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Hi everyone, welcome to another Play Developer Project monthly wrap. My name is Dave Wright and as usual I'm joined by PDP technical advisor Dan Wright. Dan, how are you? I'm very well, thank you.
I've been enjoying the July sunshine down the UK, been crazy hot. I've heard the rumors that it's pretty chilly down here in Melbourne. It's sort of insane that it's nothing like January and London so I'm kind of celebrating that fact. But looking forward to another conversation to review all of our monthly content and July was exceptionally busy, particularly with the production of issue 19 of PDP magazine which is really exciting, sort of edging towards the milestone of 20 editions which is something I'm looking forward to achieving with the PDP team.
So we're going to kick things off to start with Drew Sherman. Now Drew is a pro licensed coach, he's the academy director at A.L.E. Club Brisbane Raw and he's been in the role now for around a year and a half I believe and has launched a program from scratch. So let's hear from Drew.
And in terms of the philosophy, as you say, you've had a lot of time and I think we all dream of being in the position of starting from a blank canvas, it's a fantastic opportunity. So what is the philosophy of the club in terms of play development and how do you ensure local talent is going to get an opportunity in terms of going on to play for the first thing? Yeah, I think the club philosophy really is one of course that youth development is a big element of the club's wide business map. There isn't an economy of play of sales here in Australia at the moment but I think that that has to happen.
If the FFA, I say in that all the A.L.E. clubs needs to have a kind of needs and then we need the governance to protect our back, which is one of the biggest challenges. So for long term that's definitely the clubs and the approach, the clubs believe, we have been quite fortunate actually in the 12 months of having a youth team up and running and now just 11 weeks of the full academy program. In that period we've had 11 first-team Debbie Tons and having progressed through from the youth team.
The perception here in Australia is that we have an Asian squad which is true. I think we've been in Nick Badz Army for a couple of years in media. But one of the advantages with that is that you have experience again in your first-team squad to mentor and bring through those young players. From a head coach perspective, John always is enormously supportive of providing opportunity for young players.
Actually, he sees he has a wider responsibility than just being a head coach to give something back to developing Australian players and thanks to the opportunities that he had. So he's massively, massively supportive of promoting players. He's been present at any games, comes down to having training sessions and has even taken some of our younger academy players into the dressing room before A.L.E. Games and had them there for the half-time talks.
His influence reaches all the way down to one under 13s and it's just remarkable that we have that type of support. I think that's the biggest challenge is always what's the level of opportunity of first-team. If you have somebody that supports that, then be the reckoners and easy job. So Dan, another really interesting discussion there.
Obviously Drew giving some insight into the challenges of seeing out the program and the Australian landscape. What were some of the key takeaways from that Masterclass for you? I think Drew is in a really nice position where, like he said, he's got that blank piece of paper. So he's almost started from scratch with the whole youth development pathway.
So this clip he talked about the pathway to Prague. So from teenagers all the way into first-team and that kind of influence that the first-team manager has all the way through, which was really nice. There was a few other bits around the Australian culture which you'll probably better talk about in me. Yeah, certainly been a bit of an eye-oatness since I've come down here end of last year.
And I think it's very early days for the Academy's, in Australia, it's been passed down by FFA that the ALE clubs should implement academies and now there's sort of a ranking system around that. And I think there's finding their way. And I think Drew's put a really nice program in place which has removed the pay-to-play element and paid a play similar to the US as an issue here where clubs do charge a lot of money and it does isolate talent. So by creating a model which is viable and sustainable, it sort of removes that barrier to talent coming in.
So it's been really interesting to chat to him both in the interview and at other times as well about what the landscape looks like for him. And certainly very early days in terms of the way the ALE clubs are feeling out the academy process. So it's a bit of watch the space really. Yeah, and also interesting because Drew's got experience of academy football here and the whole emergence of each of all piece.
So maybe the landscape will change a few times in Australia. Maybe you look at English football, they went from national centres to clubs doing their own thing for a while at a whole, I would consider it an influence and then now academy football and lots of processes and can more job. So it might be interesting to reflect back in 10 years, Drew might be somewhere in the shapes of the whole landscape of the whole country, don't I? Yeah, certainly doing good things up there.
And that takes us around next content which was really, really enjoyable in terms of putting it together and that was PDP Magazine issue 19. So we sort of reviewed the World Cup, but we also focused on some of the narratives outside of just the technical tactical. So Dan, do you want to cover off two or three of the articles you wrote one about VAR and technology in football? We had a really interesting piece from our assistant editor John Hogard on cheating and diving which was a real problem that most of us saw at the World Cup.
