BEATS NEW TECH WHEN COACHING A NON-LEAGUE TEAM
ANTHONY MILLERICK RECKONS OLD SCHOOL PLANNING
DO you remember the Nike commercial: The Last Game?
A team of cloned footballers with admittedly dodgy bowl cuts conquer the world of football, until Brazilian Ronaldo recruits a world XI that uses flair to beat their android foes.
Now it would be an exaggeration to say that is the way modern football is headed, but AI is now able to predict and prevent injuries.
There is even a robotic training gym that has been developed in Germany to streamline strength training. Technology really can do wonders.
How then, in this world of gadgets and gizmos, do non-league managers ensure that everything does not become over-complicated for their players who have other full-time jobs to worry about?
Well, according to former Hartley Wintney manager and new director of football, Anthony Millerick, the solution lies in being aware of the limitations of the technology.
“A lot of teams have GPS vests, but they can be cheated,” Millerick explained. “I’m sure it’s improved over the years, but you used to watch a game and you’d see a player sprint after a ball’s gone off the pitch and you wonder what they’re doing, but they’re actually manipulating their data stats.
“Ten years ago, in the early days of GPS vests, we won a game, I played centre-half and we kept a clean sheet. The opposition didn’t cause us many problems and I was quite happy with my performance, but I actually registered no sprints for the game.
“Anyone looking would think, ‘what’s happened here?’ But it was simply down to my positioning and the fact that the opposition didn’t play very well. Therefore, the raw data itself can be misleading.”
Instead, Millerick limits the technology he uses to a video platform called Veo, which tracks the ball, providing large, panoramic views and a flashy Monday Night Footballesque touchscreen, where he highlights players and draws lines on specific passages of play like Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher.
Any more than that and Millerick, who has overseen two league titles, a play-off win and two promotions during his seven-year tenure, believes his process would become unnecessarily over-complicated.
“We’ll only do so much,” he said. “I’ll get their basic shape, dangerous players and notable set pieces. It probably won’t go on much further than that.
“In non-league you can do a lot of planning and then they turn up with a completely different shape due to a number of injuries you had no way of knowing about.
“In my younger years I would talk massively about the opposition and then you’d turn up on Saturday and they’re just completely different.”
As a result, Southern League Premier South side Hartley Wintney’s two scouts are used primarily for recruitment purposes, with Millerick using his good rapport with opposition managers to exchange video footage for his analysis.
Even this he uses sparingly. He added: “Realistically, if we’re playing two games a week, we’ve probably got an hour and a half to two hours to go through things.
“It can put doubt into players’ minds if you’re constantly talking about the opposition.
“I only make a few points and I probably talk about who we’re playing for literally a couple of minutes, as I want the main points to be about us.
“I want the players to be thinking about themselves and what they’re going to do, as opposed to something which may or may not happen with the opposition.”
So, there you have it. Although Millerick himself admitted that he would be interested in the heat maps that GPS vests can provide if he could afford them, for the mostpart, in non-league football, the old way remains the simplest.
And quite possibly, still the best.