Richard Parkin: Joining me in the studio now is Ron Smith. He’s our guest. He’s been at the forefront of elite development and senior coaching in Australia and Malaysia for over four decades. Ron was head coach of the Australian Institute of Sport’s football program, which produced some out greatest ever talent such as Frank Farina, Mark Viduka, Brett Emerton, Lucas Neill, Craig Moore and Vincenzo Grella. He was also the FFA National Technical Manager between 2004 and 2006. Ron’s had stints in Malaysia, which included winning the championship with Sabah FA in 1996, as well as director of coaching and youth development for Football Association of Malaysia. Currently, Ron is the Assistant Coach of Brisbane Roar, and he joins us on the phone now to discuss player development in Australia, the FFA’s National Football Curriculum, as well as examining our elite pathways programs. Welcome Ron. Ron Smith: Thank you. Nice to be here Richard. RP: Cheers. Now look, youve continuously mentioned throughout your work that working on behaviors is more important than working on teaching systems or formations. Can you unpack this for some of our listeners? RS: Okay. We always talk about football as being the game of making decisions. So therefore, what you look at, and what you look for, are probably the most important things to be covered. One of the biggest issues that coaches face with players is getting them think about moving the ball forwards, playing forward, and making forward runs. If you can position yourself where you can see the opponents and the teammates and the ball. Normally if you can see who’s marking you, you can see an awful lot of your teammates at the same time. That for me is one of the most important things to teach players. Now you can tell them what to do, you can show them what to do, but ultimately, behaviors that become habits have to be trained on a daily basis. To do that, players have to train themselves to actually do it. By that I mean, if you as a player say to yourself ‘where’s my markers?’ and you can’t seen them, then it’s an indication that you’re not in the best position. This is particularly for players in the center of the field, going up and down it. They’re the ones with the hardest task. So you have to train yourself to do it, and they way of doing that is by saying ‘where’s my marker?’ I look for the marker. ‘Where’s the ball?’ I look to see where the ball is. If you keep doing that. So that’s one example of what I would call the most important thing to start with, which has nothing to do at all with ball technique. RP: So it’s about this, the internalizing of habits, habitual practice, and more of an emphasis on thinking on the pitch for the players? RS: Exactly, yes. What am I trying to achieve? Well you know, that football is highly predictable. The vast majority of goals are scored inside 20 yards. So if you don’t get the ball and the players in that area, you’re not going to score many goals. In that sense, football is extremely predictable. How you get there is where the unpredictable bit comes in. Okay, you try to make it so. RP: So in this context looking at the current FFA’s National Football Curriculum, how well do think it does in teaching behaviors? RS: I would say that the emphasis is not on teaching behaviors, the emphasis of the FFA curriculum right now, is more about teaching people about playing in positions. And there’s a distinct difference. When you teach behaviors, and I’ve just given you one example, by and large they apply to all players wherever they are on the field – and players move. Fullbacks, for example, sometimes they’re well in advance of the ball, quite often they’re behind it. But if they keep, it they learnt the early behaviors of being able to see whoever they’re marking and the ball. They’re in better position to then make good decisions about what they’re going to do after they get it, who are they going to pass to and so on. The current curriculum is really focusing on teaching a system of play and how to play in certain positions. So there is quite a difference. RP: How do you reconcile this balance then between focusing on the individual and focusing on the collective? So obviously, if we’re talking about tactical structure and systems and formations, this is looking at how players related in and between themselves. Whereas what you’re talking more about is the toolkit to enable individual players to make appropriate decisions. Is there a trade off here? How do we manage to do both? RS: You do in the end, because all of the individuals fit together. But you could argue a case to say that systems are not that important when it comes to player development. But it maybe important when it comes to getting structure and team structure. But the success of the team’s relied on the collective of individuals. So the better the individuals you’ve got, the more likely it is that you can have a better team. I will say this very quickly. I’ve been doing a research PhD. In the last four or five years, I have read more articles about goal scoring than you can poke a stick at. It occurred to me the other day, I had yet to find one paper, right, that mentions systems of play. RP: For the purpose of scoring goals? RS: That tells you a little bit about how important it is in the big picture. As a coach, systems really don’t matter that much, even when you debate all of the possible variations. In most cases you’re talking about where we put one player, or two players, to change the