Sean O'Driscoll
- Thread starter Jack D Rips
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Poor old Kenny - the only man at the club who's won anything, but reduced to pre-match meets and greets in the lounge, while these three 'purists' pat each other on the back as they find more ways to pass the ball slowly back and forth across their own penalty area for ten minutes at a time, before watching their players fall over and concede another goal.
We're dickheads
So if this fella has been brought in because he a good coach then what is Rodgers going to contribute as that's supposed to be his biggest attribute isn't it? It doesn't seem to be stategy,tactics ,organisation or motivation.
Could be that he'll sit O'Driscoll down with raheem sterling in a locked room and raheem will sign a new contact just to make him stop talking.
Could be that he'll sit O'Driscoll down with raheem sterling in a locked room and raheem will sign a new contact just to make him stop talking.
I had to turn the Video of him off when i heard him complain that people were only interested in the result and not how the team had played. I'm never impressed with someone who doesn't mind losing as long as they played well..........Bollocks to that.
Roy Hodgson was and is the best at that..
Except he is deluded if he thinks his teams play well..
I can picture Pascoe sat at home with a half empty bottle of whisky whilst ranting "And i bet this cunt doesn't even know how to wear shorts properly"
Yes, I said when the change was announced that, as Rodgers is such an obsessive, hands-on coach, it would make no sense to bring in another hands-on coach, because he'd either clash with Rodgers unproductively or replicate his weaknesses. It looks like we've got the latter.
Surely this is a wind up.
WTAF
WTAF
*checks calendar*
Nope not April 1st.. I'm just hoping it's bad journalism and he is in charge of the under 19s or something..
This is a wind up, right?
This makes no sense unless this plebe has compromising photos of Rodgers or something.
Might as well put Ryan in as assistant coach if you are going to hire this guy.
Depressing.
Rodgers and Driscoll discover they're kindred spirits:
Shortly after this, they will agree that all of their players are 'great technicians' and that all their defence needs is someone who shouts a lot and maybe a switch to a three, or maybe a four, or maybe a half of each.
Shortly after this, they will agree that all of their players are 'great technicians' and that all their defence needs is someone who shouts a lot and maybe a switch to a three, or maybe a four, or maybe a half of each.
Not sure the Kop are ready for pink shorts yet.
Talking of Bizarre..
WTF..
WTF..
Admittedly not many replies, but the Doncaster supporters at least seem pleased for him http://www.drfc-vsc.co.uk/index.php?topic=252944.0
Whilst I'm worried about this, the comments on his personality don't bother me as Manchester United had Steve McClaren and he's got the personality of a traffic cone.
Whilst I'm worried about this, the comments on his personality don't bother me as Manchester United had Steve McClaren and he's got the personality of a traffic cone.
Sean reminds me of the mighty Glenn Roeder.
Is it mushroom season?
I've seen how most blokes on the Kop dress, and you're right - they're not ready for it.
Have you seen the infamous pink shorts pic Cloggy? That pic is about 6 years old at a guess, and even now it's still a beautiful melange of effortless timelessness.
Rich cotton faded pink shorts, light blue OCBD, classic miseracchi's, and fitting shades. Stands the test of time my shit.
Y'all would do well to take heed.
That's so depressingly true. That actually makes me really annoyed thinking about it. I love LFC but sometime the ways it's run disgusts me.
Dated Dec 2013
[article=http://seatpitch.co.uk/2013/12/30/garibaldi-gazette-archive-sean-odriscoll-interview/#ixzz3eVcRwZ2P]From the archives of the dormant Garibaldi Gazette website, this extensive interview with Sean O’Driscoll last summer offers his views on coaching players, managerial styles, the limitations of England and footballing intelligence…
Twitter is funny old thing. ‘Ask and ye shall recieve’. Normally that means you tweet something and you recieve indifference, abuse, unintelligible babble and maybe the odd retweet. Sometimes though, you get a little bit more than you planned for.
Cast your minds back to a rather extraordinary Boxing Day last year by the Trent. The Al-Hasawi family were six months into their ownership of Nottingham Forest. After dispensing with Steve Cotterill (who deserves a lot of credit for helping to keep Forest an attractive product on the market) they went about chasing an ‘iconic’ manager. Rejections followed, most notably from Mick McCarthy and possibly even Harry Redknapp.
Enter Sean O’Driscoll (previously first-team coach), from stage left. At his press conference he had this to say when he was told by the media that he wasn’t quiet the iconic name the Al-Hasawi’s promised: “All the iconic names I know are dead. That would be a coup, wouldn’t it? Forest appoint a dead manager.”
I didn’t need anymore convincing that he was the perfect man for the job prior to that remark, but his unveiling further reinforced how ‘fresh’ this breath of air was for an ailing Forest. It was a far cry from, say, Steve McClaren who seemed occupied with smells emanating from the trophy room.
I couldn’t believe it. ‘They’ve finally made a forward-thinking appointment’, I thought to myself.
After keeping tabs on his work over the years at Doncaster Rovers and seeing the kinds of performances and expressive football he was able to draw out of a modest squad of players, I knew we wouldn’t get there overnight but I knew we would get there. And when we got there, it would be worth it.
Then it hit me. ‘He doesn’t have a chance in hell if some of our fans get vocal’.
It seems only at the City Ground do you get such wildly differing expectations that generally do not correlate with the previous season’s reality. Just survived relegation? Promotion next season. Surely. Even the cool-cats who were nonchalantly throwing the line ‘consolidation this season’ couldn’t be trusted. They want it all. And they want it, always. Football fans of the ‘music-video-attention-span’ generation high on sugar.
This kind of mercurial behaviour even seemed to rub off on the new owners. At first, the Al-Hasawis made calming sounds with their mouths, like yogic humming, stating they were in no immediate rush for promotion and that they wanted to build something more solid as part of a longer-term plan to get to the ‘promised land’.
Then came the rush of new signings and the expected ‘bedding in’ period. So far, so good. You could see steady progress. Like wet clay being gently shaped into something more solid. It wasn’t perfect, but that’s what progress is. It’s a messy pursuit for the brave, striving towards a defined ideal.
