What Makes an Exceptional Coach

The audio version of the interview is available here, or the transcript below. 

Pavl Williams: In this episode Cardiff City Academy manager and one of the worlds most respected coach educators, Dick Bate describes the skills and qualities that make an exceptional coach. He explains when, why and how to use different coaching styles within your practice and he discusses many more other tips he’s learned during more than five decades at the heart of England’s coaching hierarchy.

PART 1: DICK BATE’S COACHING CAREER

To kick off our conversation, I asked Dick how he was introduced to coaching.

Dick Bate: First introduction to coaching, that’s an interesting one. It would have been when I was at university. I was at St. John’s College York which was a physical education college at that time, I won’t tell you when, a few years ago. And you had to take coaching awards, you had to do dance, can you believe that? You had to do dance, you had to do tennis, cricket, football and I’d always played football; always enjoyed playing football. Took those basic coaching courses, went to Sheffield and became a teacher, was still playing as I was teaching and just generally got more and more interested and more and more involved in coaching at all levels. I was playing in what was then the Midland League and then went to the Northern Premier League and I met Howard, Howard Wilkinson and we became good friends and still are, whilst I was teaching. And then Sheffield School Boys job, under-15s came up and I was appointed to that. And suppose that would be my first serious role in coaching when I was a young teacher, although you had to take the school teams and things like that, so that’s basically where it emeanated from.

Pavl: What was football like in those days? Is it possible for somebody who’s grown up with the game, of the Premier League era to kind of conceive what the game was like in those days? It must have been dramatically different?

Dick: Yes, it was dramatically different. I mean I was a young player at Sheffield Wednesday and if you said to me did they teach that? No. Did they coach you on anything? No.

What did you do when you went there on a Tuesday and a Thursday night? Run up and down the kop and you passed the ball against a wall underneath the stands and they yelled a little bit at you, they shouted a little bit at you and you played on Saturday against the Sunderland’s and your Sheffield United’s and people like that.

So was it an education? No, it wasn’t an education. But football was always vibrant in Sheffield; it was always a great rivalry between United and Wednesday and you used to go and watch United one week, Wednesday the next week. And so it was always always has been in Sheffield a passionate involvement by Sheffielders in one of the two teams.

The football it was exciting, but it was wholly different from the brand of football that’s being played now. They were great times, but wholly different as you could well imagine. There was nothing posh; there were no academies, there were no centres of excellence. You signed a schoolboy form and as I say you went training two nights a week, played in what was then the Northern Intermediate League but there was nothing educational about it or highbrow about it, I was just teaching them.

Pavl: Was it your relationship with Howard Wilkinson that introduced you to the concept of the coach as a teacher?

Dick: Well I qualified as a teacher, a physical education teacher, so I was always interested in teaching and I enjoyed the actual act and art of teaching and Howard has just finished his football career in Brighton. I was at Boston United, so we played together at Boston Untied and we used to travel and talk football two or three times a week with each other. Howard then qualified as a teacher at Sheffield Education College and he was involved in teaching as well.

But at that time you had people like Howard, there was people like John Adams who not many people would perhaps remember, I don’t know; you would have Jack Detchon. And Sheffield was in a sense the northern hotbed of coaching as it was down in London. So you had Dario Grady, you had Roy Hodgson, in that Mike Kelly and it seemed there was one group in the south, one group in the north and we all joined the Sheffield Coaches Association. I took on the role of Secretary of Sheffield Coaches Association. John Adams was the northeast regional coach at that time. Jack came in to the northeast regional coach; Howard was involved in it all. It was just a general involvement of interested people in coaching in that part of the world.

Pavl: And at that point were there any coach education courses? If you looked after a Sunday league team or a school team, was there a course for you to take or did that come a little bit later on?

Dick: No, you only really had two awards that you could take. You had a preliminary coaching award and then you had what was called the full badge at that time.

Then coaching was taken forward at the FA by Allen Wade who was my first boss (and the best teacher of the game I’ve ever come across, a wonderful teacher of the game).

And Charles Hughes followed Allen; he was a wholly different character but again, in his own right, a good proponent of a way to play and a good teacher of a way to play. Whether you agreed with that way was a different matter. But as I say it just came from that group of people where you took things forward and teaching of the game, because I trained as a teacher I understand the basics of teaching and just converted that into teaching the game of football.

Pavl: And you became coach educator for the North West region?

Dick: Well when I was in Sheffield I used to take the preliminary; I got my full badge, and I took my preliminary coaching awards as they were at that time and then they started to involve me on the A license and I can remember going to places like Durham because they used to have the A licenses in Durham and they had them in London and they had them at Lilleshall. And my introduction was to assist in a sense the A license courses and that’s where it started. And a job came up in the North West as North West Regional Coach, which I applied for and got the job. Even though I lived in Sheffield I didn’t relocate to Blackburn where the offices were but I had a flat in Blackburn and that was my first full-time – I would say serious job – my first full-time involvement in coaching.

Pavl: In your time at The FA you had Allen Wade and then, famously, Charles Hughes had a very well defined philosophy. And the coaching courses were intended to spread that philosophy around.

Dick: Absolutely.

