Take those headphones off, and be human
It’s not only premiership footballers who need to communicate more with the people around them
Are you reading this on a train? Scrolling through the text on your phone with a few deft thumb-swipes, perhaps, while the elbow of a fellow commuter lodges unyieldingly in your solar plexus? Watch out! Here comes another of those incessant announcements delivered at a volume loud enough to knock birds from the sky. Even so, it hardly cuts through the inane chatter around you, does it?
What’s that? You didn’t hear the announcement? Hadn’t noticed that elbow? Ah. I see. You’ve got your headphones on. You can’t hear a thing. You’re in your own little world. In fact, so is the whole carriage – one hundred-plus people packed into a mobile Little Ease, and nothing but stony silence.
Thank goodness for small mercies, you might think. And, when it comes to public transport, I agree. Headphones, twinned with the enticing apps and social media joys of the smartphone, offer immediate, total escape. The combination (especially if you are sporting giant, ear-covering cans) is proving the isolation tank of the digital age. Perfect for zoning out and tuning in to another, less disagreeable, reality. No wonder the PM, with his Union Jack ’phones, is a fan. Groovy!
But Ronald Koeman is far from happy. Koeman is not a commuter. He is the manager of Southampton Football Club, currently seventh in the Premier League. And he is so worried about his players donning headphones at every spare moment that he is requiring them to take part in twice-weekly sessions to learn how to communicate with each other again. “They don’t talk any more on the pitch,” he says. Not ideal for a team game.
I remember the first time I went to a football match. The first thing that struck me was the noise – not from the crowd, but the players. They were screaming at each other throughout
the game: “Leave it”, “Away”, “Time” – or whatever it might be, to flag unseen dangers or opportunities to team-mates with only one pair of eyes. You heard them as you never did on
Match of the Day.
Even today television coverage, with its inevitable focus on the player with the ball, and on talented individuals, struggles to communicate how the other 21 players are always involved, changing or holding their positions, making runs and marking opponents. TV masks the obvious, which is that football is a team game.
The top two teams, Leicester and Spurs, do not have the best players. But they have the best collectives – and renowned team ethos. The Tottenham manager, Mauricio Pochettino, makes every player who arrives for training look every other player in the eye and shake his hand. Individuals who don’t buy into this spirit have been ruthlessly sidelined. Such rules are simple, but hugely effective.
What is the lesson of all this? Not, surely, that we must all shake the hands of everyone we meet, in a universal emulation of that uncomfortable moment in church when the congregation is invited to offer strangers a sign of peace. No, there is something to cherish in the refuge that headphones offer. We rightly celebrate and love books for that escapism. There is nothing wrong in drifting off as your train pulls out.
But like Koeman, I am uneasy about the increasing temptation to be plugged into one’s own world all the time – only emerging to engage with others when absolutely necessary. I am wary that in the strictly controlled headphone world where the music you want is always playing, and the people you like are always around on social media to reinforce your opinion, curiosity will be the victim. I don’t want the ludicrous safe space concept to bleed out from universities into the mainstream. I don’t want us to become cocoon people.
Despite the astonishing advantages offered by our globalised world, proximity still matters. Though you can track the progress of online chums in different time zones, there is still a value in people simply because they are physically close. For these are the people best placed to challenge and defy you, shake you out of your preconceptions. To improve you, in other words. Love them or hate them, we can’t turn them off, and as this year’s league has shown, it is to our detriment if we try.