When we think of tense, last-gasp minutes of soccer, the incredulous victories are always those that come to mind. Not the strong-willed efforts, nor the held-down forts, no–the attack-minded miracles that prevailed over all odds. These are frantic finales: last-attempt rolls of the sporting dice that hit the jackpot–but they’re not as glamorous as they might look.
This human tendency to obsess over sensationally unlikely occurrences is hardly abnormal. As people, we are creatures of story, passing tales down from generations, with fleeting memories being some of the purest moments we can latch onto and share. The mere act of sharing ideas forms the fabric of our social society, and serves as the entry key for conversations, fueling our senses of contribution and acceptance, and spiking our brains with dopamine every time a listener smiles or leans in.
The buzzer beater, the stoppage time scramble–these are the frenzied clips we store deep in our brain’s cache, the ones we love to recount and relive, and thereby live on through our athletic culture.
These tight, late-game circumstances that unnerve minds and stir stomachs, are awfully common over the course of a season. Unlike other sports, football’s scoring opportunities are often few and far between. Loads of fixtures are decided by a single goal–one moment of sheer brilliance, or one moment of utter catastrophe–and that thin margin is what makes the sport so irresistibly poetic. Towards the end of matches, this romantic fragility can often trigger a surge of desperation, an often debilitatingly counterproductive result.
The problem here is that the frantic finale, which we might define as the hurried search of this elusive and rare moment of triumph, represents an all-too-common tactical route that entices many, but benefits few. When these tense moments arise, many sides tend to discard their status quo–under the impression that’s it’s failed their expectations and time is up–and begin to hopelessly improvise. But for football teams looking for consistent methodology, reliable ways to squeeze out points at the tail end of tight fixtures, this sounding-of-the-alarm can prove to be sharply detrimental. One of the most common examples of this is what American Football calls a “Hail Mary”, the act of throwing soldiers up the field and bombing a ball into the endzone, simply hoping that one will result in a touchdown. It’s a tactic teams rarely ever employ at any other time in the game. It’s a gamble for when all hope is lost.
It goes without saying that this is far from a dependable approach. Frantic finales might be the road to a once-in-a-lifetime miracle, but may well cost teams in the long run; for every grainy ‘84 highlight reel clip, there exist thousands of failed efforts that never see the limelight. Throw after Hail Mary throw that never scored a touchdown, never won the game, and were buried in anonymity, forever. The pressures that encourage teams to abandon their carefully constructed blueprint for more erratic late-game ideas exist and are understandable, but there are even stronger motives for staying true to one’s ideals. The adoption of this idea might not produce “impossible” highlights like Doug Flutie’s nostalgic throw, but they might win us more games, more finals, and help stock our eternal trophy cabinets. These victories build our legacy in a different way–more concretely and more tangibly than dreaming of magic ever could. Depending on what matters most to us, that just might be the right approach.
Long Kicks May Be Beautiful
Think of Fernando Llorente’s substitution in May of 2019. The storied montage of a ball cannoned in from deep, nodded down, scooped up by a nifty Brazilian, and slotted home is exactly the type of memory that finds itself seared into our collective minds. It was a hattrick goal in the most unlikely of circumstances: the all-but-dead dark horse incredulously slitting the throat of our young, beautiful Dutch Cinderella, and the surreal sequence that put a fourth-place English squad into the Champions League Final for the first time in history. It’s a fever dream and we remember it.
It is because of these clips that when the match is tied (or we’re down and need a point), and we enter the 80th, then the 85th, then injury time, our nervous minds race to find the most direct route to goal. If we had controlled the match with possession, well, there’s simply no time for that anymore. Send up our CBs, leave someone behind with a barrel of gunpowder, and fire in the hole.
The idea hinges on the simultaneous anxiety of the opponent, banking on the hope that they’re likely just as nervous to preserve the score as we are to change it, and that this anxiety might produce an anomalistic fluke. The team prays that this chaotic tactic will cause some lucky defensive mishap, a failed clearance that might lead to a sloppy chance, and that this is the best–and perhaps only–way to snatch a goal at the death. The idea largely being, “I remember that time it worked for Tottenham (or someone else), so why can’t it work for us?”
But this idea simply isn’t good enough. A lofted pass is colloquially dubbed a “50/50”, suggesting that the subsequently regained possession is simply a toss-up–no more, no less. Just because one team is in need of a goal and the other is in need of preventing it doesn’t change that. If the desperation and desire is matched by both players vying for the header, assuming both teams are just as interested in victory, it truly could go either way.