Then came the harsh reality. A baboon’s arse of a ‘happening’. The goalposts maddeningly ripped from the ground, culminating in the infamous and brutal Boxing Day firing of the man affectionately known as ‘SOD’.
I was ‘so gutted, like really, really gutted’, to use the parlance of our times.
We’d just beaten Leeds United 4-2 in an adventurous manner that evoked fond memories of past O’Driscoll excursions to the City Ground with his Doncaster side that used to play Forest off the park. Even fans who were hitherto unconvinced that he was the right man to lead the Reds were enthused after the Leeds game and the support for the ‘process’ was palpable at the final whistle.
But just as it felt like people were ready to trust the manager and to buy into a vision still in its infancy – the man with an itchy trigger-finger couldn’t take it anymore. A single shot was fired.
The Al-Hasawis wanted something else. They wanted… well, they didn’t know what they wanted so they fawningly asked Sir Alex Ferguson what he thought that they wanted.
The rest is history, and I don’t care for it much. But I’ve never quite dealt with the sacking of O’Driscoll. By dealing with it, I mean doing this. Writing about it. I know it’s not as if I was dealing with the fall of man or anything, but it’s football. And football is stupid. Brilliantly stupid.
This is where Twitter comes into it. After tweeting my disappointment about Sean’s sacking, I ended up in a dialogue with his daughter Haylie. After a back and forth, I asked Haylie if Sean would be interested in doing an interview for my newly created blog. I was pleasantly surprised (knowing of his aversion to interviews) when the answer was yes.
Had it not been for the swiftness of his return to football with Bristol City, this would have been out there a mere three weeks after the Boxing Day incident, but football. Bloody hell. As it is, he took a moment away from his busy pre-season preparations at Ashton Gate to very kindly share his thoughts.
How do you interview someone who has become a bit of a hero to you? An innovative, roguish rebel who is putting the football world to rights and ’sticking it to the man’. Well, I tried my best to get him talking about Forest and football in general and, as expected, he didn’t disappoint. Enjoy.
1. How do you reflect on your time at Nottingham Forest? Any regrets? Would you have done anything differently?
You always have to learn from experience but we had to hit the ground running with three weeks to prepare a team to be able to compete in the Championship and we were experimenting with systems, personnel and combinations as we were trying to also win games. I’d never regret taking the job; it was a massive honour to manage Nottingham Forest and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. But if we knew what became apparent pretty quickly, ie that the owners had changed their focus on what they wanted from the season, we wouldn’t have gone down the route we did. We were trying to put firm foundations in place at a club which would have been close to going into administration again had the Al-Hasawi family not bought it. But it is a very delicate balancing act trying to build a club from the foundations up while the spectre of promotion pressure is also looming overhead. We were doing ok. We were a point off the play-offs without having hit top gear yet and we knew what we needed to do in January. I genuinely believed we would reach the play-offs last season but it wasn’t enough. The owners wanted to take the club in a different direction and that’s football, you move on.
2. Forest are often accused of being a club that trades on former glories. Do you feel the history of the club is hindering its future in some ways?
I tried to embrace the history of the club by inviting former players to the training ground to come and see what was going on and what we were trying to do because you cannot escape the history of the place. Does it hinder? It sets an expectation that sometimes is difficult to realise and you have to try to help people understand where the club actually is and the progress it’s trying to make. But you would much rather have that than something that felt disposable, meaningless and soulless. When the crowd sings Mull of Kintyre at kick-off time it’s fantastic.
3. You spoke of the need to instil a clear culture at Forest – to define the vague concept of the ‘Forest Way’. What were some of the ideas you were looking to put into place and are they similar to what you are trying to cultivate at Bristol City now?
The culture at every club is important, it is its heartbeat and defines what it is. Both clubs have tradition and history but tradition is not culture. We were trying to bring the club together, make the non-playing staff part of the process, to engage the squad more in the local community. to bring the U21s and youth team into the first team environment, all the things I think are important and would try to do at whatever football club I was managing at. We also wanted to develop an identifiable style of play to be synonymous with Forest from top to bottom. This is exactly what we are trying to do at Bristol City. Although the circumstances both clubs were in when I came in were very different the principals are the same.
4. You were rather unfairly challenged by some Forest supporters for being ‘reactive’ in your tactical approach to games – but isn’t that how everyone prepares gameplans and tactical approaches as they are relative?
If things aren’t going well you react to it, if things are going right, you react to it. Surely being able to recognise what is actually happening in a game and doing something about it is a positive trait? Tactically we never changed from game to game, we may have used different structures and approaches to games but the underlying tactics were always the same. One of the biggest eye openers for me was the expectation of supporters to see a 4-4-2 formation week in, week out. Even when I have utilised this formation in the past its always been in a fluid system. You can’t ever win. If you set your team up to counter an opposition threat and you win you’re a genius and if you lose well you worried too much about the opposition. That’s not being reactive, that’s trying to prepare the team as best as possible for what they may face in the game.
5. What kind of relationship do you look for with the owners of a club? How present or available do you expect them to be?
You need a shared vision for the way you want the football club to be run, the principals you want it to run by and what you want the club to be known for. The owners don’t have to be there all the time for that but the communication has to be clear. The lines got blurred pretty quickly at Forest as the goalposts moved. That is absolutely the owners’ prerogative and that’s football. But the only way a club is ever going to achieve success is if the manager and owners share the same vision for what they want for their club in the long-term.
6. Do you feel fans expectations of ‘the manager’ have shifted as a result of the well-documented behaviour of people like Jose Mourinho and Paulo Di Canio? Do fans wrongly place importance on a display of touchline passion and gesticulation as opposed to say a calm, discerning head?
You would hope that as many people who want to see jumping up and down on the touchline would also appreciate that public histrionics don’t make you do your job any better. When I’m on the touchline is probably when I’m at my calmest strangely; I rarely feel emotion, I’m just completely engaged in what is happening on the pitch. I have to remain as neutral as possible during a game, I’ve always been like that. Sometimes people have said to me after a game didn’t I hear the crowd ask me to give them a wave and things like that but I genuinely don’t! I’m not doing it to be rude, it’s just not on my radar at that time. If you’re winning every game no one cares about what you do on the touchline, if you’re losing everything’s a problem not just your touchline demeanour.