whole formation and shape. I’d never thought of football as being so rigid, that it becomes transfixed on the field. Football is a fluid game. I know a couple of years ago, somebody asked Arsene Wenger what system does he play and he says ‘well we have a back four and then there are all of the other players that in front of it. I think that was a good assessment of the relevance of a systems of play. I do a lot of analysis of football and games, I often say, if you look at the circumstances under which an awful lot of goals are scored, which has been the subject of my research, then you have to say the most successful systems is having five, six and seven players around the width of the penalty area in the opponents half of the field. Well you know, there’s all sorts of views about those. RP: You’re listening to the Leopold Method Radio Show. I’m speaking with Ron Smith about player development in Australia. Now Ron, you’ve mentioned the importance of focusing on the individual. Do you feel there’s a lack of emphasis on developing player’s technique or isolated practice in the National Football Curriculum? RS: That’s an interesting question. I would say this. I think the message about isolated practice, and where does it fit within the development process of players, has been misleading from [F]FA. What I think that they’re tried to say is that isolated practice isnt a good way of developing players decision-making. Well all agree with that. But to say that isolated practice, per se, is like not wanted or it’s not of value, isn’t really the message you want to send out. I think that its kind of been portrayed as being bad for players, to practice on isolation, but it hasnt been explained in the context of the development of the players overall. I’ll give you an example: if you want to develop technique and touch, you’ll never get enough touches on the ball playing games. If you interview people who have got reputations of having good touch, and everything else, the common message they all give you is the number of hours they’ve spent playing with a mate, or all on their own, or juggling with a ball, or kicking it against the wall, and making up little fantasy things to do to amuse themselves. But all the time they are actually playing with a ball. Without that kind of isolated practice, I don’t think that players will develop the technical feeling and touch that you need to play at the highest level. You certainly won’t get it if you just go to training two or three times a week with a club team. You only have to look at the number of contacts people get even in Small Sided Games. The actual number of contacts isn’t that great, even if you play 8v8. So there has to be a substitution for what you’re missing at game training, which is vitally important, don’t misunderstand me there. I’ve always been an advocate of using opposed practices for everything at training. I’ve never been a big of drills and I never will be. Purely and simply, because drills are a fancy form of isolated practice. Where you actually don’t have to make decision, because you don’t have opponents in them. RP: So certainly some contrasts there to what we see in the curriculum. Now we know that the FFA is in the process of hiring a new National Technical Director. Just quickly, or briefly, what do you think his or her key focus should be? RS: I think if you look at the challenge for anybody in Australia is how to maximize the time that you’ve got with players, to encourage them, or find a way to encourage them, to get daily repetition and play with a ball. Also to be able to play and train for a period of ten to eleven months each year. The biggest issue that I think anyone here faces, in coming to Australia, or indeed in Australia, is how you do that within all of the problems we face in this country. Because of the size it, and the spread of population, and the need for the best to play with the best, and against the best, on a regular basis. That is, and has always has been the biggest challenge. I don’t think we’ve lacked the ideas, or the knowledge, about how to develop players, because we’ve done it in the past. The biggest challenge is how do we try to maintain it. Things change drastically in the infrastructure of football in Australia. When the A-League was introduced, compared to what happened 15 years earlier, when in the late 80s we introduced summer football in Australia and for the first time ever it gave young players, when I say young players, particularly young players, it gave them the opportunity to be training and playing ten to eleven months of the year. We lost that and we lost our way. We kind of accidently recreated the situations we faced in the 70s and early 80s. We’re slowly coming back to that with more and more opportunities for players to play during the summer, as well as in the winter. But for a quite a few years there we lost that opportunity. RP: You’re listening to the Ron Smith on the Leopold Method show on 2SER. We’ll be back after the break with some more. Part 2 RP: You’re back on the Leopold Method Radio Show on 2SER, your home of intelligent, insightful football analysis. Not from me, from our guests, and our guest today is Ron Smith. We’re talking about player development in Australia. Now Ron, much has been made of Germany’s success at the World Cup. They are very much flavour of the month in world football and this has been attributed to their much lauded development program. Now, what are some of the things the Germans have been doing that we could implement in Australia? RS: Well some of the things we do implement and that’s giving opportunity for young Australians to play in our top league. I can remember years ago when Berti Vogts was the national team manager in Germany, he did a survey of players who started games in the Bundesliga, and he said that there wasn’t one player under the age of 22 in the starting eleven at any club. ‘How on earth are we ever going to have a national team?’ I remember that distinctly. I can’t tell you which year it was, but it was quite a few years ago now. I think the DFB, in conjunction with the clubs, put their heads together and said ‘we’ve got to change they way we approach our domestic football for the benefit of the national team.’ I think they did that. There’s probably enough evidence to show that young players in Germany were given opportunities. What the DFB have done, has invested enormously in giving opportunity for young players to be identified, and to have the opportunity to play with other good players that have been identified, and without spending too much time on travelling. Not only are the clubs looking extensively at talent ID and organizing teams, what you might want to refer to as Centres of Excellence, within a radius of where these clubs exists. But the DFB also do it in areas where there aren’t clubs. So imagine like, one thing that maybe possible within Australia, and again all of these things come down to the dollar. But as I’m saying we’ve never been short of these ideas. But I raised some of these things nearly ten years ago when I worked at the FFA, that we need centres where kids can just go, that are regionalised and it doesn’t matter too much about age. But we have coaches there, than can actually help develop individual abilities. That is something that the DFB have done and its funded through the German FA. They pay coaches to be in the centres, to identify talented people who may not be in the reaches of professional clubs, so they’re not disadvantaged in any way. I think that is a really important part of their development, as well as what goes on in the clubs. So if you’ve got a big net, you’re not going to miss too many people. Particularly in the 12 to 16 age group where you then start to see talented players. What most people need if they have talent is an avenue that they can develop it. That’s certainly something. It’s an expensive exercise. The other thing is in many countries they try and get lots and lots of coaches qualified and equipped to actually train people at different age groups. So they have specialisation at different age levels. Again this is a cost factor. They try and do that, and Belgium have done this, they make it fairly cheap for coaches to get qualifications, rather then the other way around. I say these are just things that people have done and whether you have the finances to do this or not will determine whether you can do it. RP: Certainly I remember a stat that has come out about comparative level of German C and B licence holders in Germany, as opposed to say in England. It was the difference of a couple of hundred in England versus a couple of thousand in Germany. That depth in coaching, quality coaching, and well-educated coaches is a factor. Now you mention Belgium, as we know, we recently, the Socceroos lost to Belgium in a friendly. There was a bit of a noticeable difference in the quality of their players in terms of speed and technical ability. What has Belgium done to create this current batch of technically proficient players? RS: They’ve done a lot of the things we’ve already discussed in terms of being able to spread the net, to find talented players. They’ve also got a number of football, what you might call football schools, where talented players are identified and they can go to the football school where they can actually train on a daily basis, and kind of like not disadvantage their educational systems. I think is something that maybe we ought to put to the education departments, if we can expand on the sort of schools like Westfields [Sports High School] in Sydney. I know more and more schools are getting more and more full time coaches, which is a great thing. I think that the school as a teaching venue could be something we could tap into a lot more because of the existing resources that are there. RP: It sounds like you’re alluding very much to government support. Now as we know, you were at the helm of the AIS, very much a government backing and sponsored program. You were there when we produced some of our greatest ever players, a batch of stars. How do you believe this generation came about? RS: First of all, I was lucky that I had really good network of coaches working at the states. This didn’t happen by accident. It was a collected effort, I just happened to be at the top of the pyramid at the AIS. But for years, for the first 10 years of the AIS, we didn’t have state based programs, and basketball was actually the first sport to do it. So I went straight in and said, ‘well if basketball can do it, then why can’t we do it?’ Within like 12 months, or 18 months, we had joint venture programs with state federations, state sport institutes, that were being mushroomed all over the country and before long we had programs in those states. The objective was to identify players with talent players with talent, and to try to filter down the kind of behaviours that we wanted to see players coming in with, rather than leaving the AIS with. So there was a sharing of information, and expertise, all the way down the line, and a collective effort to try to identify talent. So within the state institutes, they were primarily charged with finding players that we thought might have the best potential to play at Under 17 level in our national teams. But when they were kind of 15 and 16 and some younger than that if they were an outstanding talent. I’ll give you an example: Vince Grella was in the VIS when he was 13 years of age, and was training ten to eleven months of the year, with players up to the age of 17. He didn’t play in the teams with them, but he was training, and he was playing with boys his own age at club level. He was then put into an environment where he was in with better players and were older than him and so on and so on. That’s been proven to be one of the key factors for improving performance with young people. If you interview, and I have done this, nearly all of the players that play at senior, in the national level, will tell you ‘when I was young, I never played in my age group as a kid. I was always played a year up, or two years up, as long as I could cope physically’. There’s lots of things we do to try to advance people, but the point is with a composite squad the intention was to say identify people who have the potential to play international football. Don’t worry too much about how old they are, but keep that as like a breeding ground. We used to take out the ones that we thought had the best change of playing at Under 20 level. Some of those happened to be young lads who played like Vince Grella did, who played at Under 17s level first. So there was pooling of ideas, we used to have fairly regular meetings to talk about what were looking for, and so on and so on. Then it was a case of trying to the best with the best. Unfortunately, we could only ever take on 18 players into the AIS. But we tried to get our talent ID and selection process refined, so that we were selecting players who we felt had something that might help them make it. not only at the Under 20s level, but beyond that. I’ll give you an example, where some of my KPIs set by the government, for me to kind of be measured, be in charge of a successful program or not; were how many players from each squad of Under 20s players, who played for the Under 20s, had been through the AIS program. My KPI for that was set at 50 percent of the squad. Know I used to have to try and identify and recruit these players three years before they played at Under 20s. RP: So fair lead up time there in terms of talent spotting. Also, that critical point you said about the coherence of the state and national bodies working together there to find talent. Your colleague Steve O’Connor has relatively been critical of some of the performances, and the set up, of the Under 16s and Under 19s national sides. What’s your belief about the state of the elite development pathways presently? RS: Very briefly, I will say this. The AIS, that used to focus on players who were going to be primarily in the Under 20 age group, well initially the Under 19s, then it became the Under 20 tournament. Players in the state institutes, were, the group there, were primarily the ones that were going to play initially in the under 17s. Now we had five or six of those programs in each state. So it would be folly to have picked all of the players in one age group, because you’re still going to have 18 or 20 play for the national team. That was the reason why I said that we need to have a composite age groups in there. Some that would be just tapping on the door for the Under 19s or the Under 20s, and some that would be really young ones that would thought have the potential at that age to go on and play at Under 17s or Under 20s. It didn’t really matter. Where we only had a central program for the Under 20s squad. But the unique thing about that was it guaranteed continuity of input and a controlled environment for learning, where the emphasis was on trying to develop individuals within various team structures. That all changed when the AIS program, was if you like, to FFA, and then we have Han Berger in as the TD, and basically any autonomy the coaches may have had been lost – and that was one of the virtues of the program. When I ran the program, and later after me Steve [O’Connor] did it, the challenge that was always put to the coaches by the AIS was, you have got to push the envelope. You’ve got to test the boundaries. Don’t just do I what you think is safe. You’ve got to be innovative and you’ve got to use sports science. You’ve got to be prepared to fail. So don’t worry about that. That’s why you’ve been picked as coach to work here. All of that kind of changed and it became this much what are you going to do? This is how you’re going to play, etc., etc. But worse they dropped the age group. I still have trouble trying to work out why that was done. I’ve been told lots of different reasons, but for me what it’s done, it’s created a void, when players need stability and continuity of practice and thinking. RP: There’s a lot in there to unpack Ron and certainly comes full circle back to the earlier parts you were making. Thank you very much for joining us today on the Leopold Method Show. Maybe we’ll have to unpack some of that over a few more sessions throughout the year. *Recorded 9th September 2014
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 22:41:02 +0000
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