It is for this very reason, for instance, that I’ll pause to indulge the reason why teams have begun to take more and more goalkicks short. A launched arrow into the center of the pitch certainly advances the ball more than a pass within one’s own box, but the security of the latter option is compelling. If your team is capable of taking the ball from your endline to the half with a 70% success rate, you’re much better off “playing it safe” first (an option completed 100% of the time, assuming opposing defenders can’t enter the box), and working the ball up the field more methodically. Reducing your squad’s collective performance to the roll of a die is feeble, and only advisable if the group is highly versed in second ball retention spacing, has an aerial king as target, or is truly miserable getting up the pitch via other routes. Simply put: if it isn’t necessary, why even give them a chance?
To learn more about this idea, check out Jared Young’s piece for American Soccer Analysis, dubbed “Forget Everything You Think You Know About Goal Kicks“. In his succinct study, Young discovered a sobering reality: that “when the goalie begins a possession with a pass beyond the midfield line, his team has 1.2% chance of scoring on the next two possessions and the opponent has a 2.1% chance.” In other words, long balls gift opportunity. As noted by his constructed table I’ve pinned below, when our pass is shorter, by comparison, he found that the odds of scoring even out significantly, and ever so slightly tip in our favor. Towards the end of his article, Young most astutely concludes that “…long goal kicks may be beautiful but they don’t appear to be a good idea.”
This analogous Hail Mary concept is only a representative case of a collection of desperate tactics. Managers assemble a plan, uphold it for 80 minutes, and as soon as the clock ticks on past a certain threshold, they abandon everything. They plug in new moves, new players, and new modes of play in order to introduce some new factor that’ll turn the tables.
Yet, the invariable question posed in post-match pressers tends to be: why not earlier? Isn’t it counterintuitive to plan something all week, only to throw up our arms when it gets on in the fixture? If adjustments are to be made, conventional wisdom tells us not to make them “too-little-too-late”. The media tells us this, too. Pundits, Twitter kids, and beer-sloshed drunks seeing double screens know it, as well. If a team leaves changes to the last moments, they might not be giving their ideas enough time to sprout and flourish. Even though these doubtful curiosities surface at the end of nearly every close match, a la “why such late subs?” or “did the team lose its head towards the end?” or “did the late game 2-2-6 cause confusion and actually interrupt our momentum?”, it’s as if the questioning does little to suggest the merits of an alternative approach; even if a coach overcompensates their course-correcting in the following match, it tends to only take a few more fixtures for the same mediocre abandon-ship tactics to reemerge. We’re right to feel disappointed.
Inevitable Logical Traps
Stepping down from the idealistic soapbox, we must admit, however, that there exists quite a handful of alluring quasi-reasons for why teams so often succumb to these ideas. It seems easy to forego temptations in writing, but if so many top sides exhibit signs of frantic finales, there must be a strong motive at play.
Amongst these: various other sources of sports knowledge indicate that the last moments of a match are when fatigue sets in, making bodies tired more prone to error. Perhaps this warrants a change in playstyle. But though the fatigue argument is irrefutable–in the sense that tired legs certainly change a game’s dynamics over time–it’s hard to employ, here, when seeking to justify the Hail Mary. If we assume teams of equal fitness, everyone on either side will be on roughly identical levels of tiredness. If the opposing defenders are exhausted, so might be our striker. If fatigue negatively impacts one’s reactions or vertical jump, it’ll likely have a similar effect on both players leaping up for the ball, yielding no true advantage to either. So yes, the game may slow, or endure periods of higher/lower tempo to enable breath catching, but we can’t argue that exhaustion is a logical motivator for overhauling our strategy. A gameplan ought to be made to last the full ninety. Rejigging the lineup or flipping styles with the hope of introducing wild card scenarios can’t be a regular method of teams looking to perform well and with consistency.
So given this nullification, what other forces consistently urge teams to suddenly toss their modus operandi for new impulses? Why else is the frantic finale so common?