7. Managers can be the most harshly treated public components of a club. Players get away with indifferent form and can often be the cause of a manager losing his job. Do you feel players, as a whole, need to be encouraged to take more responsibility and accountability? How do you actually do that?
Definitely. The coaching culture in this country from the youngest age is ‘tell, tell, tell, tell, do this, do that, do this’. But that’s not the players’ fault, that’s the coaching structure and the coaches. And you can’t blame managers for not wanting to give players any free reign in making decisions on the pitch because we’re in a results industry and the manager’s neck is on the line constantly, Can managers afford for players to make mistakes through learning or is it easier to tell them what you want them to do and let the player suffer the consequences if they don’t, not you. The only way you can ever get a player to accept responsibility on the pitch is for him to really understand what’s being asked of him and the only way he will ever understand is if he takes responsibility for trying to understand and encouraging it in his teammates. It’s a vicious circle and if we ever can get over this being a alien concept in British football the game will be in a much healthier state for it.
8. You appear to be quite a brutal realist in your understanding of the ‘goldfish bowl’ lifestyle of a manager and the fickle ups and downs – what keeps you motivated in such a cynical business?
Developing players and seeing players fulfil their potential and go on to bigger and better things. It’s not always the players with the most obvious ability, it’s the ones you have had to coax, encourage and help find their niche that I personally get the most satisfaction from. Can I make a talented individual a more rounded team player, or can I help a player recognise what his real assets are compared to what they think they are to make him a mainstay in the team. That’s maybe more coaching than managing but that’s why when I came to Bristol City I insisted on the Head Coach title as I think more and more clubs will go down the continental route of having Directors of Football working with Head Coaches, and if you’ve got the right relationship between the two I think it is the right way for clubs to run. The circus that goes on around football I can’t control but it doesn’t mean I have to play the game if I don’t want to. You have to be canny about what’s right for you.
9. How do you deal with the uncertainty of your work situation and being away from your family?
As a player you could have to move at any time, and I suppose management has just become more like that in recent years. You can’t worry about the uncertainty or you become governed by the fear to do anything.
10. Would you agree that the role of the dictator-style football manager has somewhat declined in importance over the last decade?
Managers are still called ‘Gaffer’ and ‘Boss’ by players and staff but in what other industry does that happen? I’ve never understood it, it’s almost like using your first name is being disrespectful. It’s crazy! I’ve seen some horrendous decisions made in football clubs and they’ve typically been explained away as ‘Oh that’s what the manager wanted’ as if the club has no responsibility at all. If a club wants its manager to have total control as that’s the way its decided to run itself then fine as long as everybody understands that. The precarious nature of the job means managers feel the need to be in control of every aspect, but in no other sport would you find one individual holding so much power and influence over so many people. Sir Alex Ferguson was arguably a dictator-style manager but he was outstanding at getting the best people around him and trusting them to do their jobs while he oversaw everything. Being a manager of a football club is an awesome responsibility as what you do impacts on so many thousands of people that you will never meet in your life. Ninety minutes shapes your whole week and your life that week.[/article]
[article=http://seatpitch.co.uk/2013/12/30/garibaldi-gazette-archive-sean-odriscoll-interview/#ixzz3eVcRwZ2P]From the archives of the dormant Garibaldi Gazette website, this extensive interview with Sean O’Driscoll last summer offers his views on coaching players, managerial styles, the limitations of England and footballing intelligence…
Twitter is funny old thing. ‘Ask and ye shall recieve’. Normally that means you tweet something and you recieve indifference, abuse, unintelligible babble and maybe the odd retweet. Sometimes though, you get a little bit more than you planned for.
Cast your minds back to a rather extraordinary Boxing Day last year by the Trent. The Al-Hasawi family were six months into their ownership of Nottingham Forest. After dispensing with Steve Cotterill (who deserves a lot of credit for helping to keep Forest an attractive product on the market) they went about chasing an ‘iconic’ manager. Rejections followed, most notably from Mick McCarthy and possibly even Harry Redknapp.
Enter Sean O’Driscoll (previously first-team coach), from stage left. At his press conference he had this to say when he was told by the media that he wasn’t quiet the iconic name the Al-Hasawi’s promised: “All the iconic names I know are dead. That would be a coup, wouldn’t it? Forest appoint a dead manager.”
I didn’t need anymore convincing that he was the perfect man for the job prior to that remark, but his unveiling further reinforced how ‘fresh’ this breath of air was for an ailing Forest. It was a far cry from, say, Steve McClaren who seemed occupied with smells emanating from the trophy room.
I couldn’t believe it. ‘They’ve finally made a forward-thinking appointment’, I thought to myself.
After keeping tabs on his work over the years at Doncaster Rovers and seeing the kinds of performances and expressive football he was able to draw out of a modest squad of players, I knew we wouldn’t get there overnight but I knew we would get there. And when we got there, it would be worth it.
Then it hit me. ‘He doesn’t have a chance in hell if some of our fans get vocal’.
It seems only at the City Ground do you get such wildly differing expectations that generally do not correlate with the previous season’s reality. Just survived relegation? Promotion next season. Surely. Even the cool-cats who were nonchalantly throwing the line ‘consolidation this season’ couldn’t be trusted. They want it all. And they want it, always. Football fans of the ‘music-video-attention-span’ generation high on sugar.
This kind of mercurial behaviour even seemed to rub off on the new owners. At first, the Al-Hasawis made calming sounds with their mouths, like yogic humming, stating they were in no immediate rush for promotion and that they wanted to build something more solid as part of a longer-term plan to get to the ‘promised land’.
Then came the rush of new signings and the expected ‘bedding in’ period. So far, so good. You could see steady progress. Like wet clay being gently shaped into something more solid. It wasn’t perfect, but that’s what progress is. It’s a messy pursuit for the brave, striving towards a defined ideal.
Then came the harsh reality. A baboon’s arse of a ‘happening’. The goalposts maddeningly ripped from the ground, culminating in the infamous and brutal Boxing Day firing of the man affectionately known as ‘SOD’.
