Bonding exercises can make or break team spirit
From military training to that dentist’s chair, offbeat activities will rarely fail to fascinate, writes Daniel Zeqiri
‘One soldier had a gun against Ince’s head. He almost died’
Between the bleep tests and cryotherapy chambers that comprise preseason’s menu of physical toil, an unscientific staple endures: the teambonding exercise.
Eddie Jones this week put England’s rugby team through the wringer with a lifeguard course in Cornwall, following a time-honoured sporting tradition in search of that intangible quality we call team spirit.
In most industries these offbeat ventures are low-budget and painfree: tenpin bowling, paintballing in a forest (all right, perhaps not entirely pain-free).
Professional sport’s abundance of time and money allows for more ambitious schemes, which can make for nutritious newspaper copy. In an age of limited access to our favourite stars, they offer the public a glimpse behind the curtain at athletes with their guard down.
At season’s end, a team’s success can even
be attributed to their bonding exercises as a magical ingredient.
They can be divided into loose categories: those that seek to simulate team sport through a collective effort, those that scare players so their day job seems a doddle, those that ask players to reveal unseen sides of their character, or just old-fashioned fun.
One to be filed in the first category was Eddie Howe taking his Burnley players sheep-herding. Rather like his spell in Lancashire, it was less than successful. “I ended up having arguments with a couple of players,” the Bournemouth manager later revealed.
Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United dynasty is often a source of inspiration. Ferguson once stopped a training session to make his players watch a flock of geese fly overhead, to note the perfect harmony and formation.
Earlier in his reign, Ferguson put his team of “real tough b-------” in a mock hostage situation with the SAS. Thinking under pressure was the idea, but it sounded more like a chance to laugh at Paul Ince’s expense.
“A smoke bomb went off and everything went dark,” Ferguson told a 2015 documentary. “Within seconds, ‘bang, bang, bang’ – and the lights came back on. Four soldiers were there and one of them had a gun against Paul Ince’s head. He screamed, he almost died, it was absolutely brilliant.”
Military environments continue to be popular, with Gareth Southgate’s England spending a day with the Royal Marines before the World Cup in search of perspective.
Putting pampered athletes in austere surroundings is another theme. Former Australia cricket coach John Buchanan was a disciple of pre-ashes boot camps that proved the bane of Shane Warne’s life.
Players were forced to choose which “luxuries” they wanted to keep, and in Warne’s case the choice was between clean pants and a supply of cigarettes. Naturally, he plumped for the latter.
At the recreational end of the spectrum, Fifa tournaments, Fortnite and golf are the norm in 2019 and are mostly greeted with enthusiasm.
These sedentary activities allow coaches to rest easy, unlike when teams spent this time draining enough booze to stun an elephant. Doubtless much camaraderie was fostered while raising a few glasses, but the more hazardous results of these binges have since gone down in infamy.
To name a few: Ray Parlour punching a Hong Kong taxi driver after throwing a prawn cracker into his open bonnet, Keith Gillespie out cold next to a plant pot after a right-hander from Alan Shearer outside a Dublin watering hole, or the various occupants of England’s pre-euro 96 dentist’s chair.
There is a prevailing spirit that the only things that count can be counted, but our slightly irrational belief in the vague benefits of team-bonding survives. And where would sport be without irrational belief ?
For as long as coaches are dragging their reluctant charges to navigate Dartmoor at night or walk across hot coals, we will continue to read and write about it with fascination.