The next observable issue is that these “resort-tactics” rely on the Availability Heuristic. The fact that I’ve so easily been able to conjure two examples of Hail Mary heroism, but can’t put my finger on a particularly-illustrative example of futile desperation for contrast, is a strong indication that our minds tend to make decisions based on the most immediate memories that come flooding to it. This is a fallacious way of thinking. Though it’s hard to find a YouTube montage of “frustrated long ball passing in extra time”, it doesn’t mean that those scenarios aren’t utterly ubiquitous–they’re simply boring to most viewers. As previously mentioned, the reality is that for every Lucas Moura goal, there are likely countless of identical attempts that are never described in the papers due to their eventual failure. The glamor, clickbait, and sales come from adrenaline-pumping comeback headlines, but if we allow ourselves to be intoxicated, we’ll drunkenly stumble over our own feet. These moments are only the tip of a massive, hidden iceberg.
Wandering into the widespread online coverage of modern sport, another dilemma emerges. I was unable to find a precise name for the phenomenon, but it’s something I’ll dub “The Reel Problem”. It’s a complication that arises from the idea of noteworthiness coupled with market saturation; people across the world compete to relay the footage and narratives that contain the greatest excitement, most gripping drama, and that are ultimately most profitable for the middle-man. It’s a side effect of our society. We measure success in clicks and likes, more so than comments and discussion. We see the things that are deemed attention-capturing at surface level, while it’s harder to find ideas that are more deceptively interesting, and often more important. A YouTube montage, by nature, propagates the problem. Collecting clips of each and every successful dribble or flick executed by Roberto Firmino last year might misleadingly bestow the illusion of a player in form, while his 2019/2020 goal output nearly 8 below his xG might suggest the opposite. The highlights, alone, fail to serve the full story, yet that’s almost always the only dish on the menu. The Reel Problem is what happens when we ravenously consume the iceberg tip, but fail to peer underwater.
This problem is further magnified when coupled with the Hot-Hand Fallacy, a common logical mistake that arises in sports, in which people expect previous successful performance to yield future exploits.
Such is the notion of a 3-point shooter “on-fire” in a basketball game, or a baseball pitcher repeatedly throwing strikes, but these ideas have been created for the exciting effect they have on the spectator (more on this later), and lack strong statistical backing. These success streaks are, in fact, largely the product of a lot of randomness, with a bit of skill. A short run, the sample size often used for context in these streak events (i.e. a player’s last 4 attempted threes) can’t be sufficient to define a larger trend outlined by an untruncated sample. A better approach would be to evaluate a player’s performance based on years of court minutes, rather than the opening sequences of a particular match.
Do we remember Krzysztof Piątek’s absurd streak of goals for Genoa in 2018/2019? His meteoric rise to stardom? Here’s a Wikipedia refresher:
“On 8 June 2018, Piątek signed a four-year contract with Italian club Genoa for a reported fee of €4 million. He scored four goals, including a hat-trick in the opening 19 minutes, on debut in a 4–0 Coppa Italia win over Lecce. He made his Serie A debut on 26 August, scoring in the opening six minutes of the match in a 2–1 win over Empoli. The following week, he scored his first brace of the season in a 5–3 loss to Sassuolo, which was followed by another strike in a 4–1 loss to Lazio, thus becoming the first player since Andriy Shevchenko in 1999 to score five goals in his first four Serie A appearances. During his following match, a 2–0 victory over Chievo, he scored his 10th goal across all competitions and in the process became the first player across Europe’s major leagues to reach the milestone for the season. On 30 September, Piątek scored a brace inside three minutes in a 2–1 win over Frosinone to make it 8 goals in six matches, the best start to a season by a debutant since Karl Aage Hansen in the 1949–50 campaign. In his very next match, he became the first player since Gabriel Batistuta in the 1994–95 season to score in each of his first seven Serie A appearances when he netted in a 3–1 defeat to Parma”.
Only two years later, and after a failed Milan transfer, Piątek–this once seemingly-unstoppable force–doesn’t even rank in the BBC’s list of the Top 19 Bundesliga scorers of this campaign. The Polish striker’s Icarian story rightfully admonishes us for getting too ahead of ourselves with the Hot-Hand Fallacy. Critically, a small sample of successes is unlikely to be representative of a longer term trend.
It is for that very reason that we must recognize that just because Tottenham went on a glorious tournament run, one time, doesn’t mean they’ll continue to do so. We must remind ourselves that this was, indeed, their first UCL Final appearance, meaning that the performance-trend Spurs have defined over generations is not one that replicates this level of achievement with consistency. I know this is a sensitive subject, and the pressure point most tend to choose when pointing fingers at Spurs, but I say this without any personal vendetta against the supporters at White Hart Lane! Viewing the Llorente Hail Mary as a success story that deserves to mold future tactics would be just as criminal as writing a review after watching only 3 seconds of a feature-length film. We wouldn’t dare do the latter, so why do we so confidently do the former?
