Concrete voorstellen om het Nederlandse voetbal vooruit te helpen #3

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Op maandag 13 februari 2017 20:49 schreef Haringkop het volgende:

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Dit raakt meer de kern van de huidige problemen dan alle die verschillende varianten voor competities.

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Op vrijdag 24 februari 2017 10:22 schreef Haringkop het volgende:

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Natuurlijk heeft veel met het beschikbare budget te maken. Maar als we kijken naar de kleinere landen dan heeft NL gewoon de budgetten. Ajax en PSV werken met een veel grotere begroting dan de Belgische clubs, zelfs Feyenoord zit er nog boven. Maar kennelijk lukt het ons niet om competitief te zijn/blijven op dat niveau. Dat is een kwestie van heel veel oorzaken.

Maar als je gemiddelde wedstrijd zit in de eredivisie ziet kan je amper spreken van (top)sporters. Veelal zijn het magere mannetjes met amper spierontwikkeling. In dat speelveld kunnen jongens als Luuk de Jong, Kramer en Weghorst zich nog wel staande houden, maar het is tekenend voor de situatie waarin het NL'se voetbal verkeert.
Helaas is daar meer voor nodig dan alleen de competitie omgooien naar een play-off variant.

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Wenger has failed to evolve and his blinkered mindset might ruin Arsenal

It is remarkable that Kodak was, at one time, a byword for innovation. In 1900, it patented the Box Brownie, a cardboard machine with a meniscus lens that took pictures on 117 roll film. In 1935, it introduced Kodachrome, the first colour reversal film. In 1963, it rolled out the iconic, easy to load Instamatic camera, which I remember my grandfather using when I was a child.

Polaroid, too, had a reputation for dynamism. It created the instant camera, introduced sepia film, and brought instant colour photography to the masses. Between 1948 and 1976, revenues jumped from less than $7 million to $950 million, and it seemed as if it would continue to surf the wave of the mass desire to have durable memories in the form of pictures.

We all know what happened next. Polaroid tanked, and Kodak, after years of stagnation, filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The immediate problem was the rise of digital photography, but the deeper cause was to be found in the internal dynamics of these two companies. They were blinded by their own success. They kept harking back to the innovations of the past, and stopped looking for the victories of the future.

I will return to Kodak and Polaroid, but first an examination of Arsenal under Arsène Wenger. For this is a club who, for a long time, had a reputation for innovation. When the Frenchman arrived on these shores, he leveraged his broad understanding of science to alter many of the basic assumptions of English football. He transformed training methods, using short, razor-sharp sessions, carefully timed and logged, and turned up the temperature on the team bus to keep muscles supple.

He changed the diet, introducing more vegetables and vitamin supplements, discouraging alcohol, fat and sugar; he recalibrated recruitment by widening and strengthening the scouting network (in 2005, he was the first manager to field a matchday squad comprised entirely of foreign players); he introduced stretching to a team who had previously shunned the activity; he hired an osteopath; and he altered the training pitch to match the dimensions of that of the stadium.


But after years of punctuated success, Arsenal have stagnated, an assessment bolstered by the performance on Saturday, when Wenger made a change that signally backfired. He left Alexis Sánchez, his best player, on the bench, and his team failed to have a single touch in the Liverpool box in the first half, eventually going down 3-1. Afterwards, it emerged that there had been a falling out between Wenger and Sánchez, a story dominating the back pages. But most Arsenal fans will agree that the real problem goes much deeper.

Now, many Arsenal fans will testify that this kind of stubbornness is not a one-off; it is symbolic. If you look at the arc of the past few seasons, Wenger has found it increasingly difficult to question his own assumptions (on Saturday, he said he had no regrets about dropping his star player), particularly when things have gone against him. When it comes to transfer policy, training methods, nutrition, rehabilitation, tactics, and other aspects of performance, he has, with only a few exceptions, stuck to the concepts that secured his early success and for which he has become famous. In other words, historic innovations.

Criticism from outside the club has been regarded, not as an opportunity to think differently, but as a reason to hunker down. Instead of looking beyond the barricades of the club, to other sports and industries, for fresh ideas, as the young Wenger once did, the tendency has been to point to the past by way of self-justification.

How often have we heard the refrain that a consistent top-four finish over recent years validates everything that is happening at Arsenal?

As for criticism from within the club, this is conspicuous by its absence. Wenger is very much the boss, which is no bad thing, but it can be fatal if it suppresses the voices that might jolt him into an overdue recognition that success requires continuous evolution.