I was ‘so gutted, like really, really gutted’, to use the parlance of our times.
We’d just beaten Leeds United 4-2 in an adventurous manner that evoked fond memories of past O’Driscoll excursions to the City Ground with his Doncaster side that used to play Forest off the park. Even fans who were hitherto unconvinced that he was the right man to lead the Reds were enthused after the Leeds game and the support for the ‘process’ was palpable at the final whistle.
But just as it felt like people were ready to trust the manager and to buy into a vision still in its infancy – the man with an itchy trigger-finger couldn’t take it anymore. A single shot was fired.
The Al-Hasawis wanted something else. They wanted… well, they didn’t know what they wanted so they fawningly asked Sir Alex Ferguson what he thought that they wanted.
The rest is history, and I don’t care for it much. But I’ve never quite dealt with the sacking of O’Driscoll. By dealing with it, I mean doing this. Writing about it. I know it’s not as if I was dealing with the fall of man or anything, but it’s football. And football is stupid. Brilliantly stupid.
This is where Twitter comes into it. After tweeting my disappointment about Sean’s sacking, I ended up in a dialogue with his daughter Haylie. After a back and forth, I asked Haylie if Sean would be interested in doing an interview for my newly created blog. I was pleasantly surprised (knowing of his aversion to interviews) when the answer was yes.
Had it not been for the swiftness of his return to football with Bristol City, this would have been out there a mere three weeks after the Boxing Day incident, but football. Bloody hell. As it is, he took a moment away from his busy pre-season preparations at Ashton Gate to very kindly share his thoughts.
How do you interview someone who has become a bit of a hero to you? An innovative, roguish rebel who is putting the football world to rights and ’sticking it to the man’. Well, I tried my best to get him talking about Forest and football in general and, as expected, he didn’t disappoint. Enjoy.
1. How do you reflect on your time at Nottingham Forest? Any regrets? Would you have done anything differently?
You always have to learn from experience but we had to hit the ground running with three weeks to prepare a team to be able to compete in the Championship and we were experimenting with systems, personnel and combinations as we were trying to also win games. I’d never regret taking the job; it was a massive honour to manage Nottingham Forest and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. But if we knew what became apparent pretty quickly, ie that the owners had changed their focus on what they wanted from the season, we wouldn’t have gone down the route we did. We were trying to put firm foundations in place at a club which would have been close to going into administration again had the Al-Hasawi family not bought it. But it is a very delicate balancing act trying to build a club from the foundations up while the spectre of promotion pressure is also looming overhead. We were doing ok. We were a point off the play-offs without having hit top gear yet and we knew what we needed to do in January. I genuinely believed we would reach the play-offs last season but it wasn’t enough. The owners wanted to take the club in a different direction and that’s football, you move on.
2. Forest are often accused of being a club that trades on former glories. Do you feel the history of the club is hindering its future in some ways?
I tried to embrace the history of the club by inviting former players to the training ground to come and see what was going on and what we were trying to do because you cannot escape the history of the place. Does it hinder? It sets an expectation that sometimes is difficult to realise and you have to try to help people understand where the club actually is and the progress it’s trying to make. But you would much rather have that than something that felt disposable, meaningless and soulless. When the crowd sings Mull of Kintyre at kick-off time it’s fantastic.
3. You spoke of the need to instil a clear culture at Forest – to define the vague concept of the ‘Forest Way’. What were some of the ideas you were looking to put into place and are they similar to what you are trying to cultivate at Bristol City now?
The culture at every club is important, it is its heartbeat and defines what it is. Both clubs have tradition and history but tradition is not culture. We were trying to bring the club together, make the non-playing staff part of the process, to engage the squad more in the local community. to bring the U21s and youth team into the first team environment, all the things I think are important and would try to do at whatever football club I was managing at. We also wanted to develop an identifiable style of play to be synonymous with Forest from top to bottom. This is exactly what we are trying to do at Bristol City. Although the circumstances both clubs were in when I came in were very different the principals are the same.
4. You were rather unfairly challenged by some Forest supporters for being ‘reactive’ in your tactical approach to games – but isn’t that how everyone prepares gameplans and tactical approaches as they are relative?
If things aren’t going well you react to it, if things are going right, you react to it. Surely being able to recognise what is actually happening in a game and doing something about it is a positive trait? Tactically we never changed from game to game, we may have used different structures and approaches to games but the underlying tactics were always the same. One of the biggest eye openers for me was the expectation of supporters to see a 4-4-2 formation week in, week out. Even when I have utilised this formation in the past its always been in a fluid system. You can’t ever win. If you set your team up to counter an opposition threat and you win you’re a genius and if you lose well you worried too much about the opposition. That’s not being reactive, that’s trying to prepare the team as best as possible for what they may face in the game.
5. What kind of relationship do you look for with the owners of a club? How present or available do you expect them to be?
You need a shared vision for the way you want the football club to be run, the principals you want it to run by and what you want the club to be known for. The owners don’t have to be there all the time for that but the communication has to be clear. The lines got blurred pretty quickly at Forest as the goalposts moved. That is absolutely the owners’ prerogative and that’s football. But the only way a club is ever going to achieve success is if the manager and owners share the same vision for what they want for their club in the long-term.
6. Do you feel fans expectations of ‘the manager’ have shifted as a result of the well-documented behaviour of people like Jose Mourinho and Paulo Di Canio? Do fans wrongly place importance on a display of touchline passion and gesticulation as opposed to say a calm, discerning head?
You would hope that as many people who want to see jumping up and down on the touchline would also appreciate that public histrionics don’t make you do your job any better. When I’m on the touchline is probably when I’m at my calmest strangely; I rarely feel emotion, I’m just completely engaged in what is happening on the pitch. I have to remain as neutral as possible during a game, I’ve always been like that. Sometimes people have said to me after a game didn’t I hear the crowd ask me to give them a wave and things like that but I genuinely don’t! I’m not doing it to be rude, it’s just not on my radar at that time. If you’re winning every game no one cares about what you do on the touchline, if you’re losing everything’s a problem not just your touchline demeanour.