And so, this single moment must be put into a broader context. In fact, for every Llorente nod down success, Tottenham, alone, likely iterated through hundreds of failed attempts. Some of these might’ve resulted in counterattacks that conceded goals–an outcome akin to a “pick six” or interception leading to an opposing touchdown in American Football, and diametrically opposite from the intention of the Hail Mary. Recall Jared Young’s findings that a long goalkick grants the opposition with a higher chance of scoring than it does ourselves. It goes without saying that if we find that a tactic ends up granting the opponent more chances than us, it rapidly becomes even harder to justify.
In the grand scheme of things, the fact of the matter is that successful tactics are rarely born from one moment of brilliance amidst hours of mediocrity; sustained performance is what tends to, and deserves to, mold the landscape.
Somewhat separate, yet another chasm to sidestep is that created by the fan ambience. Desperation typically moves spectators to the edges of their seats, and provides a house of cards illusion that the team is putting everything into squeezing out a last minute goal. We might consider the opposite to prove the point: a situation in which a team does not fire balls into the box from their own half-line, but rather continues to try to pick the lock as they had unsuccessfully done all game. Imagine the ire from the stands! The optics might suggest stagnation, that the lads aren’t leaving everything on the pitch or even (somewhat counterintuitively) that they’re “out of ideas”, and brew discontent from ticket-paying fans. In order to quell the potential upheaval, players and managers alike tend to attempt unusually valiant marauding runs, highly attacking substitutions that unbalance the team’s structure, or pump the rock long. And though, usually, it gives off the intended effect, it seldom warrants consistent results.
Thus, not only is it easy to conjure up memories of successful Hail Marys–facilitated by a culture that preserves unlikely outcomes in amber resin–but it’s even easier to assume the ensuing results might be representative of our future successes if we were to use the same tactic. We can be pressured into using “all the tools in our toolbox”, even if some aren’t “sharp”, by fan and media expectations, too. The result is a feedback loop that causes nearly every game to feature hopeful lobbed balls in and around the area. We manipulate ourselves, we allow ourselves to be manipulated, and we are sappy glory hunters even if it’s unintended.
There’s got to be a better way.
Why Divergence is Deleterious
In traffic, experienced drivers know that switching lanes hardly results in faster progression. As it often appears to happen, the second we frustratedly merge into another lane is frequently the exact point in time in which our previous one advances. “Doing something” often feels better than “doing nothing”, but patience can prove to be a virtue. Sometimes, the plant just needs a few more minutes to bear fruit. Inquietude is both delicate and dangerous.
The core of the problem with frantic finales is the unnerved departure from what is outlined in the roadmap. Risks are undoubtedly necessary in sport, but a pack shuffle so significant with plenty of time left on the clock (I’d argue that 10, or even 5 minutes, is certainly plenty of time) is often the product of a rush of blood, rather than calculated tinkering. Managers rarely bomb forward and chuck balls long while seated comfortably in their seats–they’re often pacing frantically on the touchline. The objective is arguably subconscious, but invariably to look like adjustments are being made, whereas in reality, it’s simply the letting-go of an ostensibly failed approach. At its foundation, that’s all it really is: hopeless relinquishment.
But reducing organization and practiced sequences into mere chaos is rarely a productive strategy. For success to come about, a team likely still needs balance, a well-versed attacking method, and so forth; scoring isn’t simply a function of how many wingers have entered the pitch, or how many missiles drop hopefully into the other box. Rather, it is achieved through training exercises that equip teams to sever the opponent’s lines, and these are most often executed under the assumption of normal in-game circumstances. Practice and preparation are the routes to success, rather than standalone improv.