There are many bright people at the club who fear that any suggestion, however constructive, might jeopardise their position, given that Wenger has begun to inhabit a somewhat blinkered mindset.

It is ironic, to switch focus, that Kodak invented the digital camera. In 1975, an engineer called Steve Sasson developed a device that could take photos with 10,000 pixels. Sadly, the bosses at the company were so focused on past triumphs, and were so stubbornly set on print, that they did not exploit a crucial head start. As one analyst put it: “If you want to point to the pivotal moment, it was in 1975 when they discovered the digital camera and put it back into a closet.”

At Polaroid, a similar story played out. As digital emerged, the leader of the company, instead of embracing this new technology, doggedly stuck to what he knew best, “surrounding himself with devoted followers who would do his bidding,” as one colleague put it. He eventually started working on a separate floor where critics were denied access. This is not untypical of once-successful leaders who hit problems.

In one famous study, the more trouble a company was in, the more chief executives would seek advice from people who parroted their perspective, rather than those who may challenge it. This is perilous because it fosters groupthink. It creates a bunker mentality.

Instead of reaching out, innovating, evolving and adapting, the very qualities that drove the success of companies such as Kodak and Polaroid, and clubs such as Arsenal, there is a tendency to use the successes of the past to legitimate the strategy of the present, thus jeopardising the future. As one Wenger critic put it: “He is a bright man, but he struggles to reinvent himself.”

Sir Alex Ferguson, one of the few managers to have engineered long-term success, was in a constant quest for reinvention. We all know about the early innovations: the staggering of players’ contracts; the focus on possession; watching training from the sidelines rather than in the mix to gain a more global perspective (he called this “the most important decision I ever made”); and the battle against the alcohol culture at United.

But even after his early successes he continued to evolve: hiring a nutritionist; introducing compression socks to aid recovery; recruiting a specialist to improve peripheral vision (after a grey strip led to poor results); revolutionising health checks; and trialling new tactics, not least after a 4-0 rout by Barcelona in 1994 following which he put an extra man in midfield, and split the strikers. He also encouraged staff and players to offer ideas, unafraid to be challenged provided that he remained the ultimate decision maker, even creating a competition about who could guess the opposition line-up.

Above all, Ferguson never trumpeted the victories of the past, fearful that it might lead to contentment or, worse, stagnation. “Complacency is a disease, especially for individuals and organisations that have enjoyed success...” he has said. “For me, the questions going through the back of my mind during any celebration were, ‘How do we top this? How do we get another triumph?’

“I always felt I had to be in the vanguard of tomorrow.”

These words might offer a useful corrective to Wenger, a manager with keen intellect and work ethic, but who has become a hostage to history. In that sense many will regard the reported tendency of Sánchez to challenge players if they underperform as precisely the mindset that Arsenal require. For too long, the club has been focused upon the glories of yesterday. It is time to focus upon the triumphs of tomorrow.

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Op maandag 20 maart 2017 14:27 schreef MichelWuyts het volgende:
Nederland onder 17 verslaat belgie en Italie voor kwalificatie van het EK. Op samenvattingen zag het er aardig uit. Hierna zal het met deze spelers wel meer minder gaan, zoals dat bij onze spelers altijd het geval is.

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Op dinsdag 21 maart 2017 10:55 schreef Solstice1 het volgende:

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Een fysieke voorsprong die je hebt omdat je nou eenmaal een stuk groter geboren bent of omdat je relatief ouder bent ben je zo weer kwijt als je niet goed getraind wordt. Ook hier gaat trouwens op dat veelzijdig sporten in de jeugd belangrijk is, bouw je een veel bredere basis, kun je je ook veel langer doorontwikkelen.

Harry Dost(docent Sportpartners) beeldde dit mooi uit met een pyramide. Als jij een pyramide hebt met een smalle basis kun je hem niet zo hoog maken want dan flikkert ie om. Als jij een pyramide met een brede basis hebt kun je veel langer blijven door bouwen voordat je top in zicht komt.

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Op dinsdag 21 maart 2017 17:54 schreef Solstice1 het volgende:

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Meer sporten op school betekent een bredere basis, betekent meer ruimte om door te groeien.

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voshans twitterde op zaterdag 25-03-2017 om 07:38:39 Is het in Nederlands voetbal tijd voor de methode Raymond Verheijen Plus? Duiding @vkwillemvissers. https://t.co/Pv92GWM7Fd via @volkskrant reageer retweet