Courtesy: The FA.com


Mental strength required

By Graeme Dell

Tuesday, 04 December 2007


Hi everyone, it’s been a rushed and odd couple of weeks, with a number of highs and lows in football, where I’m still a little numb after our games in Georgia last week.

England’s Euro 2008 exit has ramifications for all of the national teams but perhaps allows the focus once more to fall on what we are developing for the future and where Futsal has a part to play in that.

You can get too hung up on the here and now, but for me it’s more about tomorrow’s players, the next generations and that’s where the focus has to be.

I see a lot of Futsal and football around the world and only when you look at the games on that global stage can you really see how much work we have to do. It’s easy as coaches to look in your own back yard and think we have the best, or we have what it takes to succeed, but when the gates to the street open up you realise that there is a great deal more out there which you’ve not been paying attention to. That’s a position which has been festering for some time as the other nations are catching us up and some are accelerating away from us and this may just be the wake up call all areas of the game needs.

We arrived back from a bitterly cold Georgia on Thursday having learned a great deal, yet we were stunned by our final result.

The Tbilisi group contained a number of new players at international level, with only seven remaining from the team who faced Andorra a few weeks previously, but the entire group surprised me and I’m very pleased with how they did in an environment which asked a lot of them individually.

Part of the challenge of coaching an international team is ensuring that as well as picking the best players available, you must also select a group of people whose personalities match and merge with each other. That’s harder when, as in some cases, I might never have met the individual before. This group gelled almost from the start and made the week fly past in an enjoyable and focused manner.

I have to say though that the arena at the Sportspalace in Tbilisi was amongst the worst I have come across during my time with Futsal, a very uneven surface, poor lighting and a chill throughout the air – I’ve never been colder on a bench before, and this was indoors! However, our hosts did a great job of making us feel welcome and did all they could to ensure that we had what we needed – other than a result!

Despite all of the positives I’ve taken from the games, I’m still numbed at being 2-1 up in the second game with less than eight minutes of court time left, only to lose out 7-3.

How can that happen? What went wrong? What did we or they do that was so dramatically different in the space of minutes that saw us concede five goals almost instantaneously?

Well they’re all questions which have been running through my head for days now and the simple answer is mental strength. It’s something my young players have to get to grips with, or they will see more games like that come and go, so we’ll be working on that in the coming days.

Futsal can be very cruel when you don’t expect it and our inexperience showed on the night, as we forced in places where we didn’t need to and capitulated when we should have been forceful. That’s all part of the discipline of the game, being able to command a game when you’re pressured.

Those games have gone now but act as another chapter in the players’ education archive, but now we have to look forward to Greece at home in December.

I named that squad yesterday, retaining some of the players who did so well last week and added back in some of the experienced ones from the Andorra squad. It was that experience which I think would have helped us and I feel the blend of the two groups will suit us well in Birmingham, but there’s still some work to be done between now and then and that will start this weekend at Lilleshall, as we meet up on Saturday night after the weekend’s games for another F30 Workshop.

It’s an opportunity to get the entire group together and whilst we will be focused on preparing for Greece a week later, it will also be an opportunity to dissect and deliver some of the lessons of the past four games.



I’m pleased to hear that we have now secured funding for three regional Futsal leagues which are to be based geographically north, midlands and south and more than likely in London, Birmingham and Sheffield. This replaces the original concept of a single national league and it’s a new concept which I think is much better. The message going out though is for clubs to be exactly that, potential participating clubs need to have proper club structures to be considered, rather than just groups of lads playing the game.

Elsewhere. Spain managed to retain the European Championship in Porto recently despite being pushed closer than they have in recent years. I feel for my friend Orlando Duarte, Head Coach of Portugal, as they had the game well under control at 2-0 in the semi-final. But it just goes to show that even the very talented teams still require experience and mental strength, whilst injuries to their key experienced players like Ivan and Andre Lima robbed them of that and cost them the final berth as Spain went into overdrive in the last four minutes.

If you can make it to Birmingham it would be good to see you.

Graeme



Posted by Luca Ranocchiari --> luca.ranocchiari@futsalplanet.com