Pavl: In your later years at The FA you developed ‘The Future Game’ and that’s a new style of play for the modern Premier League, International class footballer. What are some of the key differences between those two philosophies? It’s quite a dramatic change isn’t it?

Dick: Allen Wade would have been a strong proponent of what was proposed in The Future Game. Allen’s view of the game was an artistic, creative way of playing the game.

Charles was more functional, he was more direct in his thinking; he was pragmatic in his thinking.

Charles left, Howard came on the scene. Howard was the first person that tried to link a coaching vision, a coaching philosophy; he tried to link what was done on the coaching courses with what was done with the national teams. And so you would see the topics or the sessions that Charles Hughes advocated and we have to connect to the football, it was about direct play, it was about delivering balls into channels (with accuracy I might add). It was about pushing and supporting and regaining possession and winning the ball and all those sorts of things, producing crosses and this and that.

Now a lot of it is still worthwhile for sure, you know being able to play the ball through teams and to play the ball forward with accuracy. He never had any objections to anything like that, although some people interpreted some of his work in a different way to this. But Allen was always advocating good, people call it ‘good’ football.

Howard came in, had a way of playing and adopted a playing system within the national youth teams – and I was a national youth team coach, one of the national youth team coaches at that time – we played 4-3-3 generally speaking. We played out from the back; we would play through the midfield. So where people have condemned The FA for a lack of vision on how to play football, Howard was there for what? Five, six, seven years and we worked with the national teams around that philosophy.

So The Future Game was perhaps the first time that it was ever encased, that the philosophy was ever encased and edited and published and said “look, this is what we believe in”. So that largely was the evolution of what became The Future Game.

PART 2: ON GREAT COACHING

Pavl: One of the conversations we had recently amongst members of the Coaching Manual is that there’s a lot of coaches, who are often the keenest to learn, latch on to an idea the most strongly and then reject all other ideas. Is that something you came across when you were teaching coaching courses?

Dick: I think over the last five, six, seven, eight years; however long it’s been, there’s been advocates who say, “let the game be the teacher” and I’d be a bit more careful about that.

Because what you’re finding now there are many, many coaches who just stage a game and hope or expect that players will learn without any infusion of ideas or offerings from the coach, just stage games and that’s it, the players will learn from that and I wholly disagree with that.

So that’s one thing that’s been modifiable; let the game be the teacher yes, but understand the circumstances. Now let the game be the teacher for the coach, I wholly agree with.

Again we’re having this confusion between different types of coaching practices, that you should never ever use practices unopposed. Why not? If you want to develop the biomechanics of striking a ball over certain distances, and certain biomechanical movements that a player should make, well there’s no reason why you can’t isolate it and build it up in unopposed practice. Then you move it forward into skill practice then you might take it to the game practice then you might take it to the game. So I think there’s a process, almost an elevated process of how you would move through developing players and young players through this unopposed practice right the way through. But there’s some advocates who say you should never do anything that’s unopposed which I don’t agree with.

Pavl: When you come to now interview, observe sessions and ultimately recruit a coach for the academy, what are some of the qualities and the skills that you’re most excited about seeing within that coach?

Dick: Well the best coaches I’ve come across, everybody uses it; they are passionate about what they do. I mean I’ve got two or three coaches here, it’s their life. I think they think they are put on this planet to be a coach, that’s it. It’s not a vocation, it’s their life and you can tell in their conversations, even in the casual conversations that you have when you’re eating, there’s something about them that says, it’s for me. That is it, I am a coach because I just love this game, I’m fascinated by the game, I have a great passion for this game more than any other facet of my life. So those are those are the ones that I’d look for that reflect that when you talk to them and when you see them work. They need to have an enthusiasm about what they do that electrifies the players that they’re working with.

For me they need to understand the fine detail of what’s necessary in performance and to help players to understand the fine detail and to acquire that fine detail.

So that passion – and I don’t like using that word, but I hope you understand what I mean, a sheer passion for it, an excitement about what they do – and great teaching skills, in a sense that they can take each player, they may be working on the similar concept, but they can take each player and interpret it in a language that suits each player and each player understands. So language skills are vital, communication skills including language skills, I think are vital. And of course a very deep and great understanding of the layers of the game.

Pavl: If you’re a beginner coach who aspires to work in the professional game and you feel passionate, you’re willing to put the hours in, you’re willing to put the volunteer hours in and the time and the expense for courses; how do you prioritize areas to work on? I don’t think there are any shortcuts and I don’t expect you to say there’s any shortcuts, but is there certain aspects that you would say to a beginner coach “just concentrate on this for the first six months” and it’s going to dramatically improve their coaching more so than certain other areas?

Dick: I think if they can find a mentor or someone that can help them early in their career that would help.

If they can record the sessions that they do then sit down with a mentor who understands coaching, not just somebody who wants to offer an opinion although sometimes that can be helpful as well, but somebody who really understands coaching, then that may well be a good way to make progress early. So having a mentor, having somebody who’s prepared to sit down and advise you, not necessarily tell you but advise what he sees and what he thinks you may well do; that would be important.

