Concrete voorstellen om het Nederlandse voetbal vooruit te helpen #3

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Op zaterdag 25 maart 2017 11:56 schreef Solstice1 het volgende:

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thomasrijsman twitterde op vrijdag 24-03-2017 om 12:52:53 Sportjournalist @PieterZwartNL vertelt op @villamedia over zijn vaste bijdrage in @Rondo. Oa over botsing der gener... https://t.co/tUSync6AH0 reageer retweet

Vond deze ook wel typerend. Hoe zorg ik dat hij zo zichtbaar wordt als bij jou Klopkoek?

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Op maandag 27 maart 2017 12:00 schreef Cultuur058 het volgende:
Nederland weet in een aantal takken van sport heel behoorlijk mee te komen door gebruik van inovatie. denk bijvoorbeeld aan het befaamde haaienpak, de klapschaats en ook in andere sporten zijn we niet te beroerd om onze kenniseconomie te gebruiken voor sportief voordeel. Voetbal doet hier echter liever niet aan mee. We hebben een tijd gehad dat we met totaalvoetbal alle tegenstanders konden verrassen, maar dat is nu gewoon alweer ouderwets en ieder team weet hoe wij spelen nu. Daarom, tijd voor iets nieuws. Ook bij de KNVB.

Tijd voor een 5-4-1, zonder opkomende backs.

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Johan Cruyff was, to put it mildly, successful. As a player, with Ajax he won the European Cup three times and the Dutch league on eight occasions. As a coach, he won La Liga four times with Barcelona, the Cup Winners' Cup in 1989 and the European Cup in 1992. That is the definition of success. Winning matches; winning trophies.

And yet there is a deep irony in Cruyff's life. He was not motivated primarily by winning. In an interview in 2011 with Matt Dickinson, my colleague, he said that what mattered most was the way a team played. He was interested in philosophy, expression. "Winning is just one day, a reputation can last a lifetime," Cruyff said. "Winning is an important thing, but to have your own style, to have people copy you, to admire you, that is the greatest gift."

It hardly needs stating that this is an inversion of the way we typically think about football, and life. In the conventional perspective, sport is about winning and everything else is subservient to that. In much the same way, business is about profit and all else must be shoehorned into this objective. This is what you might call instrumentalism: defining the bottom-line goal and then working towards it.

But Cruyff's success hints at a psychological truth that we overlook at our peril. Few of us, whether fans or athletes, are inspired solely by the bottom line. We want to embrace a wider ideal, a deeper meaning.

Let us move beyond football for a moment and consider a study by Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School. She recruited a number of artists and selected ten of their works that had been commissioned (ie, created for money) and ten non-commissioned works (ie, created for love of the work itself, out of a desire for self-expression). She then asked a group of influential artists and curators to rate them.

"Our results were startling," Amabile wrote. "The commissioned works were significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet were not rated as different in technical quality. Moreover, the artists reported feeling significantly more constrained when doing commissioned works than non-commissioned works."

In a different study, researchers interviewed art students to see if they wanted to become artists to earn money or to express themselves in some more vital way. Twenty years later, they caught up with them to see how they were getting on as full-time artists. They found that "those artists who pursued painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognised as superior".

This finding is now so familiar that it has its own expression; what the author Daniel Pink calls the "paradox of creativity". We find our deepest inspiration when we are motivated by something other than winning, but that, in turn, makes us more successful. As the researchers put it: "It is those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eventually receive them."

When you look at the teams masterminded by Cruyff, both as a player and coach, this truth shines through. Winning was a big thing; but it wasn't the only thing. And this is why their performances were infused with such imagination and flair. He regarded the pass not as a functional aspect of the game, but as a thing of beauty. Even at 37, he was altering the dimensions of the game, hitting "30-metre passes so surprising that the TV cameras of the day sometimes missed them", as Simon Kuper put it in the Financial Times.

This is about more than football, or even art. Businesses rarely inspire their people with an emphasis on profits, or beating the competition, or ever larger bonuses. Indeed, these carrots and sticks often drain us of inspiration and obscure the meaning we seek in our jobs and lives. Truly visionary leaders never forget the bottom line, or the importance of paying a fair amount, but they inspire precisely because they articulate an ambition that transcends the profit and loss.

