The thing about elite sport is that boundaries will be pushed to their limits, and sometimes beyond, in the pursuit of those elusive marginal gains that make the difference between winning and losing.
Everyone is at it: managers, coaches, players, medical staff, and any number of others who constitute a team or club. Give them rules and regulations and they will break them at some point. Make unenforceable recommendations and they will nod in agreement while laughing inside.
Providing recommendations to professional football clubs is a bit like setting down a bowl of sweets in front of a toddler, telling them not to eat them, then leaving the room.
And so it was that less than two months after clubs were recommended to limit “higher force headers” – those from a long pass of over 35 metres, crosses, free kicks and corners – to 10 per week in training, a manager at one of the country’s leading clubs revealed, unsurprisingly to almost everyone, that they are not really paying too much attention to how many times their players head the ball in training, higher force or not.
Everyone was behind the recommendation, so claimed a joint statement by the Football Association, Premier League, English Football League, Professional Footballers’ Association and League Managers Association, to protect players from the increased risk of dementia in later life. Apart from they weren’t. And it took Tottenham Hotspur manager Nuno Espirito Santo to say publicly what everyone knew was happening.
Asked ahead of the north London derby how his players can improve defending from set pieces – a weakness since he replaced Jose Mourinho at Tottenham – with the heading limit in place, Nuno replied: “Good question. That’s why we have training sessions without anybody seeing us.”
“Honestly, I will not lie to you,” he added. “I don’t count how many times our players head the ball. Maybe I will get myself in trouble for this, but football is jumping, heading, it’s part of the game.”
Nuno was criticised for his comments – turned on by campaigners – but at least he was honest. Isn’t it better to know the truth, than for everyone to wilfully carry on pretending clubs are limiting the number of headers their players do every week on the training pitch?
Perhaps there are some clubs who strictly adhere to it, but surely that will not last much longer when they realise others are at it, and that there is absolutely nothing that will happen to them if they allow a stray 11th header from a centre-back that week.
There was an aspect of Nuno’s comments that were wrong, however. There are more eyes on training sessions – in the Premier League and in a lot of clubs beneath – than ever before. Every session is recorded, by multiple cameras from multiple angles: every kick, tackle and – yes – header, to be pored over by the manager, coaches and scores of analysis staff. At a great many clubs, players are offered the chance to look back over their training footage for areas to improve or can request it themselves.
If the FA is serious about protecting the future welfare of players in regard to heading the ball – and research has found footballers are three-and-a-half times more likely to die from dementia than the average person – it has to be policed properly.
English football’s governing body can force players to hand over their smartphones to access call records and their most intimate WhatsApps when investigating betting cases where they are accused of passing on details of impending transfers to friends and family to make money from bookies – a measure even the police find difficult to enforce. Surely, then, they can request training ground footage to assess if clubs are really restricting headers.
For this to work, recommendations need to become rules, and the rules need to carry punishments, otherwise they will be ignored. It does not even need to be an exhaustive process. Ofsted, the education regulator, drops into schools for short periods to assess their aptitude. To police heading would require only spot checks covering a couple of weeks, then a fine for a first offence and so on, until points are deducted for repeat offending.
Following an inquiry, MPs said in July that sport had been allowed to “mark its own homework” when reducing the risk of brain injury. In response, football decided to tell clubs the answers in advance.
Clattenburg has a point
In recent interviews promoting his new autobiography, former leading referee Mark Clattenburg has called for officials to be allowed to explain why they made controversial decisions during a game. What does the PGMOL, who manage English referees, have to lose? Without refereeing stars such as Clattenburg and Howard Webb, the reputation of English officials is lower than ever. At least let them explain why.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3B1ZYOF
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