I also think studying the game really, really studying the game. Now if you’re a beginner coach, have a look at the skills and techniques adopted by the world’s greatest players and try and understand them because if you don’t understand them you can’t make sense, you can’t then teach to other players.

Go and visit and go watch, whenever you possibly can, great teams play and great coaches work. I can remember in my time I lived in Sheffield and Terry Venables was the coach at Crystal Palace and I can remember finishing teaching at four o’clock in the afternoon, then driving down to Crystal Palace to watch Crystal Palace play because there was something about them that was different from all the other teams. They were much more inventive, they were probably more cerebral, they understood what they were trying to do, what they were trying to achieve with the players that they had and they were a good little learning catalyst for me. I would go and watch the great coaches, go and spend some petrol money and if Don Howe, unfortunately Don’s in essential retirement from coaching. I would go and watch Don Howe whenever I could. I’d go and watch Dario although he was almost a contemporary of mine, at work. Go and watch Howard work, go and watch as many of these men, reasoned and experienced coaches, as you can then try and filter off whatever you can from whatever they say, any type of session. I can remember when I was in Sheffield I used to go and watch Alan Hodgkinson work at Sheffield United because I wanted to know more about goalkeeping.

So if you can get a mentor that would be of great help. If you could record the session that you do and listen to what you say, observe how you get the messages across and watch yourself, your body language and things like that would be helpful way but you would need some advice as to what might be good material and what might be worth dropping. Watch the great coaches, watch the great teams, watch the great games.

Pavl: You’ve got so much experience now, maybe people perceive that you don’t learn anything by watching a session, but other coaches have told me that no matter who’s delivering and even a bad session they’d learn a lot from. What do you look at now when you are observing a session within the academy or even a grassroots session on a Sunday?

Dick: Well probably the first thing would be how does the coach handle he group? How does the coach handle the players? We’re not talking about organising because you say well organisation is a foundation. If you’ve not got your organisation right you’re likely to run up against problems at some stage during the session. So if the organization is okay and it allows the coach and the players to work on whatever it is that they’re working on, I watch the coach and say, “right how has he handled the group”, what’s his way with the group, how does he handle individual players, his language and his eye contact and all that sort of thing, what does he do?

Does he fully understand what he’s after? Can he take it at the right tempo? So sometimes you can move quickly through a session because they can grab that idea, other times you take the time because it needs to be understood clearly before you move on to the next phase. So does he understand about what he’s teaching?

Does he understand about the teaching process? Well I can’t take this too quickly, some will take it quickly, others will take it slower, so I just need to be a bit careful in the tempo that I work at. Does he allow them to make errors? Does he allow them thinking time? Does he then bring them in from time to time, but not overly excessively and discuss what their thoughts are, discuss what they are doing and it’s just general teaching manner, coaching manner that the coach fully understand the detail and what’s necessary to take forward and fully understands the process of teaching.

Pavl: As a grassroots coach who puts on a lot of sessions but doesn’t always get to observe myself, or if I observe other sessions and aspire to reach the quality of certain academy sessions or great grassroots sessions, how do I measure my own success? How do I determine whether my own session was effective or not?

Dick: You may have an assistant coach who would give you some form of feedback, you know like “I felt you should have lowered your voice there” or “I felt you might have moved quicker to this point”. You may have that.

I think something inside you tells you whether it’s a good session, whether you feel it’s a good session. Did it flow? Did I make the points I wanted to at the right time? It’s self-reflection really. You’re looking back and saying, look at my organisation again, did I get bogged down in this, was it smooth, did it lead to what I wanted to move on to? Did it allow the players to interpret what I was working on to their advantage? So have a look at your organisation.

You’ll have this feeling about how you preformed. Did I come over as being certain and come over as being in authority or do I know that actually I said one or two things and I wasn’t quite sure what I was saying or I did one or two things come across as I’m not quite sure what I was doing? How did they work?

And speak to your players.

The thing about players is they’ll tell you what they think that you want to know. Ask them if they could teach that session alone; “I’ll give you five minutes, you teach him how to be a better passer of the ball” or “you teach him about dribbling”. So registering what you’ve said is one thing, being able to register what you’ve said, convert it and interpret into something that you understand clearly and could probably teach somebody else, might be a little way that they could start to do that.

PART 3: ON COACHING TACTICS

Pavl: When you get to U12-U14 and the kids have hit secondary school, they’ve already gone through a technical development phase and are ready to learn a little bit more about the intricacies of the game. So as a coach you need to take a step forward and start talking about the shape of the team and introduce some tactical elements. It’s going a little bit beyond [The FA] Level 2 and it’s looking at a broader aspect of coaching.

What would your advice be for a coach who’s taking that step up?

Dick: Two things really. Have an idea and try and know where you think the game is going to go. Because you’ll have your team for now, you might have them for a couple of years and if you’re rational about it will say “this lot are never going to be pros” they haven’t got that capability. So you’re working from a different measure then.

If you’ve got some potentially good players they might go to the academies and you can say “right, he’s a 16-year-old boy, where’s the game going to be in let’s say nine or ten years’ time when he’s 26 or 27?” You’re preparing him for that and so ‘think in the future’, seeking understanding of where the game is likely to go will help you to work with your players in a way that prepares them for that game.

