One game at a time? Don’t believe a word
WE’RE taking each game as it comes’ ‘No one is talking about the R-word (or P-word)’
‘It is about looking after ourselves and not worrying about the others’.
As the season heads towards the business end, you can start ticking off these phrases on the football clichés bingo card, but however often managers and players repeat them everyone knows they are kidding.
Footballers are human. They will be studying the league table, looking at fixtures, working out the permutations, just like the fans. Occasionally, they admit it.
Liam Rosenior, in his column for The Guardian, described last week how the Brighton & Hove Albion players had discussed after training how many points would be needed to be safe from relegation.
Revealed
Alex Rodman, fresh from scoring against Charlton Athletic last Saturday, to maintain Shrewsbury Town’s remarkable League One promotion push, revealed the players had checked the results of rivals Blackburn Rovers and Wigan Athletic as soon as they got into the dressing room.
While Rodman still insisted “we have got to focus on what we are doing one game at a time”, he had looked far enough ahead to know Blackburn and Wigan were playing each other this weekend while Shrews hosted Peterborough.
This is inevitable. The reality is it’s not just about how your own team are doing. Last season Bolton Wanderers went up automatically from League One with 86 points. The year before Burton Albion did so with 85.
But, in the previous season, Preston won 89 points but finished third, then lost in the play-offs. Sheffield United suffered the same fate in 2012, despite harvesting 90 points.
Going into this weekend Shrewsbury averaged two points a match, exactly. Should they continue that form they will finish with 92 points. Only three times since three-points-for-awin was introduced 36 years ago has the secondplaced club scored more than 92 points. But, if Wigan and Blackburn maintain their form, they will finish with 97 and 95 points respectively, leaving Shrewsbury to scrap it out in the play-offs.
If. As Sir Bobby Robson once noted, it’s a very big word in football.
As the number of matches remaining goes down into single figures, the pressure grows.
Rosenior made the point that the conversation between Brighton’s players last season, as the club chased promotion from the Championship, was similar, but subtly different.
He wrote: “Statements such as ‘we need to win eight of our last 12 games for promotion’ have been replaced by ‘we need 10 points from our last 11 games to stay up’.”
To underline: then they targeted wins, now they target points. The positivity has been replaced by fear.
Rosenior added that players, as much as they deny it, do read the papers, do listen to TV pundits and know what the keyboard warriors are typing on social media. And that this can affect their mentality, and thus performances. Fear of losing takes hold of clubs at the bottom, but pressure can also affect those at the top. Shrewsbury were considered relegation candidates at the start of the season, Blackburn and Wigan were among the promotion favourites. They have bigger budgets, bigger squads… and bigger expectations. That can play on players’ minds.
Trusted
“The pressure isn't on us,” said Rodman. “It's on teams like Wigan and Blackburn. They should be up there, we shouldn't.” It is at times like this that managers – and their coaching staff, including the physio who has a vital role as a trusted listener – can make the difference. An ability to take the pressure off players is as valuable as being a tactical wizard. In the Championship shake-up, Cardiff manager Neil Warnock and Aston Villa boss Steve Bruce have the greatest experience of the promotion squeeze.
Expect Warnock, in particular, to seek to draw attention off his players and on to himself. It is not egotism, it serves a purpose. Cardiff, like Shrewsbury, were unfancied, but it is tough being a front-runner all season. Look also for clubs with momentum: Fulham in the Championship, Plymouth and Rotherham in League One, Mansfield in League Two, though that could be slowed by the change of manager.
There are ten or 11 games to go for most. If ability has got teams into the promotion frame, it is often character that carries them over the line – or, at the other end, keeps them above it.