The Fallacies in Practice
If we consider this idea of training, one might argue that it’s a good idea for teams to practice time-constrained situations. A remedy for appearing “out of ideas” late in matches, and resorting to a more randomized approach, would be to perhaps reconstruct those moments in a more controlled and lower-stakes environment. “Train being down a goal and with minutes to spare, that ought to fix this problem of ‘desperation’, right?”–to which I’d argue that, well, teams already do this. The end of nearly every competitive youth scrimmage results in the coach proclaiming “next goal wins!”, and yet, the result invariably takes one of two unproductive paths:
- We see a microcosm of the same issue, just in training, with players (for instance) resorting to 50/50s instead of sticking to the plan, or
- The in-game, high-stakes simply aren’t replicated, and the necessary desire to win falls short (i.e. punitive sprints at the end of training might be a pain, but often pale in comparison to dropped points in a tight table). We haven’t truly captured the essence of a tense endgame.
Both of these results can often be attributed to the laissez-faire coaching style adopted by many. If one tries to wind the clock and let it run, players will trip into the pitfalls we’ve already outlined as being so deceptively alluring. Without specific direction, they’ll fall back on Hail Marys, and likely not think much of it.
Furthermore, I might add that practicing these moments and “making them into a thing” might inadvertently crease the wrong strategy further into our reflexes. The more we add time constraints to scrimmages, the more prevalent hopeful tactics might become, and the further engrained into the team’s culture the abandonment ritual might find itself.
So what if, instead, we specifically train the art of driving long balls, nodding them down, and scoring. What if we get really good at that specific skill? Sure. But if this tactic is so enticing past the 80th minute mark, why don’t we adopt it as our chief strategy from minute 1? Well, you tell me. For starters, once an idea like this takes the reins, and we make it a primary focus of training over time, it no longer becomes problematic through the lens via which this discussion is analyzing things. If a team’s entire mode of attack is to play long balls to their towering striker, I would hardly be upset to see them persist with that approach in the final seconds of the match. What would be dumbfounding would be a sudden change to triangulation and possession, building up through fullbacks, or any other divergent resort-strategy that, once again, departs from the original plan. It doesn’t matter to me where you start, it matters whether you stick to your guns amidst adversity, or if disown them. For the sake of this conversation, a methodology that would utterly transform an entire playstyle simply wouldn’t factor in.
Alright, so let’s say that a team didn’t take the extremist route and make Hail Marys their official brand, but rather, interspersed them throughout the match with other signature tactics. This would be a bit better, but for the purposes of this discussion, we’d still “disqualify” them for the same reason. The approach is now part of the team’s identity; it’s a high-risk high-reward method that’s employed when the time is right throughout the game–and this is why it also fails to meet the “frantic” criteria. Players wait for opportunistic moments and execute the progression when they deem fit–they don’t hear an alarm bell and run amuck. One thing provides a deliberate choice, and the other is simply a forced action. Once more, this is not where the issue lies. If at the dying moments of the match, the team suddenly stopped intermixing long balls, that would be more cause for concern.
Moreover, regardless of the Hail Mary implementation strategy, I’m still not even convinced that the approach is totally productive, anyway. It might be comforting, but there are a few deeply-rooted issues with the idea of giving up one’s agency and holding onto fate.
A Needless Toss-Up
For a moment, let’s actually dig a little deeper into the Hail Mary itself. My argument, here, is that it’s implementation towards the end of games as a resort-tactic is counterproductive, but this approach has deeper base flaws that further cement its futile status. Imagine, if every time a team won possession they launched a desperate rocket into the sky; they’d suffer an even greater proportion of the consequences that come with 50/50 randomness. Instead of 10 minutes’ worth of die rolling, a team would voluntarily endure 90. Even in a less drastic case, in which a team mixes in 10 or 20 total minutes of Hail Mary attacking, I still don’t feel as though that tactic would lend itself to top teams. Strong sides prefer control–however they might define it.
Consider a street-crossing comparison. As a pedestrian, it is perhaps my fatal flaw that I never cross a street until the cars have come full stop. I’m a fast walker and quite an impatient person, and yet, I do this to a fault. The reason? It’s quite simple: I’ll never choose to put my life in the hands of someone else. Whatever I can control, I will. Just two years ago I yanked a friend back onto the median just before an onrushing car nearly hit them, careening into the curb as they maneuvered away in a cloud of burnt rubber. Just weeks later, someone was hit and killed on the same crosswalk. Indeed, the chances that someone fails to see you traversing the road, or falters in their braking execution, might be slim, but why let something so important be decided by fate? It’s certainly an extreme example, but I find this precise frame of thinking to be awfully applicable to football.