7. Managers can be the most harshly treated public components of a club. Players get away with indifferent form and can often be the cause of a manager losing his job. Do you feel players, as a whole, need to be encouraged to take more responsibility and accountability? How do you actually do that?
Definitely. The coaching culture in this country from the youngest age is ‘tell, tell, tell, tell, do this, do that, do this’. But that’s not the players’ fault, that’s the coaching structure and the coaches. And you can’t blame managers for not wanting to give players any free reign in making decisions on the pitch because we’re in a results industry and the manager’s neck is on the line constantly, Can managers afford for players to make mistakes through learning or is it easier to tell them what you want them to do and let the player suffer the consequences if they don’t, not you. The only way you can ever get a player to accept responsibility on the pitch is for him to really understand what’s being asked of him and the only way he will ever understand is if he takes responsibility for trying to understand and encouraging it in his teammates. It’s a vicious circle and if we ever can get over this being a alien concept in British football the game will be in a much healthier state for it.
8. You appear to be quite a brutal realist in your understanding of the ‘goldfish bowl’ lifestyle of a manager and the fickle ups and downs – what keeps you motivated in such a cynical business?
Developing players and seeing players fulfil their potential and go on to bigger and better things. It’s not always the players with the most obvious ability, it’s the ones you have had to coax, encourage and help find their niche that I personally get the most satisfaction from. Can I make a talented individual a more rounded team player, or can I help a player recognise what his real assets are compared to what they think they are to make him a mainstay in the team. That’s maybe more coaching than managing but that’s why when I came to Bristol City I insisted on the Head Coach title as I think more and more clubs will go down the continental route of having Directors of Football working with Head Coaches, and if you’ve got the right relationship between the two I think it is the right way for clubs to run. The circus that goes on around football I can’t control but it doesn’t mean I have to play the game if I don’t want to. You have to be canny about what’s right for you.
9. How do you deal with the uncertainty of your work situation and being away from your family?
As a player you could have to move at any time, and I suppose management has just become more like that in recent years. You can’t worry about the uncertainty or you become governed by the fear to do anything.
10. Would you agree that the role of the dictator-style football manager has somewhat declined in importance over the last decade?
Managers are still called ‘Gaffer’ and ‘Boss’ by players and staff but in what other industry does that happen? I’ve never understood it, it’s almost like using your first name is being disrespectful. It’s crazy! I’ve seen some horrendous decisions made in football clubs and they’ve typically been explained away as ‘Oh that’s what the manager wanted’ as if the club has no responsibility at all. If a club wants its manager to have total control as that’s the way its decided to run itself then fine as long as everybody understands that. The precarious nature of the job means managers feel the need to be in control of every aspect, but in no other sport would you find one individual holding so much power and influence over so many people. Sir Alex Ferguson was arguably a dictator-style manager but he was outstanding at getting the best people around him and trusting them to do their jobs while he oversaw everything. Being a manager of a football club is an awesome responsibility as what you do impacts on so many thousands of people that you will never meet in your life. Ninety minutes shapes your whole week and your life that week.[/article]
[article=http://seatpitch.co.uk/2013/12/30/garibaldi-gazette-archive-sean-odriscoll-interview/]11. You’ve drafted in former Forest scout Keith Burt to work alongside you – are you happy to delegate responsibility? Do you feel the ‘Head Coach/Director of Football’ combination is a recipe for success?
I think it’s more and more the way clubs are going to go. I’m not saying it will work in every club but managing up in a football club, with someone acting as a liaison between the playing side and the board can be extremely useful. The responsibilities of, and demands, on a manager day-to-day have escalated massively in the 13 years I’ve been a manager. Your phone literally never stops ringing from 6am to midnight with agents, media and all the other stuff you have to look after at a club. If you trust someone to act on your behalf in the boardroom, and vice versa, then it takes a huge part of the job off your plate day-to-day. One of the biggest mistakes clubs make is appointing Directors of Football who have no relationship with the manager so it takes a while to build trust, if either party is able to relinquish enough ground to make that relationship work at all. But a Director of Football should have a massive say in the manager the club appoints based on the way the club wants to run and the qualities they want in a manager. A manager does still need to have a relationship with the owner and board but I’ve found our Director of Football/Head Coach relationship invaluable so far.
12. How do you, personally, learn and progress as a coach? Do you feel the job allows you any kind of creative expression and experimentation in the face of perpetual expectation?
Bizarrely that sense of perpetual expectation actually gives you a freedom to do what you want because, the way football is now, the likelihood is you’re going to lose your job at some point so you might as well lose your job having done things the way you think were right and achieved recognition for it in the process. For everyone who says Forest treated me poorly personally there can’t be too many better times to lose your job than off the back of a 4-2 win, an excellent performance and leaving the team a point off the play-offs! I’ve always been interested in what makes successful people continually successful, whether that’s sports teams, businesses, individuals anything. The one trait they all have is they put their faith in the processes knowing if they tick all those boxes they more often than not get the outcome they want. If they don’t get the outcome they have a reference point to understand why they didn’t perform or they were beaten and learn from it to improve. It’s not what football fans want to hear half the time but for me it’s the only way that makes sense.
13. In your experience, do coaches in this country do enough to broaden their own horizons? For example, do they embrace sports science and technology enough?
There’s always a balance with sports science and technology; football’s played on grass with 22 players not in a lab. I’ve always been interested in all the elements of performance both physical and mental but you have to apply it properly. I have people come to me and say ‘Look at this stat, or look at that stat’ and my first response is always ‘But what does that actually mean?’ So what if someone runs 5k in a game? That stat alone means nothing. If my centre-forward, who’s been tasked with closing down defenders and stopping them playing, runs 5k it suggests he’s done the job he’s been asked to do, but if my centre half is running 5k I would ask ‘Why??’ There’s too much credence given to basic human effort in football in this country, that running 10k in a game is a badge of honour and reflects commitment in some way. But I’d rather a player ran 7k but used every metre more effectively than come out with 10k pitch coverage stats. There are so, so many things like that. Psychology is still sneered at in this country, and seen as a weakness or an emotional crutch, but all the top Olympic sports swear by mental training. The work Dr Steve Peters has done with British Cycling has been universally applauded yet in football any intervention like that is still greeted with cynicism. Players have to be convinced it works because it’s alien to them. It makes no sense.