When Steve Jobs, of Apple, tried to lure John Sculley away from an executive role at Pepsi, for example, he did so not with a fat pay cheque. "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" he said. Jobs may not have always been admirable in his personal dealings (nor, incidentally, was Cruyff), but he made billions precisely because he was driven by something more than money.

And that is why Cruyff's greatest gift to football was to bequeath to Barcelona an understanding of this paradox. The "more than a club" tag sometimes grates on fans, but there can be no doubt that Barcelona believe that they are about more than winning matches. This idea of a mission, a way of playing, infuses the way they think and act, both in the first team and at the academy. And this is one crucial reason why they have become so successful.

"Cruyff painted the chapel, and Barcelona coaches since merely restore or improve it," said Pep Guardiola, who played under the Dutchman and learnt from him as a coach. Joan Laporta, a former president of the club, said: "As a player he turned football into an art form. Johan came along and revolutionised everything. The modern-day Barça started with him, he is the expression of our identity. He brought us a style of football we love."

After his death, I read many tributes to Cruyff, all deeply personal. But I was struck by one similarity: they articulated the importance of the Dutch master not in terms of his success, but in terms of how he made us feel. "This was football from another planet, football as reimagined by a master choreographer assigned to strip it down, discard the rusted and outmoded components and reconstruct it in a way that was not just more aesthetically pleasing but more lethally and unanswerably efficient," Richard Williams wrote in The Guardian.

In the FT, Kuper wrote: "It was as if he was the lightbulb and Thomas Edison in one." Dickinson, reflecting on speaking to the great man under the shade of a tree in the Catalan capital, wrote: "It felt like a religious sermon from the pope of football. Winning is not everything. Beauty matters. I had marvelled at Cruyff the player, admired the coach, but what I came to love most in Cruyff was the idealist, the self-proclaimed romantic. Football has so very few of them."

And that really is the point. Van Gogh, perhaps the most creative Dutchman of all, who earned not a cent while revolutionising art, said: "For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream." It was while reaching for the stars, for something beyond conventional success, that Cruyff became the most successful individual in football history.

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Op maandag 27 maart 2017 22:46 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Misschien een vergelijking die nergens op slaat.
We fokken de beste vleesstieren ter wereld. Nederlandse melkkoeien zijn over de hele wereld beroemd voor de hoeveelheid melk die ze leveren. Onze fokkers werken goed samen met de universiteit van Wageningen. Als het voetbal in Nederland samenwerkt met universiteiten dan moeten we zeker in staat zijn weer de beste voetballers ter wereld voort te brengen.

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Op dinsdag 28 maart 2017 18:52 schreef Syntix het volgende:

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Nee, dan gaan we weer met "the obious" verder. Ik wil wel eens een revolutionaire trainer uit Duitsland of Spanje zien.

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Op woensdag 29 maart 2017 10:14 schreef Solstice1 het volgende:

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Random zou ik niet willen zeggen, dit is iemand die er duidelijk enorm veel tijd in gestoken heeft en zich gespecialiseerd heeft. Dat zou Adriaanse natuurlijk ook moeten doen om minstens op dat niveau te komen. Maar random pipo vind ik wat denigrerend richting iemand die zich zo verdiept heeft.

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A nicer Fergie would have done better

I once went to a youth football game and was shocked at the way the coach shouted at his players during half-time. He berated them. Bawled at them. Afterwards, I asked him whether he thought this would help them to perform better? "Sir Alex Ferguson does it," he said, "why not me?" There is a bout of soul-searching within British sport. Shane Sutton, the former head coach and technical director of British Cycling, was alleged by Jess Varnish to have said, "get on with having a baby" after she was dropped from the team. The leaked findings of an independent review into British Cycling's world-class performance programme talk of a "culture of fear" and "bullying". Shouting and bawling are said to be rife, not just in the top ranks of British sport but lower down too. This has led to calls for "a recalibration" in the relationship between coach and athlete.

There are two schools of thought in this debate. On the one hand, there are those who, like the youth football coach, think the end justifies the means. If sport is about winning, why use half measures? A furious Ferguson once swept a tray of teacups into the air. He kicked a boot into the forehead of David Beckham, albeit inadvertently. Indeed, open any autobiography of a Manchester United player and you will read about episodes of aggression that make the culture in cycling seem tame.

People in this camp worry about the dead hand of political correctness, that do-gooders will blunt the edge so crucial in competitive sport. They regard fear as an important tool and that, without it, players can become complacent. Tear a person to shreds and you improve their resilience - or, at the very least, discover that they don't have what it takes.