For instance, at the moment it’s a possession game largely. There’s very little time on the ball these days, you get around about two seconds, two touches things like that and the best players are 90% possession players.

There are implications there for defenders; they’re going to have to move quicker, decide quicker et cetera, et cetera. Am I preparing my players to play in a game like that? Now if you’re not, you’re not preparing them for whatever it’s going to be.

Most teams now will play from the back, though not all of them, most teams will play from the back. They’ll try and play through midfield in some form or other and they’ll try and bring in their attacking players in front of defence or behind the defence. Now we all know that, but how do you do it with the group that you’ve got? You need to be realistic about what you think their potential is in adopting certain game tactics.

So can they all do it? Do they understand about playing out from the back? Most goalkeepers throw the thing out but there’s other ways of starting attacks other than just rolling out to the centre backs. Are your centre backs capable of starting the game that you want to play or are they risky – well not risky – are they going to get caught regularly in possession and can you help them over that phase? How are you going to go through midfield? People talk about rotation but is rotation always necessary? It may or may not be.

So the first thing is developing the coach’s understanding of where the game is going, where it’s likely to go, what that means to these players that you’re working with now, what level are they up to now, what they need to work on and when, and having a way of playing – people call it a philosophy – a way of playing that you fully understand that you think they can fully understand and implement.

Pavl: So when it comes to the planning, how do you separate that out over the course of 10 years of development? There’s obviously an impetus to rush certain aspects that are affecting a game sometimes, but how patient can you afford to be or how much slack can you give players before you can step in and make a coaching decision within a tactical session?

Dick: It depends on how far along you are with what you’ve worked on? So I mean here (and presuming there are many other academies), how long does it take players to fully understand they have to play out from the back? So by the time they’re 12, 13, 14 I would have thought they would fully understand the principals and the precepts of how we can play out from the back and when we can’t.

Now if they don’t, the question is why not? So would you need to continue that aspect of playing great depth as they go through 17, 18, 19 or say this is what we do, we accept that, we understand that, we know where we are with that, we know we’re competent with that but these are aspects of the game we need to spend more time on if we’re going to build off what was already built on. For instance playing out from the back, if you understand what I mean.

And it’s a case of just progressing it and moving it forward slowly in a way that they fully understand that suits them and suits what’s going to happen in the future that takes them towards that game I think.

Pavl: In terms of how you would then split that up over the course of 10 years; so you would actually start with a foundation, which will be playing out from the back, and we’ll build everything on top of that? So you’ll come back and you’ll reinforce those ideas, year after year with a little extra added each time?

Dick: Yes.

Pavl: Within an individual session, would you allow, you know a mistake 80% of the time, 60% of the time if you need to put a number on it? At what point would you step in and say “we need to be getting this right now”?

Dick: Well I think that’s part of the art of the coaching that you probably won’t learn on coaching courses and probably won’t learn through reading books.

I think feeling a session is one thing; so you’ve got your organisation, you’ve got your players, you’ve got your idea you’re going to work on. And the art of it is just understanding well how much do they really understand? How much do they fully understand? Do I need to go and help this player now because he’s not making sense of what we’re talking about? And if you can enlighten him then you should do so. If you say “well he’s nearly there”, you could leave him alone and say, look I’m sure he’s going to come onto this one in the next couple of minutes or the next three or four occasions that we do this.

So that’s the art of coaching, just understanding the session, feeling where the players are and if you need to go in, if you don’t need to go in then step aside, knowing that you think he’s almost there and that’s that art I think of coaching.

I was once on an A license course and the lad said to me, “how often should I go in because somebody told me I’ve got to go in 20 times during a session”. Now that was a point of discussion with him and a point of discussion with the group. And young coaches, most of them put a figure out, “I must go in six times, I must go in 10 times, I must go in 20 times, I must never go in and leave the game let them learn from the game” and I think it’s finding out about the arts of coaching when is the right time to step in and what to say and when is the time just to pull them out of a session and say “look, you’ve done well there but think about this the next time you do that” and put them back in the session.

Pavl: Do you think it helps to specify there are 5 coaching styles or 7 coaching styles or as somebody has told me recently, 17 different coaching styles (he was an American, so you can probably imagine he’d also sub-divided them all)… is it helpful to make those distinctions or do you feel like it’s just a continuum that could be broken up into an infinite number of different styles?

Dick: Well I think so. I mean I don’t care how many coaching styles you’ve got. You can have 5, you can have 17. I’ve seen documents with 30 or 40 different things that are criteria of a certain coaching style. The essence is you can actually use four or five different coaching styles for making one point. So if I want to make a point to a full-back about playing the ball, I can tell him “play it down the side of their full-backs so that our strikers can move on to it”. So I’m telling him. I can ask him a question, “how do you think you’re going to do that?” That’s a different coaching style. “Okay show me that you can do it”, there’s another style. Next time you get it, I won’t say a word, you do it. So you’re using three or four different coaching styles for want of a better word in making one particular point.

I do think it’s useful to know the effects of what those styles will be.

