THE FOUR WORDS HELPING PHILLIPS REACH HIS PEAK
SOME players play in a way that reflects their character. Roy Keane took his simmering fury onto the pitch, Andrea Pirlo his detached cool. But some do not. Matt Phillips, at his best, is an explosive instinctive winger who can shred opponents at will. But he is a thoughtful, careful, deliberative man, a man who makes sure to choose the right word every time.
There are times when too much of Phillips’s admirable personality creeps into his game. When he overthinks things, gets on his own back, puts pressure on himself, and goes into his own shell. To play his best football, then, Phillips has to master himself, subdue his own thoughts and simply believe.
Almost every manager Phillips has ever played for – Ian Holloway, Gordon Strachan, Harry Redknapp and Tony Pulis – has told him that he needs to play with more confidence, to leave his doubts behind. But it was Ian Holloway, at Blackpool, who gave Phillips the perfect advice, which he is still making the best of.
“Don’t think, just do,” is what Holloway used to tell Phillips. Not to let his own anxiety get in the way of the brilliant dangerous play which, after all, is what tempted Holloway to pay Wycombe Wanderers £350000 for him in August 2010.
Even if it took Phillips the best part of five years after that first big move to know what Holloway really meant.
“I never really understood it until towards the end of my time at QPR,” Phillips admitted last week at West Bromwich Albion’s training ground. “It’s so simple. He just said: ‘ Don’t think, just do’. That is probably one of the hardest things I have found. When things aren’t going right, you overthink that pass, or you over-think whether to shoot or not.”
That is exactly what Phillips has done too often. That is why such a talented player has not yet made the best of his ability, and he admits that at Blackpool and QPR he was too quick to get inside his own head after a mistake.
“Especially when I was younger,” Phillips says. “When something like that happened I would beat myself up for the next five minutes.
“Then, within that five minutes, you’ve made another couple of mistakes. Suddenly you’ve had a bad game. It’s like a goalkeeper conceding a bad goal in the first minute. It takes a lot of mental strength to come back and perform.”
This has been a problem throughout Phillips’s career. Holloway was not the only manager to try to coax Phillips’s aggressive best out of him. But he feels that now, at 25, in his third shot at the Premier League, he is closest to putting Holloway’s advice into practice.
“It’s been something I have been working on for a while,” he says. “Gradually I think things have got better within my own head space. That is what I have been working on improving. Hopefully I have put it to bed. I’m just grateful that things are going well.”
Phillips is enjoying playing for West Brom and looks as if he is taking to Premier League football better than in his first two attempts. Playing as a winger for a Pulis team is an unusual task and involves at least as much defending as attacking. In two recent away games, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur, he has almost played as an auxiliary left-back in a formation that switches from 4-5-1 to a 6-3-1.
Phillips has become a diligent defender and in those two games he could not have done any more for his team. West Brom were heavily beaten at Spurs but at Chelsea last month they nearly got away with it.
At the start of Phillips’s career he was an old-fashioned winger who loved beating opponents and getting crosses in. Now he is a modern wide-man, who helps out his full-back and then breaks with speed.
“You’ve got to be able to do both,” Phillips says. “It’s something the modern day footballer, I feel, has to have.
“It’s hard work, but it’s what you’ve got to do.” Phillips, then, is the picture of evolution from the old era to the new.
“The game is changing,” he says, “and the players have to as well.”
Phillips has certainly grown a lot since he made his Premier League debut six and a half years ago.
He was not born into the elite game but came up the hard way, through the system at his local club Wycombe Wanderers, the club he joined at the age of eight.
“Everyone was assigned jobs, cleaning the gym or the canteen, which was good,” Phillips remembers.
He had to clean the boots of Derek Duncan, now of VCD Athletic in the Ryman Prem.
“It gave you a bond with a first-team player, if you ever got to train with the first-team you had a familiar face there.”
Phillips broke into Paul Lambert’s first team at 17 and quickly impressed. League Two is not an easy place to be a teenage winger but Phillips did well and word spread.
Two years later he was on the bus to Northampton away when he got a phone call telling him to get off so he could sign for Holloway’s Blackpool.
He scored on his debut against Blackburn Rovers.
That was Phillips’s first season in the big time but Blackpool were relegated and he dropped into the Championship.
Two years later he went to Queens Park Rangers, fighting to come back up under Harry Redknapp, who recognised the same ability, but also the same barriers, in Phillips’s game.
He had another season back in the top flight, before being relegated again, and it was only then that Holloway’s advice started to click.
Now Phillips has his third shot. He has learned to relax, not to get inside his own head, to believe in himself and to play his best football.
He is excelling going forward and doing his job at the back. But he is not setting himself any targets, or putting pressure on himself. – The Independent