The second school of thought maintains that winning isn't everything. They point to other values such as civility, respect and courtesy. They argue that professional sport is a place of work and that athletes have a right to expect those in charge to behave in an acceptable manner. Shouting, bawling, personal insults: they are all ruled out of court. However much the use of the "hairdryer" may boost motivation, it is unacceptable. Sport, they say, must operate within the boundaries of a society's values.

I disagree with both these perspectives, however, and for a simple reason: I don't think that Ferguson's use of the hairdryer was a reason for his success. On the contrary, he would have been a greater manager without it. If you read the words of Manchester United players, you will see that they feel the same way. They wanted to play for Ferguson, not out of fear but out of respect.

They loved the way that he positioned United as a special club. They loved that he had a distinctive philosophy: of youth, of attacking football, of width. They loved that United weren't a pay-cheque club, but a club with history.

They loved that Ferguson talked so poignantly about the Munich air disaster, the Busby Babes, and articulated that endlessly powerful idea that they were writing the next chapter in a living history. They loved that he arrived at the training ground before anyone else. They loved that he protected them publicly when they had a bad game. They loved that every decision was based upon one criterion: the long-term interests of the club. They loved that he had high standards.

But did they love him bawling at them, flecks of spit hitting their faces? Did they like the personal insults that would occasionally fly in the heat of the moment? Not a bit of it. These were the times they lost respect and when cohesiveness was imperilled. Indeed, Ferguson himself acknowledges this. "One of the sideeffects of the abuse of power is when someone leads by fear or intimidation," he says in his book, Leading. "As time went by, I learnt to control my temper ... Harsh outbursts [are] a corrosive way to run anything. It's far better to give people belief in themselves, and faith in the direction of the organisation."

Why do people so often suppose that fear bolsters performance? Imagine standing behind a concert pianist and telling him that, if he hits the wrong note, you will shoot him in the head. Do you think he will play with greater felicity? Or do you think he will freeze? Performers reach their fullest expression not when they are crippled by fear but when they are liberated from it.

Does anyone suppose that Sutton is a great coach (and he clearly is) because he allegedly used sexist language? Is it not clear that he could have taken Varnish through the performance data and demonstrated that he was dropping her for reasons of scrupulous rationality? She may still have been unhappy but no independent panel would have upheld a complaint. And is it not obvious that other people in the team would have been empowered by this modus operandi? You see, fairness is also a powerful tool. If people think that they are being treated justly, that decisions on selection and preferment are being made objectively, they will try harder. Meritocracy is the cornerstone of any organisation hoping to win. The moment that these decisions seem arbitrary or ad hominem, you will lose people, even those who would be gaining an unfair advantage. For they will not be thinking, "How can I get better" but rather, "What if he turns against me?" There is a huge amount of confusion around the use of sharp words. They are, to my mind, crucial. I would abhor the encroachment of political correctness into the dressing room. But sharpness does not have to shade into bullying. Indeed, the two most brilliant coaches I worked with - Paul Day and Denis Neale - were excoriating with their criticism. It could be painful. It could be close to the bone. But never, not once, did I think they were being personal.

The reason is to be found in the content of their criticism. If I didn't train hard enough, they would berate me. If I hadn't completed the cardiovascular work, they would slate me. These criticisms found their basis in objective reality drawn from our shared goal of better performance. But they never criticised my colour, gender or any other aspect of my persona not strictly relevant to performance. They were not seeking to instil fear, but respect for the objectives that we had all dedicated our lives to achieving.

A video emerged on social media yesterday of Geno Auriemma, the famed US college basketball coach, saying that he would never give a player on the bench a chance to play if they were not "engaged". He rebuked those whose body language was selfish, who were not watching their team-mates. It sounded stern, but this wasn't about fear: it was about accountability. Why should someone play for a team when they are only in it for themselves? It is these distinctions that are often missing from the debate: the distinction between tone and content, between fear and accountability, between arbitrary preferment and decisions aimed at objectivity and rigour. When coaches get these right, there is no conflict between toughness and empowerment, still less between performance and humanity. Ferguson, at his best, got this balance right and this, to me, is why he was one of sport's great leaders.

If other coaches get it right, the future of British sport will remain golden.'Performers reach their fullest expression when liberated from fear, not crippled by it'