So if you want to stop the session and ask a question – I couldn’t believe when I saw somebody coaching six months ago and he said to this kid, “look if you’re not going to play with your left foot which other foot are you going to play it with?” I couldn’t believe what I heard and it’s that kind of stupidity, where he obviously hadn’t considered the question properly and the response that he was looking for or could guide the player towards. Now it’s when you get into that nonsensical repetition of question after question after question that I find irritating, I find it irritating of a player – now for me you’ll ask a question at the right time and you’ll pursue that question. “Okay, now what do you think you can do in this circumstance here?” Well I could do this, this and this. “Of course you could, which do you think is the best one here?”, “Why?”, “Is there not an alternative?”, “What about doing that?” And I’ll tell you why or you tell me why you think you can do that or why is that the best option because of whatever it may well be. And it’s asking the question leading towards in a sense the most positive answer.

So when you say ‘let the game be the teacher’ now “why do you?”, “what could you do here?” The player could give you five to six different options. “Okay which are you going to do?” I’ll do that one. “Okay you play that one”, and in fact the coach could be actually working with him, working on probably what is the worst thing you could possibly do never guiding him towards what is the prime solution to that circumstance. And it’s all about decision making, so how do we help a player to make a decision? What’s the criteria for making the best decision? I’m not sure the coaches are very good at that. They’ll offer them the options but making the prime decision, the most functional, the most effective decision, they’re not very good at that. Either they don’t know or they’re unwilling to guide the player because they’ve got this mantra about letting a player make the right decision.

Pavl: The point you make about questioning for questioning’s sake is important because I’ve seen that a lot at grassroots level; certainly using closed questions or not even really presenting options, just you know what you want to hear.

How much of that comes into the session planning process? Do you usually plan questions, challenges?

Dick: Yeah I think so. I talked about the art of coaching a moment ago. Knowing when to ask a question, knowing what a question should be, knowing how you should couch that question is vital and understanding what he’s saying and what he’s thinking and guiding his thinking towards a different alternative perhaps that will be the art.

If you want to ask a good question, I always say, okay what do you think we should do here? And he says, I’m going to play there. Okay and it’s the best option. And why is that a good idea? Well because it means that the winger can go forward. Okay good, and what’s that likely to do? Well it could get us in a good attacking position and we could maybe produce a cross in the box. And how does that affect you? Well it means I can push it behind the player as well. So if you ask a question and the boy is on the right trend just keep using the word “and…”. What does that do for us and why do you think you should do that? And what are you going to do after that? That is drilling down inside his mind and saying, well that’s expanding the idea, and that for me would be proper questioning. There’s a thought for the coach, just keep using the word “and”, only two or three times and see where it takes him and you.

Pavl: So to reiterate; it’s not just about the action there and then within that session, ‘does he play the ball in the right direction, the right way etc’ but also the reason why. And it comes back to that decision making process.

Dick: That’s right. And where you take your action? What are the consequences of your action for you? For other people? How do you move again? Things like that.

Pavl: So what are the benefits of having a lot more small sided games within academy training? It’s not to dismiss that games can be used to develop understanding, it’s purely to say “there is a time and a place” and they have different functions. Just to balance that a little bit; if you’ve asked a few questions of a player, he’s made the right decision with your help but then he makes the wrong decision on the next occasion within a small sided game, is that for you an opportunity you need to go in and coach or would you kind of hold back a little, wait and see if he figures it out?

Dick: Well it could be if it’s vital to the session. So for instance if you’re working on, I don’t know you might be working on turning with the ball and you’ve done some preparatory work with turning and then they go into the game and the player doesn’t turn when he’s got a great opportunity to turn. I would suggest you stop it there, say look, now we’ve just been working this, you know the circumstance you’re in (or you should), you can turn then, keep it tight, keep your touch tight, keep it a tight turn now it’s opened the field for you to go forward.

So if you’ve been working on something and you can’t see it within the game, so you might have been working unopposed practice, you might have been working on a very simple opposed practice and then it goes into the game, you’ve got to take what you’ve worked on and show him how it functions in the game.

Pavl: So you’re actually looking for the clarity of the picture within the game. If it’s a very muddy picture, it could have been or could not have been the right decision, maybe then hold off and leave it but if there’s a really clear opportunity where he should have recognized the picture and the decision…

Dick: Yes.

He needs to understand the criteria when he can turn. So has he got space, has he created space? Does he know how much space he’s got, does he know if he turns he’s turning into some form of circumstance where somebody is closing him down, or nobody is going to close him down. What’s the criteria for his decision making? Why did you not turn then or great opportunity to turn because of… So he’s trying to help you understand the facets or the criteria by which he makes decisions. Or somebody is closing me down, well you could still turn them if you keep your touch right. But if you feel under severe pressure, give it to somebody else, find another position and then maybe you could turn a bit later, those things.

Pavl: Could you ask the players to anything in the week in-between training sessions that would help them to reinforce the idea of decision making? Do you set the boys homework from the academy, do you encourage them to watch games and if so what do you ask them to look for?