14. You’ve spoken of your admiration of innovative managers like Roberto Martinez in the past. Do you sneak a grin when you see tactically adventurous smaller teams, like his former Wigan side, pull off an upset against bigger teams?
Not really but it just goes back to the point of preparing properly. Man for man a Wigan shouldn’t be able to beat a Man City but if you can spot where you can capitalise on their weaknesses and then make the most of your strengths you’ve got half a chance. Lose and you get accused of worrying too much about the opposition, win and you’re a tactical genius. Sometimes you just need players to be brave and, as easy as it sounds to the man in the stands, having the bollocks to take a risk on a football pitch is one of the hardest things you can ask them to do. Playing safe maybe the easy option as it stops the onus being on them if they make a mistake but how many ‘safe’ teams have won trophies over the years? The way Spain and Barcelona play requires bravery, the way Bayern Munich play requires bravery, the way Swansea and Bournemouth play requires bravery, it’s just a different kind of bravery to what we typically view as bravery in this country.
15. Managers have often called for the implementation of a transfer window of their own, allowing changes to be made at certain points of the season. Invariably, changes are often made either in the summer or just before January – could you ever see that idea working?
Sometimes managers’ jobs are untenable; football clubs have to blame somebody and that will never change. Sometimes, obviously the manager is culpable for the failings of a team or squad but how many decisions are made purely in terms of results, rather than the context of a club’s overall objectives for a season? I can see a time when you can only change managers at certain time during the season but that won’t stop clubs trying to get shot of managers outside that period, by putting them on gardening leave and other similar tactics. If that day ever comes the LMA legal department would probably have to double its number of lawyers!
16. Has international management ever crossed your thoughts or would you implode with boredom?
I don’t understand what international managers do for 10 months of the year. You see them at a lot of games at the weekends but then what? You never say never, and I wish that more English coaches from the Football League were considered for key roles in the international set-up because sometimes you get the feeling they are just appointing safely rather than acknowledging some of the coaching innovation that is actually going on below the Premier League. But I enjoy being on the training pitch with players day after day and feeling like you’re making a tangible difference to their own individual improvement and the improvement of a team.
17. How far are England from being anywhere near a major footballing final? Do you keep tabs on the international scene?
Watching the England football team frustrates the hell out of me. Sometimes the fear in the players is palpable, they desperately don’t want to be the one to make the mistake that then leads to them having the wrath of the media and nation rain on them. That’s why Rooney was such a breath of fresh air when he first broke through, and Wilshere more recently; because they played without fear, they were prepared to take responsibility on the pitch and if they made a mistake they didn’t let it cripple them. But that can get beaten out of a player. England players rarely look like they’re enjoying playing for their country, which is sad. The individuals we have had in this generation of players – Gerrard, Lampard, Rooney, Terry, Cole, Ferdinand – are unbelievably talented yet they have never succeeded as a group. Why? Because they are asked to play week in, week out one way for their clubs and then go off to England and are asked to play in a totally different way because the nation demands it. Is it any wonder we don’t succeed?
Spain and Barcelona could be the same team, Bayern Munich and Germany too. The successful international teams play in a way that is common in their domestic leagues, but we don’t. We can’t expect players who play like English players in the Premier League to suddenly play like Barcelona when they play for England, the whole idea is absurd. Yet that’s the criticism they have levelled at them all the time, that we’re not as technically good as other countries. We’re not but that goes back to coaching development at the youngest ages again. We want to win the World Cup then scrap relegation to and from the Premier League because teams will start trusting and blooding English players. Give international players central contracts too like England cricket and rugby have so that they can spend more time as part of the international set-up. We want to win the World Cup then let’s actually do something about it but we don’t really because the implications of the changes we would have to make would be unpalatable to our domestic game. We want our cake and to eat it. It’s unrealistic. But should we still have done better in recent tournaments? Probably.
18. What is ‘footballing intelligence’ to you? Is intelligence valued in this country or do we still rely on physicality in players?
Football intelligence is worryingly rare in this country and that stems from the coaching players have had at the youngest age where they are just told what to do, and don’t have to make decisions for themselves. Football intelligence only comes from a player understanding the game that is actually going on around him, not the game he wants to play in his head. But how do you ever develop that if you are just doing what you’re told, not thinking about it. Players with good football intelligence also tend to be good leaders on the pitch as they get what’s actually going on and is needed at any moment in a game. Of course there is a place for physicality, but there is also the tendency that if Plan A isn’t working let’s throw on the big man and see what chaos he can cause. When you’re neck is constantly on the line, as it is with managers in this country, the brave thing to do isn’t always the easiest and we wonder why it’s so hard for players to then show bravery?
19. Finally, you come from a family of Wolverhampton Wanderers supporters – would managing them one day be a dream come true or would it be too close to the bone?
You’d have to ask the family that! My nine-year-old nephew, especially, is the world expert on what Wolves should or shouldn’t be doing so it would certainly be unforgiving in that respect! I’ve only ever been at clubs where I thought I was a good fit, and I’d never change my criteria for deciding whether a job was right for me. Bristol City is a very good fit for me currently. For all the challenges that come with a rebuilding project, and that is what we’re undertaking here, the rewards are greater when you see the work you’re doing with the team, with individuals and with the club as a whole bearing fruit. Football being football some people want to see the results of that work yesterday, but progress is being made and we’re excited about the potential of what the club could achieve if we keep heading in this direction.[/article]
I think it’s more and more the way clubs are going to go. I’m not saying it will work in every club but managing up in a football club, with someone acting as a liaison between the playing side and the board can be extremely useful. The responsibilities of, and demands, on a manager day-to-day have escalated massively in the 13 years I’ve been a manager. Your phone literally never stops ringing from 6am to midnight with agents, media and all the other stuff you have to look after at a club. If you trust someone to act on your behalf in the boardroom, and vice versa, then it takes a huge part of the job off your plate day-to-day. One of the biggest mistakes clubs make is appointing Directors of Football who have no relationship with the manager so it takes a while to build trust, if either party is able to relinquish enough ground to make that relationship work at all. But a Director of Football should have a massive say in the manager the club appoints based on the way the club wants to run and the qualities they want in a manager. A manager does still need to have a relationship with the owner and board but I’ve found our Director of Football/Head Coach relationship invaluable so far.
