As Manchester United announced the arrival of Sascha Lense as a sports psychologist on permanent residency, the overwhelming reaction was one of “What, only now?”, a sarcastic welcome-to-the-21st-century gotcha.
Sports psychology was roughly labelled as pseudo-nonsense in the Premier League’s formative years when the best medicine for fear was to pull yourself together, man. Times have changed and now Manchester United are changing with them.
In fact, that’s all a little unfair. Manchester United may not have employed anyone permanently, but they have used sports psychologists on a consultancy basis regularly. That’s the same as Manchester City, whose Head of Psychology David Young also works with the England men’s cricket team. Pep Guardiola better hope that his team doesn’t require specialist work between now and mid-January; you suspect Young might be a little busy.
Their previous permanent psychologist, Bill Beswick, is credited by Roy Keane and Gary Neville in improving their mindset and aiding recovery from a period of self-doubt respectively. Beswick was employed by Alex Ferguson but tied to Steve McClaren, who he followed to Nottingham Forest, Derby County, Middlesbrough, FC Twente and England. Yes, that England team; a reminder that these people are assistants, not miracle-workers.
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Which, the inevitable punchline dictates, is why Manchester United really needed one. Given the combination between high expectations, the pressure of historic success, the fierce criticism after setback (from media and within the club’s own support) and the recent gross underperformance, you might argue that a psychologist can make a greater difference here than anywhere else.
Ralf Rangnick is a firm believer. If he was not the first manager in world football to employ a sports psychologist, he was certainly the first in Germany. When in charge of Ulm in the late-1990s, he appointed Hans-Dieter Hermann into the role. Hermann has worked with the German national team since 2004. In his pre-match press conference this week, Rangnick hinted at some surprise that United did not have a permanent psychologist and described their use as “absolutely logical” at elite clubs.
“If you have special coaches for goalkeeping, physical education, even for strikers, fitness, whatever, you should also have an expert for the brain,” he reasoned.
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Which all makes the arrival of a permanent psychologist itself as important as the work of the psychologist, a victory for perception as much as the logic to which Rangnick refers. This is the psychology of appointing a psychologist, if you will. Rangnick’s great missive is not that his team must play in a 4-2-2-2 formation or that Cristiano Ronaldo must register a certain number of high-intensity presses in the final third, but that Manchester United have a definite identity after years spent chasing the intangibles of nostalgia and romance.
That is not to say that Lense’s arrival is a box-ticking exercise. There are obvious names within the first-team squad who would benefit from the same experience Keane and Neville got back in the early 2000s. But his appointment is a message that no stone will be left unturned. The age of excuses is over. And we know they mean it because on Sunday they changed their Twitter profile to ‘The start of something new’. You can never truly escape the trappings of brand management.
The pertinent question is whether any of this makes enough of a difference for Manchester United to commit to this bold new era, particularly if it involves those in power delegating control. Short-term on-pitch results shouldn’t be the defining metric, but probably will be. The next six months are vital in scoping the plan for the next six years. Those who fear a messy battle between old habits and new vision may be interested to know that Sascha Lense is an anagram of “Sense a clash”. Now that really is pseudo-nonsense.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3EKijRU
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