Dick: Well we have a library here of a million and one different things that we look at. So we clipped together recently a little DVD of the boy Iker Muniain who plays for Athletic Bilbao. Now his energy and his willingness to find a pocket of space somewhere in midfield is a great example to our younger players. You can’t just stroll around midfield, he got great energy, not running frantically, he’s knows what he’s searching for and he knows how he’s doing it. Then we’ve got another one of Soldado. Soldado came down here to play for Tottenham and his movement across the front was terrific and his movement off the front was excellent. And so what we do is we clip games together from the first team players or Real Madrid playing, or Barcelona, we stack up a library and we would use those on a regular basis to show those players what it is that we’re after and when it happens, those sorts of things.

They are given homework, they’re asked to go and do certain things and they are given a test probably once a month on how they’re making progress (or not) and they have training diaries whereby they keep a dairy of how much they do, where they do it and when they do it and what they’re doing away from the club.

Pavl: How much has technology helped you develop coaching as a practice in the last 10 years? Especially in the last five years with the advent of smartphones and big explosion of the internet?

Dick: Significantly to answer your question. I can remember the first time I ever tried it was with the Betamax, the video system. And it was either Betamax or it was… what’s the other system they use?

Pavl: VHS.

Dick: VHS. And I bought Betamax and they lost the race, everybody bought VHS. But I can remember doing it ages ago where you just put your DVD in – it was then your tape, put your tape in – stop it, try and edit it if you could. That was years and years ago, so it’s always been around.

Now it’s highly sophisticated as you know. We use iPads here, so the coach will take his iPad out and he’ll watch the session and he’ll video the session or he’ll video a player, pull the player in, have a look at this, what do you think? Do you think you could have turned earlier, let the ball run across your body and this sort of thing. So we’ll use all that, all the games are recorded (and they will be in all the other academies). All the games are analyzed statistically; all the games are analyzed and edited for the visual thing. So it’s everybody, certainly the professional uses it to a high standard.

Pavl: What are the benefits from a player’s point of view of being able to see their own performance almost instantaneously compared to even a delay of three, four days? Does it make such a big difference that they see it there and then, particularly as it relates to the practice and to those ‘pictures’?

Dick: Yes because it’s like a coaching point. So if you take an iPad out and you video them; I’m working with you on turning, I can let you do it, I don’t need to go into the session interrupting the session, but after 10 minutes then I can stop, in you come, let me show you this and it’s just another form or expression of coaching. So you tell him is one thing, actually seeing him doing or not doing it is another. So that’s just a simple coaching point that he can’t deny because there’s his movement, he can’t question because – well he could question but he can’t question in one sense because there I am doing it. Now he might want to contest what you said, well I did, no he didn’t! There it is in the visual evidence.

Pavl: You talked about using Athletic Bilbao or Real Madrid and Barcelona. Do you find that players are more aware of the world game then they were a decade ago?

Dick: Some are, but not as many as should be. So if I was to bring let’s say the under-16s in here or you bring the under-18s and ask them, did you watch Athletic Bilbao, did you watch Lyon? No. If you ask them the name of players, very few of them have got them under the belt which implicates that they don’t actually watch as much football as they should and could. I would imagine most families have got Sky – well one or two of them will do.

I’ve got a winger here who’s as sharp as a razor, very quick and we’ll give him a task, I want you to watch this player and he’s playing here, it’s on Sky, it’s on BT or all the different stations we’ve got these days. Go ahead and tell me what he’s done, tell me what he does.

Another one, the full-back, okay I want you to watch three full-backs, I want you to watch Alves at Barcelona, I want you to watch the left-back at Real Madrid, the Brazilian boy, tell me what you think are great aspects of great players. Some of them, well, they don’t spend enough time watching good stuff.

Pavl: It’s interesting because amongst the grassroots teams which I look after, my experience with them, especially under-8s even, they’re so aware of players and teams, of everything. So it’s interesting that lads who are in the academy system are a bit different sometimes and some of them are really into it, that’s interesting.

Dick: They’ll watch some games. Whether they studied them deeply enough, studied the people who are playing at that time in their position, that’s another matter.

Now the other thing of course is do they understand what they’re looking at? Do they understand what they’re looking for?

So it’s easy to say go and watch Real Madrid’s left-back, I think its Marcelo. Watch him playing against; I don’t know Real Betis tomorrow. Tell me what you see in him. Now do they know what they’re looking for? And there’s an education, teaching them to try and observe what other people do to bring it into their repertoire.

PART 3: THE EPPP AND DEVELOPING TALENT

Pavl: The Premier League grew in stature and power throughout that time you were working at The FA. Was there any frustration? What were some of the challenges in spreading The FA’s vision when an alternative organization was looking after the majority of youth development?

Dick: It’s only recent, I think, that the Premier League has advocated a certain way, the EPPP (Elite Player Performance Plan) of developing players in this country. So when I first went to The FA, that was the 1980s, but when more recently I went to The FA, in 1997, the Premier League was just starting to get going. It started in 1992 but their involvement in youth development and their involvement in changing the game, and marketing the game (and it certainly has become more and more stringent and stronger) over let’s say the last decade rather than the last 20 years. And obviously it’s only recently within the last two or three years that the EPPP has been advocated a way of doing things.

