The BEST players and the BEST managers will thrive when football starts again behind closed doors
I’M one of the few bosses to have managed a team playing in a competitive game behind closed doors in a top-flight league.
My final game with Brisbane Roar – before the lockdown in Australia – had no fans. I can’t pretend anything other than it was eerie.
It goes against everything you work for in pro football - the intensity, the inspiration and demands of a crowd.
Yet, I will say this as strongly as I can, these are unprecedented times, these are strange times.
When games resume behind closed doors, you will see the best managers coming to the fore now.
You will probably see the best players, too, because mental capacity is huge in football and, invariably, the best players have the biggest mentalities.
And whatever we see as the ‘ideal’ whatever we want for our team, whatever the perfect conditions are… they have gone.
And they will be gone for a long time.
So there is no use crying about it. We have to be prepared to work outside our comfort zone – even if it goes against everything you believe in about football.
We have a duty.
I think clubs have a wider duty to finish this season when it is safe, for several reasons.
For the integrity of the competition, for sure – and, on that basis, I believe you must have teams promoted and relegated.
On that subject, I don’t get the argument that playing behind closed doors or on neutral venues is unfair. To borrow a horrible phrase from politicians, “this is the new normal”.
If we wait for crowds and home advantage, we may wait for years and football clubs will have long gone bust by then. So we adapt. Why? Because we have a duty, if we are role models – and footballers are always held to the highest standards – then it is time to do our duty. When it is safe to do it (I’m adding that for the hard of thinking!). There is a bigger picture here. Football needs to return at some point before the sport in this country is destroyed beyond recognition.
And it needs to do it to help
everyone else. We take for granted
NHS workers putting themselves on the front line for wages that are a pittance for what they do, for the job they do. A scandal, in fact.
No one is expecting footballers to put themselves on the front line. But if it is safe to return, can we rightfully say to them, “It’s OK, the nation needs you, but don’t come back because you are worried about a lack of home advantage? Or worried about no crowd noise?”
That is nonsense.
You need to adapt. We adapted at Brisbane Roar. We played behind closed doors with only a few days’ notice.
In fact, the fixture list at Brisbane showed in the first four months we only had four games at home. FOUR.
But people said, “It’s OK, you’ll get home advantage when it really matters towards the end of the season”.
It wasn’t. The virus made sure of that. Are we moaning? Nope. We went out and won anyway and we had the best record of any club in the A League after Christmas – and made the play-off positions.
We played the hand we were dealt, and, if I see anyone else moaning about conditions that are unfair – when Covid-19 has changed the world landscape – then I may scream.
It is not going away soon, games behind closed doors may be here for a year or more. Get used to it.
The manager has a big role to play in adapting. Without fans, it’s almost like a training game, one of those arranged to give players returning from injury a run-out.
But I’d also say one of the biggest reasons players reach the Premier League is because they have that ruthless, almost pathological focus.
They are psychologically different from most players at lower levels, or in most other leagues. There is a ruthlessness to the mentality.
As a manager, you have to tune into that. You have to prepare the players for the importance of the game – not the importance of the crowd.
The work we do as managers is from the last game to the current one. On the pitch, they are largely on their own, but in the build-up is where we work.
Without fans, we found a way to deliver. We treated it as a full-on, passionate game because we didn’t want a different attitude as that introduces a damaging negative.