50/50s take a paper bag full of red balls and introduce blues. No matter the distribution, there is now always some likelihood that we’ll pull out the one we weren’t hoping for. Good teams will always seek to eliminate even remote chances of failure. They maximize their odds in as many individual moments throughout the match to so as to get as close as they can to a predetermined result. To launch balls into the sky and hope they’ll convert into goals is, simply put, a helpless and low-probability tactic. It isn’t prudent to use generally, let alone when we need it to work most.
The Art of Persistence & Composure
In sum, regardless of the futility interlaced with any specific tactic, the abrupt adjustment is the core problem at play. It might look, to the untrained eye, like an exciting new set of changes, but is often disruptive beyond repair. So in that case, what should managers do?
Pushing back on the forces that might encourage a coach to switch things up, I’d argue that the simplest and best tactic is to avoid non-premeditated gambles. Create a Plan A and a Plan B, with sufficient preparation such that you have calculated options throughout a match, but don’t succumb to the pressures that might make you entertain abandoning ship. Doing so is the mark of a weak will.
Instead, a virtue that’s valuable to instill in a player group is the notion of persistence–continuing to grind away as the match dwindles, but without descending into disorder. If the route to defeating a team is by controlling the game and surprising them with sprayed long balls, don’t suddenly lose your unpredictability by flattening a complex machine into one random, thin road at the end.
This persistence goes hand in hand with the curation of composure throughout the squad. Don’t switch lanes in a traffic jam. Don’t improvise for the sake of improvisation. Composure reflects confidence, a contagious assuredness for the squad, and perhaps even the antsy fans. If a club is able to foster a sense of tranquility, even in the edgiest of moments, they’ll rise to the occasion. For it is the nerves, the easily spread chaos, and the subsequent leaping overboard, that will leave even a valiant captain stranded in a sinking boat.
In these moments, we teeter on a razor thin edge. A composed player who breathes calmly in spite of his racing heartbeat will serve as a metronome; soon, the surrounding orchestra will begin to match his respiratory rhythms and fight on in equanimity. But by the same note, a squirrelly player who interprets his chest-thumping crescendo as an SOS call for erraticism will startle his fellow mates, generating more anxiety, more disorder, and less-controlled outcomes. And there’s a fine line between both conductors.
Most teams have players that fit both phenotypes. Coming up with 5 PK takers can occasionally be nuanced, but if you ask most coaches, or even most fans, who would occupy the first and absolute last names on their list, the response would hardly take more than a second. Nearly every squad has someone known to handle the pressure, and someone known for bottling it. Even more intriguingly, the composure skillset seems to be only moderately correlated with observed “talent”. Many star players have been branded as “pechos frios”, as the Argentines so lovingly call Gonzalo Higuain, a name reserved for those that can’t handle the heat. Sometimes, even our best players can be the ones that lose their cool.
The goal is to tilt the scale such that our composure artists outweigh our nervous nellies. When scouting and recruiting, look for players that appear unbothered by the population in the stands. Seek out stoic soldiers, grant them roles of leadership within the team, and encourage others to follow suit.
Why Biology Might Have the Answer
In Neuroscience, there exists this notion of biological desensitization–the effect we experience when we continue increasing the water temperature after we spend a few minutes in the shower, even if it felt perfectly hot, just moments ago. The examples of it’s impact are as ubiquitous as they are recognizable. It’s the phenomenon at play when you put your socks on in the morning, and you feel them, but five minutes later, you don’t. That freezing cold pool in the summer? It shocks your system at first, but only takes moments get adjusted to. The first Salt and Vinegar chip is pungent and invariably awful, but it’s worth it once you munch on the second, or the third. Loud party music sounds loud as we walk down the steps .. until we’re inside and it doesn’t. The whirring machines and whooshing air ducts in our office might annoy us at first, but we eventually forget they even exist.
Humans, across countless different neurological receptors, tend to sharply interpret initial impulses, but exhibit a gradual tapering off of their effects. Bacteria, viruses, animals, they all do it, too. Millions of cells that overreact, initially, to stimuli, but eventually get used to it. This idea is ingrained in our biology, and can be used to our advantage on the football pitch.