The FA still has the rights because of UEFA and FIFA to devise the coaching courses as it sees fit.

The Premier League is in the process of having CPD sessions for coaches, having conferences for coaches and trying to influence the way they think. But I don’t think there’s a massive differential between what The FA believes it should be teaching, right the way through that range of courses, and what the Premier League would also adapt and say, “yeah we agree with that”.

Pavl: You are now on the other side of the fence and you have to implement the EPPP in your role at the Academy. What does having a structure like the EPPP, and the extra contact hours especially, mean for an academy like Cardiff’s?

Dick: The extra hours of work are important, whether it should be melded on the 10,000 hours concept is another matter. There are many people that disagree with that and of course there’s a couple of us that’s come out and said “well its not about 10,000 hours.”

Pavl: Where do you stand on that?

Dick: I agree with both.

We always needed to increase the amount of contact time they have with players. What we always need to increase is the amount of contact time that the players with great teaching.

So just increasing the number hours is not necessarily the remedy, providing its great teaching that’s taking place and great care over players in their development and their, people call it, holistic development; through their mental attitudes and through their spiritual beliefs and things like that, that’s all part and parcel of that.

I agree with that, but I also believe there is a genetic, a massive genetic influence, on what players and how far they can go in certain aspects of performance. I’ve got a bonus of 10,000 hours, well the essence of what you’re saying, improve the hours that players spend, always agreed with that.

Whether it’s predominant and you can turn a very normal and average player into a god, well I wouldn’t go with that one.

Pavl: I’ve been lucky enough to interview Daniel Coyle, the author of The Talent Code and he admitted a little bit of frustration that, of the three elements of the book, two are often completely ignored; one being that the environment is crucial, it has to be the correct environment; and the type of challenge, the type of practice is mostly ignored as well. So he’d agree that 10,000 hours turning a very ordinary player into an exceptional player was never the message (of his model anyway) so it’s a shared frustration.

Dick: People, if they’ve got a message to sell, they oversell it so it really hits people strongly and then I noticed that many, many times throughout my years in football (and throughout my life), people will advocate a very, very strong idea and throw it at you and they’ll advertise it and then they tend to withdraw from it. It’s a selling process that they go through.

And that’s happened within The FA and it’s happened in other institutions I’ve been involved in as well.

Pavl: Just to come back to the EPPP and now looking at Cardiff’s academy. We talked about how the extra contact hours are certainly warranted, as long as the quality is there; we should see an improvement in the quality of player. Will we see genuinely world class players coming through? I think will we see more Premier League class players, but will we see more International and World Class players coming through the academy system do you think?

Dick: Well the hope is that you would. The time that you’re given gives you an opportunity to further their performances, but that’s not to say world class players haven’t come through before because people say Rooney is world class, people say Gerrard is world class, people say Wilshere is going to be world class; so they have been coming through.

People say well not in abundance. Okay, here it’s a Welsh club so we’re trying to stimulate the thought of being Welsh and being different and we’re trying to encourage players here to make certain that they play for Wales. I mean Athletic Bilbao, I have the greatest respect for them, they just take Basque players and they’ve never been out of their Premier League [La Liga] for 18 years I think it is. And we’re trying to attach that kind of allegiance to Wales and that kind of allegiance to the City of Cardiff and the region to try and help them come through.

And what we have to do is to educate them about what it takes to be an international player, what the sacrifices are, what the aims are, what the goals are. Firstly to make that, and then if you can get world class that would be terrific. If the whole thinking mentality of the coaches in this club was about world class, I’d be highly delighted about that. (But of course, what is world class?)

So the time would give you probably more opportunity, the quality of the teaching, the quality of the games programme you provide, the opportunity to step people up when it’s necessary and step them down when it’s necessary. But that’s not to say it’s not been done in the past. There are other inventive ideas that definitely could help them.

So the aim would be world class, the aim is to be international class here and the aim is to play for Wales and Cardiff City in the Premiership.

Pavl: As a grassroots coach in Wales or in England, you could conceivably play a role in leading to an international player but it’s highly unlikely, the vast majority of players aren’t going to reach that level. What do you think is a realistic ambition for a grassroots coach, what’s our role in player development?

Dick: It depends on what you mean by grassroots because can mean non-league football played by adults. I imagine that you’re talking about younger footballers?

Pavl: Yeah, absolutely.

Dick: I suppose “what’s the next step up?” So if there’s a young boy in Cardiff who’s 7 years old he’s playing for Whitchurch Rangers, which is a local club, does he try and move on to maybe somebody like Port Talbot, which is a Welsh Premier League team, into their youth system. So that might be his aim.

He’ll always have the dream – it was interesting about dreams because I read something about Sachin Tendulkar the other day as he was going to retire (probably the greatest cricketer I have ever seen live) and he said, “every day of my life I dreamed about playing for India and then he said, every single day of my life that I’ve lived I’ve dreamed about playing for India”, so he always had this task, this dream, this goal of playing for India.