And of course Jimmy Vaughn went pretty interesting with his angle around Argentina and cultural reflection. So what's your summary of those? Yeah, this was my first kind of experience of VAR. So I was seeing a few clips online of it being used in the A-League and a few Italian cut competitions as well.
And initially I thought that I was really good. There was a few examples where they reviewed it and they got it right. But then there was a few inconsistencies. And although I didn't mind when the final I was spitting feathers in the final, I thought the final decision was ridiculous.
And I think there was a lot of interesting things I could talk about VAR for an hour to you might have to wind me in. But I just thought the human nature of having to go over to a TV screen where a group of people have told you that you need to review this. So you've already got doubt in your mind. And then there's 90,000 people watching you make the decision with 11 pros screaming in your ear.
It's a system that I like because I want the team that deserves to win to win. But it was part of it that was subjective. I like the offside bits. I realize I'm renting them.
I like the offside because offside was black and white. You're either onside or offside. Similar to the kind of development of goal line technology. I think that's been good in the Premier League.
No one doubts the ball is cross the line. It's in or it's not in. But penalties were just subjective. There are things that you watch when you go, that's a pen, that's not a pen.
And in the middle, you go, oh, maybe give it a pen. And I'm not sure how you can quantify what is a pen. They will get really in detail with our descriptors of people saying, well, this contact, that isn't in the rules. Again, the pull first.
It was a real storm. I think a good example here. I am a crazy rugby league fan. It's a sport I've grown up watching and loving.
And I watch a lot of that now, particularly now that I'm back down in Australia. And they've got huge issues. And they have a bunker, which is similar to the VAI offside. And they've got huge issues happening with the referees.
They're almost lacking confidence in make decisions. And this video technology has been used in the NRL for probably 15 to 20 years in terms of replays around triswaring moments. And you're right, that lack of black or white and that lack of kind of, well, that subjective element. Yeah, sometimes it's interpretation involved means that decisions get made wrong and they cost teams games and they cost coaches their jobs.
And I think there are moments where we're leading technology, remove the human element from sport. And sometimes we've just got to accept that the human element will be wrong because players are sometimes wrong and they make mistakes and coaches do the same thing. So it's very interesting. But it was a fascinating thing to see at the highest level without a doubt.
Yeah, I also wondered for a while whether it's just part of the game. Like, when you go, you finish the match and at the highest level, if you're a spectator, you get in your car and in the UK, you put six or six on or this chat, this chat's on Twitter that you go to the pub and have a chat with your mate. If everything is like, no one disagrees on anything, then the game's going to be quite boring. And I wonder whether like, that one meal that you sneak in in the last minute or someone doesn't tackle, they shouldn't or someone scores a goal that they shouldn't.
We do want to eliminate cheating, but I also think that's part of the game. Maybe the dark arts of even make set plays. Maybe teams, the Italian teams of yesterday year pulling shirts or zonal marking and holding people in certain ways. Is that completely disappearing?
I think like Harry Maguire, people that can run and jump and head the ball, are they going to become more vague because no one's going to stop. Like I said, I could go on for hours like this. Yeah, well, look as a Kiwi, I can certainly remember Daniel de Rossi diving in the 2010 World Cup to cost us a potential win over Italy. So that was New Zealand's moment.
So I'm just going to throw that in there. But go on to cheating because it's a nice big way towards it. Yeah, I think this is something you're super passionate about. And I think the two are kind of married out there that they are in the cheating because if we're going to get more zoomed in and more focused on our sides and goal and technology and reviewing penalties, I think we're going to have to review diving.
The Premier League have talked about doing it for years, retrospective action of yellow cars, red cars, missing games and they've never really done it. The referee is more confident to use a yellow car but some of the play acting in the World Cup was a joke, it was embarrassing. And I actually thought it was probably the worst I've seen for a while. I thought it was worse than the Premier League, worse than the Champions League.
What was your second? Look, I think John's angle in the article was really about the influence on young people. And we saw the memes and the videos of young kids taking the Mickey with coaches getting them to all dive at once and do the Neymar role. And I thought that was pretty comical.
But I think there is an underlying message here that there are certain teams and certain cultures that value that trickery deception or beating the man, whatever it is, more so than playing the game the best they could. And I look at Neymar's performance and I think, well, this was an opportunity for him to create a legacy of the quality and the legend that could be Neymar. But instead, he spent, I think it was 14 minutes laying on the floor through the tournament. And I also think Griezmann dived to get a penalty.
So this goes back to the winner, sorry, to get a free kick in the final. And this goes back to the win it all cost mentality. Are you willing to dive and cheat to get a penalty to win a tournament? And is that just part of the game?
Or should we try and rise above and clean up the game? Because I know a lot of people that don't watch football when they talk about football, they just go, all they do is dive and roll around. And it's embarrassing. And it's hard to defend or argue with that as a football fan.
