understanding the game, and would back myself against anyone of my era on this aspect, being able to read situations and understand what was going to happen in the game. And that was probably my biggest strength. I could see danger.”
The science of how Carragher could see that danger lies in how elite central defenders tend to look at specific areas on the field for less time and scan the overall field more broadly, taking in more information over a certain time span than less proficient players. They take visual snapshots of play to create a picture in their mind of what is happening around them. “With experience you don’t think – it’s almost like driving a car,” Carragher recalled. “When the ball’s in a certain position you know where you need to be.”
Carragher’s brain was so supple that he could think not just what was the best thing for him to do to neuter the world’s best forwards but what his teammates should do too. Effectively, he was many football brains in one. “It’s sort of autopilot. I was the organiser for the team, and I wouldn’t just be thinking about my own position, I’d be thinking about everyone else’s on the pitch. And I think that comes with experience, maturity. When you’re in the position I was in, you’re organising the team. You’re not just watching the ball, you’re seeing where everyone else is, you’re turning your head, seeing the bigger picture. I mean the top attacking players as well – they are always checking where defenders are. All top players have a great awareness of what is going on around them. But certainly as a defender you have to be aware – you’re trying to organise other people and not just yourself. You have to be well aware what is around you.
“When you become a senior player, in some ways you take your own performance for granted, and you’re actually more worried about what other people are doing. At times you’d be sitting at the back and thinking about whether the people in front of you are in the right position, whether one of the strikers is dropping back on the holding midfield player, where is your full back. So, you’re actually organising a lot of people, and if you do that – well, it saves you a lot of work.”
When the ball is not close to the penalty area, skilled defenders scan the field widely, but as the ball gets nearer the penalty area, they change the way they use their eyes. Faced with a player running directly towards them on the edge of the penalty area, skilled defenders fixate more on what is directly in front of them – the player with the ball – moving the head and eyes less frequently, and relying more on peripheral vision to monitor the positions and movements of other players off the ball. “When you can understand who you’re playing against, what runs the strikers need to make, you’re just trying to be one step ahead of them all the time,” Carragher explained. “Being a centre-back, I think reading the game and understanding it is probably the most important attribute you need in that position, because it’s not a lot of running or a lot of sprinting. It’s just being in the right place at the right time.”
From Carragher to Lucy Bronze and Virgil van Dijk, the best defenders know exactly where to look – fixating on the lower body of the player in possession of the ball, using the ball as a visual pivot point, while using peripheral vision to monitor for opponents’ movements. They can fuse this information with auditory cues – calls made by teammates or opponents, or hearing players advancing towards them from outside their central vision – to anticipate what will happen next and the best position to be in either to make a tackle, intercept a pass or simply close down the opponent with the ball. The best players use a myriad of information – combining their visual and auditory senses with broader game awareness and specific knowledge of opponents and the match situation. They are masters of multitasking. “You have to be aware of everything,” Carragher said.
As well as using the eyes more effectively to pick up relevant information, leading players are better at predicting what will happen next than weaker players. A study involved players watching footage of different match situations such as a goalkeeper throwing the ball out to a full back, and then asking the player to predict what the full back would attempt to do next.
Players highlighted the options available to the player with the ball and ranked these based on the level of threat posed to their team. Top players were better at identifying relevant options and ranking the likelihood of these occurring. The very best players develop a huge library of sport-specific patterns of play in their memory – based on the general situation, the match context and specific knowledge of their opponents – to subconsciously assign probabilities to the likelihood of each action occurring. This narrows down how players search for relevant information with their eyes, and the process of confirming or rejecting their initial prediction, enabling them to anticipate what will happen next. “If it goes to Paul Scholes, the first thing he’s going to do is look for a ball in behind you. He’s got the killer pass,” Carragher explained. “So, as soon as he gets it you need to be alive to that possibility. If it’s a winger – does he like to dribble or does he like to cross? The ball goes to [David] Beckham, and you’re the centre-back, you’ve got to be ready for the cross straight away. If it goes to [Ryan] Giggs, well it might be a little bit different. He’s going to run at his full back.”
‘When you become a senior player you’re actually more worried about what other people are doing… if you do that – well, it saves you a lot of work’
So Carragher would adjust his position depending on which winger got the ball; if two players got the ball in an identical position, one would likely act very differently than the other. This knowledge meant that as Beckham whipped in a cross, Carragher would be waiting and expecting the ball. His legs got him there; his brain made his legs get there. It is commonly thought that even central defenders with the brainpower of Carragher need a centre-back partner with more pace. Yet the most successful partnership of Carragher’s career was with Sami Hyypia, who was even slower. The two played together for a decade, making up Liverpool’s first choice central defensive pairing for several seasons, including in the Champions League victory in 2005. “It wasn’t the paciest of partnerships, but we both read the game very well,” Carragher explained. The two had contrasting strengths, helping them to be more than the sum of their parts.
“I wasn’t the biggest centre-back. I’m just under six foot. He was six foot four, so he was the aerial lynchpin in some ways, and he was the dominant player – certainly defending set pieces.
“I was probably more aggressive on the front foot than Sami. He was better in the air. But I think the main thing was just the understanding of the game that we both had, and that’s why we probably didn’t get done for pace as often as maybe people thought we may have done.”
This partnership could easily be caricatured as a pairing of two tortoises. But to their opponents who could outrun them but not out-think them – and so were denied a chance to make their far greater pace tell – scoring against Carragher and Hyypia could seem impossible. For doing so meant trying to outsmart them. “I’d rather have had a really good football brain than great pace, than have it the other way around,” Carragher reflected. “You know, the football brain is still the most important thing, even though the game is getting more athletic each season.”
The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made by Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore is out now, published by John Murray Press. RRP £20.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2S9fkMn
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