Now even a boy at Whitchurch Rangers, who is 7 years old, has he got a dream of playing for Cardiff City? How does he do it? Well he’ll take the steps, he’ll go from Whitchurch, maybe to Port Talbot or to Haverford West or (I can’t speak the language very well) to one of those Welsh clubs and then he steps up, he steps up or somebody recommends him to come to Cardiff Academy. His first step would be to come to Cardiff City or Swansea City’s academy; depending on where he’s located. So if he has that little dream, there’s my first step.

Pavl: And once he reaches that next level, even with EPPP in place, what challenges remain for you in bringing more players through to the first team squad?

Dick: The challenges for us are quite simply to prepare him for what’s going to be the game in the future. If our coaches or if we just do what we are doing now we will produce players for now, which will leave them short of being able to take part in a game five, six, seven years down the line which – if the hope is that they’re going to be playing for Cardiff City’s first team – they’re going to have to do that.

So that’s our curriculum as such, thinking forward, thinking what’s going to happen, not just working on the basics and the orthodox and the ordinary but taking it to more extreme techniques, more extreme skills because that’s what you’re going to need, quick extreme skills, that’s what we think you need. The ability to read the game quickly, the ability to make decisions quickly, the ability to use both feet and get the ball out of your feet quickly and nick a pass off the outside of your foot, to bend passes, to float passes, to drive passes, things like that because that’s what you’ve got to develop and you’ve got to have if you’re going to have a chance of playing first in the Premiership and secondly at a world class level.

So we’re into that and it literally is to say to the junior players, “right your first step really now at 14 to 15, your first aim if you dream to play for Cardiff City, your first step is to become a scholar. When you’re a scholar the next step is to become an under-21. Once you’ve gotten into the under-21 squad, can you get into the under-21 team? Once you’re in the under-21 team your next step has to be thinking first team. So always trying to give them an incentive and a goal to go for, but be realistic and prepare them to reach that goal by what you do out on the field or in the classroom.

Pavl: For everyone here at the club in Cardiff the hope is that they’ll remain and will grow as a Premier League club in the future. So if you were an under-21 player last season, or the season before, has your challenge suddenly got exponentially more difficult because you’re trying to break into a Premier League team?

Dick: Yes, it has become significantly harder because of the quality of the players that are playing in the Premier League both in our team and in other people’s teams as well. The step that we do, and what other clubs do, is to put them out on loan for a period. But there’s always a little danger there that people go out on loan and they sit on the bench or they play minimal football. So we have to put certain impositions on the borrowing club that you must play this number of games and if they agree to that we’ll let them go, if not we probably won’t. So that would be the logical number of steps for them to take. If they can’t get immediately into our first team, can they slide sideways and take a step forward by going into somebody else’s team and playing on a regular basis on loan.

Pavel: And it’s now a global game. Do academy players risk it almost going to their head a little bit now they’re representing a Premier League club that comes with a lot more money, a lot more attention, a lot of fame. Is it difficult to kind of keep a lid on that, keep the kids grounded and keep them in the right place?

Dick: Not here because Malky is very stringent on discipline and keeping your feet on the ground and having a sensible head. Is it a strict regime with the first team? Well strict, it’s an organized and disciplined regime and anybody that steps out of line will certainly find out about it and know about it. So one of the major practices of the club is to keep people’s feet on the ground, to know what we want to be, to know where we want to go. We keep people’s feet on the ground as we move in that direction and if anybody shows any signs of not being with us going in that direction, of wanting to be a bit of a big hitter, they’ll be told very, very quickly.

Pavl: One of the criticisms that’s been level at academies is that far too many boys drop out and then they leave the game all together. Is there anything that you could put in place or is there anything that is in place here at Cardiff to help the boys who have worked their way up that tier who then need to drop back down a tier?

Dick: We’ll always help them for boys released here. We’ll always speak to the family and speak to the parents. We’ll being them in and talk to them individually as a family and as a boy and we’ll always try and help them to another club and if at any time they want to come to us for advice or they want to come to us for some form of guidance we’re always going to be there for them. And I don’t know what else you could actually do other than helping them to pursue their career perhaps in a different direction at a different club, but always being there if they need us or want us and quite a few of them do. They’ll come back and ask this question, what you think now, what you think now and I’ll tell them about somewhere else ad we’ll always try and help them and assist them if we can.

Pavl: Is it difficult to manage expectations while they’re in the academy because you need to be so confident in order to be able to reach that level of Premier League football that it’s hard to simultaneously manage expectations and let them know that they probably won’t make it to that level?

Dick: Well they’re very clear, we’re very clear with them. At the beginning of every season we have a parent’s evening and the players come as well. We explain to them, less than 40% of all players playing in the Premiership are English. I think it was a recent research survey said that the average playing time in the Premiership for English players is something like, well…

Pavl: 32%.

Dick: That’s right, 32%, whereas the Germans and the Spanish and the Italians are far superior to that. So the parents and the players are under no illusion that it’s going to be easy. They need to know what the circumstances are and they need to know what the consequences are of what they do. And so we try and be as honest with them to explain exactly what it is that you’re going into, what are the ramifications of going into that, what’s necessary to try and survive in that but there’s no guarantee, no guarantee.

Pavl: Thank you very much for your time Dick, much appreciated.

Dick: You’re very welcome.