To employ this concept, we must take the impulse that incurs that overreaction, late in a match, and strike the drum early, instead. By emphasizing urgency from the first minute of a game, the clock will quickly become an irrelevant artifact. The pressure is felt at the beginning, a time in which mistakes can be recovered from, and kinks can be ironed out. If the group only senses that intimidating “pressure impulse” as the time winds down, they’re unlikely to recover from the ensuing mayhem until the whistle’s blown; this is so often the cause of our Hail Mary ailment. If we make a habit of bearing the brunt of that load between minutes 1 and 10 (by cementing the immediacy of the game and the cruciality of scoring fast, in the locker-room and on the training ground), not only will we excite the fans by flying out the gates, but we’ll experience the otherwise-debilitating rush at a time when it will fuel us, and as we’d previously argued, it makes simply no sense to abandon ship just yet. After all, even the weakest of teams don’t give in after only 10 minutes.
Now, it’s quite reasonable to think that the effect of an initial impulse may die off so much so, that by the time the end of the match rolls around, the alarm bells will once again shock the team’s system. That is correct. The second spoonful of spicy food won’t be less painful than the first if we wait 70 minutes in between bites. Thus, the subsequent mentality to cultivate is one of maintaining that original level of intensity. Holding firm a baseline of purpose. We persist under the sustained impulse, and get acquainted with it. If the team plays with deliberate intention the whole game, the players will become so aware of their nerves, that they’ll be less surprised when they invariably show up, and eventually so comfortable coexisting alongside them that the pesky anxieties will simply cease to exist. Here’s where we find composure. Such a team is unlikely to need resort tactics at all. Even in the most dire of late-game circumstances, they’ll simply maintain their caliber of play–and it’ll likely be enough to earn a result. This is the meta method, so to speak, of eliminating frantic finales from our repertoire.
Final Thoughts
Culture must be formed around this notion of urgency such that we don’t scatter and hide when it arrives on our doorstep. Consistency and mindfulness will spread composure, and composure allows us to get closer to being able to predict the future. Nerves and chaos introduce random variables into an otherwise controlled equation. The less we have under our control, the more our success depends on others. Remember, manager-earned predeterminism is the zenith of soccer coaching.
Frantic finales are attractive only because of our fond, albeit highly selective memory. They’re peddled like propaganda across the internet, glorified unabashedly, and we fall prey to these heroic stories despite their fundamentally flawed nature. The route to continuous and reliable success can be found in a squad that oozes togetherness, one that fights even if the ship is under siege, and vows not to give in. It only takes one or two soldiers to jump overboard, for a swarm to follow–this catastrophic domino effect is destined to bring about failure. Our best chances of victory are to keep on firing.
Thus, instead of chucking the ball long, pushing lanky defenders up as strikers, making unbalanced subs, or whatever resort-tactics you might conjure up, think of the all-encompassing ice cube analogy, put forth by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits:
In a room, 25 degrees F, a man sits while watching an an ice cube as it rests on a table. He hopes to witness it melt. In his efforts to achieve his goal, he raises the temperature of the room by one degree. Nothing happens. He does it again–nothing happens. He bumps the temperature to 28, then to 29, then to 30, 31, and still nothing. The ice cube remains unperturbed. At 32, he watches tensely as the ice cube exhibits a delicate state of equilibrium. Only at 33, does that fateful puddle finally begin to form.
What we can learn from the ice cube analogy is that many large-scale changes take large sums of unnoticed energy to finally cause one sudden shift. If the operator of the experiment had become frustrated after raising the room’s temperature by one degree, two, three, and so on, he might never have been able to experience the melting victory. Though the increments in temperature never displayed progress on the surface, they were building up to something much greater–something that eventually only took only a single degree change to finally unfold.
This same concept has been mirrored across many disciplines. A man with a chisel may strike a boulder hundreds of times until one strike, identical to all its preceding ones, suddenly splits the rock in two. Sorites Paradox tells us that a single grain of sand would never be considered a “mound”, but if we add hundreds, or thousands of single grains together, there exists some critical point at which we’d say “alright sure. that looks like a mound to me.”
Tiny, incremental moments might appear innocuous until they finally tip the scales.
When we establish a blueprint for any given match, we must recall these analogies ahead of the tempting resort-tactics that lurk in the shadows. Abandoning the project at minute 85 is like stopping the thermostat at 31 degrees–we might be just one play away from achieving what we set out to do, and what all our work up until now has built up to. Halting our chiseler at such a defining moment is not only tragically wasteful, but will cripple our team’s desire, erode faith in our gameplan-making abilities, and tear at the fabric of any club. Don’t turn on your blinker just yet. Stick to your guns, and they might just prove me right.
Till next time.