12. How do you, personally, learn and progress as a coach? Do you feel the job allows you any kind of creative expression and experimentation in the face of perpetual expectation?
Bizarrely that sense of perpetual expectation actually gives you a freedom to do what you want because, the way football is now, the likelihood is you’re going to lose your job at some point so you might as well lose your job having done things the way you think were right and achieved recognition for it in the process. For everyone who says Forest treated me poorly personally there can’t be too many better times to lose your job than off the back of a 4-2 win, an excellent performance and leaving the team a point off the play-offs! I’ve always been interested in what makes successful people continually successful, whether that’s sports teams, businesses, individuals anything. The one trait they all have is they put their faith in the processes knowing if they tick all those boxes they more often than not get the outcome they want. If they don’t get the outcome they have a reference point to understand why they didn’t perform or they were beaten and learn from it to improve. It’s not what football fans want to hear half the time but for me it’s the only way that makes sense.
13. In your experience, do coaches in this country do enough to broaden their own horizons? For example, do they embrace sports science and technology enough?
There’s always a balance with sports science and technology; football’s played on grass with 22 players not in a lab. I’ve always been interested in all the elements of performance both physical and mental but you have to apply it properly. I have people come to me and say ‘Look at this stat, or look at that stat’ and my first response is always ‘But what does that actually mean?’ So what if someone runs 5k in a game? That stat alone means nothing. If my centre-forward, who’s been tasked with closing down defenders and stopping them playing, runs 5k it suggests he’s done the job he’s been asked to do, but if my centre half is running 5k I would ask ‘Why??’ There’s too much credence given to basic human effort in football in this country, that running 10k in a game is a badge of honour and reflects commitment in some way. But I’d rather a player ran 7k but used every metre more effectively than come out with 10k pitch coverage stats. There are so, so many things like that. Psychology is still sneered at in this country, and seen as a weakness or an emotional crutch, but all the top Olympic sports swear by mental training. The work Dr Steve Peters has done with British Cycling has been universally applauded yet in football any intervention like that is still greeted with cynicism. Players have to be convinced it works because it’s alien to them. It makes no sense.
14. You’ve spoken of your admiration of innovative managers like Roberto Martinez in the past. Do you sneak a grin when you see tactically adventurous smaller teams, like his former Wigan side, pull off an upset against bigger teams?
Not really but it just goes back to the point of preparing properly. Man for man a Wigan shouldn’t be able to beat a Man City but if you can spot where you can capitalise on their weaknesses and then make the most of your strengths you’ve got half a chance. Lose and you get accused of worrying too much about the opposition, win and you’re a tactical genius. Sometimes you just need players to be brave and, as easy as it sounds to the man in the stands, having the bollocks to take a risk on a football pitch is one of the hardest things you can ask them to do. Playing safe maybe the easy option as it stops the onus being on them if they make a mistake but how many ‘safe’ teams have won trophies over the years? The way Spain and Barcelona play requires bravery, the way Bayern Munich play requires bravery, the way Swansea and Bournemouth play requires bravery, it’s just a different kind of bravery to what we typically view as bravery in this country.
15. Managers have often called for the implementation of a transfer window of their own, allowing changes to be made at certain points of the season. Invariably, changes are often made either in the summer or just before January – could you ever see that idea working?
Sometimes managers’ jobs are untenable; football clubs have to blame somebody and that will never change. Sometimes, obviously the manager is culpable for the failings of a team or squad but how many decisions are made purely in terms of results, rather than the context of a club’s overall objectives for a season? I can see a time when you can only change managers at certain time during the season but that won’t stop clubs trying to get shot of managers outside that period, by putting them on gardening leave and other similar tactics. If that day ever comes the LMA legal department would probably have to double its number of lawyers!
16. Has international management ever crossed your thoughts or would you implode with boredom?
I don’t understand what international managers do for 10 months of the year. You see them at a lot of games at the weekends but then what? You never say never, and I wish that more English coaches from the Football League were considered for key roles in the international set-up because sometimes you get the feeling they are just appointing safely rather than acknowledging some of the coaching innovation that is actually going on below the Premier League. But I enjoy being on the training pitch with players day after day and feeling like you’re making a tangible difference to their own individual improvement and the improvement of a team.
17. How far are England from being anywhere near a major footballing final? Do you keep tabs on the international scene?
Watching the England football team frustrates the hell out of me. Sometimes the fear in the players is palpable, they desperately don’t want to be the one to make the mistake that then leads to them having the wrath of the media and nation rain on them. That’s why Rooney was such a breath of fresh air when he first broke through, and Wilshere more recently; because they played without fear, they were prepared to take responsibility on the pitch and if they made a mistake they didn’t let it cripple them. But that can get beaten out of a player. England players rarely look like they’re enjoying playing for their country, which is sad. The individuals we have had in this generation of players – Gerrard, Lampard, Rooney, Terry, Cole, Ferdinand – are unbelievably talented yet they have never succeeded as a group. Why? Because they are asked to play week in, week out one way for their clubs and then go off to England and are asked to play in a totally different way because the nation demands it. Is it any wonder we don’t succeed?
Spain and Barcelona could be the same team, Bayern Munich and Germany too. The successful international teams play in a way that is common in their domestic leagues, but we don’t. We can’t expect players who play like English players in the Premier League to suddenly play like Barcelona when they play for England, the whole idea is absurd. Yet that’s the criticism they have levelled at them all the time, that we’re not as technically good as other countries. We’re not but that goes back to coaching development at the youngest ages again. We want to win the World Cup then scrap relegation to and from the Premier League because teams will start trusting and blooding English players. Give international players central contracts too like England cricket and rugby have so that they can spend more time as part of the international set-up. We want to win the World Cup then let’s actually do something about it but we don’t really because the implications of the changes we would have to make would be unpalatable to our domestic game. We want our cake and to eat it. It’s unrealistic. But should we still have done better in recent tournaments? Probably.