So it's a very interesting debate. Yeah, not to go off piece, but the Neymar angle is quite interesting because I think he's probably the third in line behind Messy and Rinaldo. And that's a whole lot of podcasts that do like that. But lots of people were focusing on Neymar's diving, pro-acting, trying to win penalties.
When there's some really good stuff online written about how well he actually played statistically, he was carrying the ball, he was creating chances, he was amongst the best attacking players in the tournament. But I don't think that people saw that because the kind of the lens they were watching through. So you look at maybe someone like Azar do a brilliant World Cup as well, and beat him players and carrying Belgium forward. Probably a similar level of performance to Neymar, but Neymar's theatrics and drama meant that perhaps people didn't value what he did so much.
Just moving on to the rest of the magazine, which other articles did you want to cover? Well, look, I think John Aldo's piece, which was a follow-up from a couple of issues to go around values and culture. Just the promise of thinking culturally was really interesting. And highly recommend John's work.
He is a real guru when it comes to leadership and culture. There is a masterclass with him on the website. He's written a number of articles for us. And it's just a really interesting look at the importance of values and culture around teams.
So a really nice article there and it kind of taps into some of these themes, which rose up through the World Cup, which is why we published it in this edition. Jimmy Vaughn's article, do you want to cover that one off in terms of the Argentinian angle? Yeah, I think Jimmy is someone that's really interested in how culture influences the game and how Lincoln is what we're talking about with cheating, what we value to be true, then starts to come out into the football. And so he talks about how Argentina used the value kind of skill and creativity and, I suppose, football things.
And now they only value hard work and they talked a lot about having balls, didn't they? And how that kind of affected the teams performance and the teams cohesion. Does that sum up well enough? Yeah, I think a good example from sort of environments I've seen is when coaches who perhaps may be lack experience or maybe lack genuine knowledge of environment will just go intensity, intensity, intensity.
Like it's all about intensity. I wasn't intense enough all the players weren't working hard enough. Well, that's great to a point. Like we can all be intense, but you can play football slowly.
I mean, the Italians traditionally play a beautiful sort of slow, methodical game. The Spanish obviously keep the ball and build English game might be quicker. So it varies culture to culture. But I think it's just about looking at it and going, what do we value to be true?
And again, I often reference Jimmy Vaughn's article in issue nine of the magazine around catch me if you can, where it talks about the Brazilian case study because it's such a good example of the cultural influences that shape the way the game is played and the form of trickery and what weight you put on putting the ball through a player's legs versus what weight you put on scoring a goal that may vary in different cultures. So a really nice piece from German and certainly one to consider when we think about the kind of values and messages we promote in our media coaching environments. Yeah. And then the final one was your afterwards here.
I really enjoyed a relaxed format. So here I'll see someone that we've both worked with, let's see when that's at Brentford, but just kind of going through some of the tactical trends of the World Cup. Do you want to touch on this one? Yeah, look, I think it was just a devil's advocate piece.
So obviously I thoroughly believe that players should be taught to keep possession and play attractive football and try and play through the thirds. And I guess the sort of message I was at most academies or most clubs will have a philosophy where we play through the thirds, we try and keep position and we press high. And that's sort of been a common thing tied back to the trends in the game for the last 15 to 20 years. And I think looking at the World Cup and the analysis that I asked to hear to help me with was really around providing some effective clips around the importance of transition and speed in the game.
So the article was called High Speed Chess. And it's all about the influence of really positive transition, whether that's the attacking transition or defensive, and how that we need to encourage young players to experience those things and make sure that at training, we're giving them an opportunity not just to keep them all for the sake of keeping it, but to actually keep it to penetrate or to work on counter-attacking quickly or reacting quickly on transition, whether that's a pressing high, counter pressing, whenever we lose the ball, whatever that is, it's just about that variety. And so here was able to support, I guess, the themes that I was trying to get across with some great clips and some good analysis there. Yeah, I really enjoyed that.
I think it's a format we should look to use again. So moving on, we've got a research review. You introduced this one and then I'll kind of point out the best that I like, yes, it was a really nice one from Professor Bill Harper, who obviously does all of our research reviews on practice, instruction, and skill acquisition in soccer. And I guess Bill was sort of taking it and breaking down some of the key points, but there was a sort of nice part in the middle of the article around five key myths that go with coaching.
And you and I can both talk about one of them, but myth one, for example, that demonstrations are always effective in conveying instructions to the learner. So there's always a lot of debate around learning styles, teaching styles, and whether they're true, whether they're not. But I think, if I think back to certain courses I've done over the last 16, 17 years, it would be that you stop the play, you demonstrate, you check understanding, and then the role rolls. And that would be a very traditional method of instruction and coaching.
And there's a lot of evidence in this paper to kind of debunk that myth. And I think from experience, you could say that coaching interventions on the run, conversations with players while the game's going on, maybe sometimes stops and still is relevant. But just making sure that there's not really a one size fits all approach was that kind of myth. And then the one that you were going to address around game intelligence, what were you thinking about?
Yes, yes, I'm glad it was myth five, game intelligence skills are not amenable to practice and instruction. So I think there's a common belief that game intelligence, maybe something you have or you don't have, or maybe game intelligence is something you learn through playing the game. So this myth talked about perhaps using different interventions. So it could be video, it could be a coach telling a player, it could be a coach asking a player to watch another player and how that can build game intelligence or can build understanding or tactical understanding.
So I enjoyed that one because I think maybe in the UK, you've talked about the traditional coaching formula that was stopped and still and it was commenced and then perhaps we went, the game is a teacher and we went to games based. And the reality is that all of these things are useful and that seesaw of practice and play, they're all useful and all those interventions, those practice, different types of sessions are all useful. So I'll point this paper, I would recommend people have a look. Definitely, pretty challenging.
And that sort of takes us over to the session plan. And this was when I put together very much inspired by a former colleague of mine when he used to call it cheating wingers, a great counter-attacking session, which I renamed lazy wingers because I had Jimmy Vaughn's voice in my head thinking rename this so that we take the word cheating out of it and make it something a little bit different. You can't bang on about name, I don't know what to cheat. No, exactly right.
He would have batted me out. So you know, lazy wingers was the name for the PVP session plan library, but essentially a session designed to give wingers and attacking players lots of opportunity to counter-attack and break forward by just simply stationary them in certain areas of the pitch and then working with them individually. And I actually ran this practice a couple of weeks ago when we were working on transition with my group and it went down brilliantly. We did it in 99 and the practice really can work from probably 6v6 to 11v11.
So very adaptable and a great way to get lots of forward attacking runs, lots of attacking under loaded, which is generally fairly realistic in the game. I think it's too many times we attack overloaded. It's more often than under loaded. So it's a really nice practice one to check out.
And I recommend using when you are working on counter-attack. Yeah, I like the session plans because a lot of them are adaptable. I tend to look at them and then not copy them. I tend to be like a nice foundation to go and come with a new idea.
So it's not so much taking the session plan and sticking on your players. It's like this idea of defending overloaded or attacking under loaded or weather. And then how are you going to run that with your group? So like you said, it can work maybe 99, it can work a lot of them.
Most of them go way down to 5v6 aside on this. So it's a nice kind of bank accession. So just to wrap up the wrap, we need to talk about your blog change the story. Yeah, look, this was one that kind of was inspired from a book I'm reading at the moment called Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind.
And it's I guess about evolution. And it was inspired when there was a sort of part early in the book that talks about the agricultural and price of that, the cognitive revolution and how Homo sapiens essentially became the dominant life force on earth. And one of the key reasons for that started by the author was the ability to tell stories. And it sort of talks about many examples of myths and stories that are passed down from generation to generation.
So that inspired me to sort of examine how does that apply to coaching, how does that apply to sport. And of course, there's so many different myths and stories, whether that's when it all costs is narrative and coaches telling players what to do and to knock them all along. And then I happened to go and watch a game where that was happening. So it all kind of was a perfect storm in terms of inspiring the article.
But the basic premise is that I think we have to question dominant narratives in sport all the time. Now, whether that's the masculine paradigm, whether that is the winnidle costs story or that narrative that dominates youth development far too often, and it's still a problem, whether that is the way we coach in terms of our behavior. So do I have to verbally impose myself because I'm wearing a tracksuit and I need to be seen by the parent standing over there that I'm the coach and I'm the boss and I'm a judge or am I confident enough to go look, we've done the work during the week and now I'm going to give the players ownership and just questioning things. So it was really just to challenge people about the story that you're passing on to your players and their experience as children in your environment.
Yeah, I think back to one of the Q&As you did about what is coaching and we talked about maybe the attributes of a good coach or a modern coach. We talked about saying curious and understanding the why. I think that can be one of the best advice to young coaches. If that narrative is always there or it's the culture, the level of the culture of the game, why?
And you've got to understand yourself whether that's true or whether people just believe for it to be true. It's a bit of a bit of a I find interesting. Yeah, definitely. Just going to keep questioning things, keep challenging traditions and norms and social constructs.
It's a healthy attitude in my personal opinion. So then that sums up a very busy month of content in July. Published a lot of stuff in there and particularly with the magazine. Thank you very much for your time in reviewing it.
No worries, mate. All right. We'll look forward to another PDP monthly wrap very soon.