18. What is ‘footballing intelligence’ to you? Is intelligence valued in this country or do we still rely on physicality in players?
Football intelligence is worryingly rare in this country and that stems from the coaching players have had at the youngest age where they are just told what to do, and don’t have to make decisions for themselves. Football intelligence only comes from a player understanding the game that is actually going on around him, not the game he wants to play in his head. But how do you ever develop that if you are just doing what you’re told, not thinking about it. Players with good football intelligence also tend to be good leaders on the pitch as they get what’s actually going on and is needed at any moment in a game. Of course there is a place for physicality, but there is also the tendency that if Plan A isn’t working let’s throw on the big man and see what chaos he can cause. When you’re neck is constantly on the line, as it is with managers in this country, the brave thing to do isn’t always the easiest and we wonder why it’s so hard for players to then show bravery?
19. Finally, you come from a family of Wolverhampton Wanderers supporters – would managing them one day be a dream come true or would it be too close to the bone?
You’d have to ask the family that! My nine-year-old nephew, especially, is the world expert on what Wolves should or shouldn’t be doing so it would certainly be unforgiving in that respect! I’ve only ever been at clubs where I thought I was a good fit, and I’d never change my criteria for deciding whether a job was right for me. Bristol City is a very good fit for me currently. For all the challenges that come with a rebuilding project, and that is what we’re undertaking here, the rewards are greater when you see the work you’re doing with the team, with individuals and with the club as a whole bearing fruit. Football being football some people want to see the results of that work yesterday, but progress is being made and we’re excited about the potential of what the club could achieve if we keep heading in this direction.[/article]
Seems like the next in a long line of yer nouveau hipster football coach who talks a magnificent game, but has won two bits of fuck all.
In an 18 year coaching career, this man has never managed beyond the Championship or won a single thing. He's been sacked by every lower league club he's gone near.
And now he's the 2nd most important coach at our club. This is what we're surrounding our players with; guys who don't know what it takes to win, and have zero experience of success to draw upon.
When did someone's 'philosophy on coaching' usurp 'winning' as the most desirable attribute for recruiting coaches at our football club?
In an 18 year coaching career, this man has never managed beyond the Championship or won a single thing. He's been sacked by every lower league club he's gone near.
And now he's the 2nd most important coach at our club. This is what we're surrounding our players with; guys who don't know what it takes to win, and have zero experience of success to draw upon.
When did someone's 'philosophy on coaching' usurp 'winning' as the most desirable attribute for recruiting coaches at our football club?
Dated Sep 2010
[article=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1312704/Doncaster-boss-ODriscoll-explains-secret-success-Keepmoat.html]The logo on the signs that pepper the route to Cantley Park , where Doncaster Rovers train adjacent to the racecourse, tells the visitor to ‘Discover the Spirit’.
An hour in the company of manager Sean O’Driscoll reveals that it resides in him. Ideological and combative, O’Driscoll is not the quiet man of common portrayal, the one nicknamed ‘Noisy’ years ago.
He is the voice of a Doncaster side who tonight can move second in the Championship by defeating Leeds United.
Given that Rovers beat Leeds in the play-off final two years ago, and given they were eighth in the Championship table in mid-March last season, it may soon be time to consider ‘Donny’ promotion contenders.
Having been relegated from the Football League in 1998 and been in the Conference in 2003, Doncaster could become the first club to leave the four divisions to return and reach the Premier League. It would be some story. Just don’t ask O’Driscoll clichéd questions about it.
The 53-year-old former Bournemouth player and manager has disdain for glib reporters, for what he calls ‘football rhetoric’ and for a ‘lack of thought’ in general.
Asked about Doncaster’s ambition this season, O’Driscoll’s reply is: ‘Our ambition is to win the next game.’
And beyond that? ‘Win the next game. That’s my ambition.’
But as a club? ‘I don’t know, you better ask the board. My influence is on the football team and I’ll implement the culture I think will win games.
'But in a 46-game season you’re not going to win every game.’
O’Driscoll argues that because the average lifespan of a Championship manager is 18 months, coaches are ‘battered into “three points” every week’ and he is unimpressed.
‘Then you end up coaching like that. Nobody gets time, so you focus on results. Are you going to ask a goalkeeper to roll the ball out from the back if you “need a result”?
'All you’re doing is breeding managers you don’t want to breed. The culture breeds the personalities within it.’
Warming to his theme, O’Driscoll adds: ‘To stay in this division and avoid relegation you need to do certain things. To win promotion you need to do certain things. Write a list and they’d be no different — except for money.
'They’d be things like organisation, attitude, discipline, so why treat it differently? But you have to articulate it: what does organisation look like to a Championship team?
'We think we know — for us — but when people say, “They’re a well-organised team”, what exactly does that mean?
‘Is 4-4-2 rigid? We’ve just had an England team lambasted for that. People think 4-4-2 is tactics; it’s nothing to do with tactics, it’s a structure.
'Within the structure you can do whatever you want. It could be the most fluid system in the world.
'The problem with England was that their 4-4-2 was rigid. They needed to be fluid. But when you’re playing against Spain, do you need a fluid 4-4-2?
'Do you f***. You need to be rigid because they’re better than us.
‘All I can do is send out a team with certain values and the players operate within that. They can agree or disagree but if they disagree it needs to be logical.
'They can’t just disagree because someone in the stands or on the telly said something. But there’s no thought, people do things because they’ve always been done.’
O’Driscoll wants his players to be as curious as he was — ‘If you speak to Harry Redknapp, he’ll tell you I drove him mad’ — but he is sometimes dismayed.
‘I don’t know what players know, I’m gobsmacked at times by what they don’t know. They’re never asked to think. We breed players from eight years old who never ask “Why are we doing this?” or “How does this work?” — thinking players, who evolve.
'All our coaching philosophies here are about understanding your responsibilities. Some players fly with it, some find it difficult, some of the older ones want to be told.
‘We want them to be the decision-makers, we want them to understand their role in the team.
'Suddenly they’ re thinking players.’
As an example of the philosophy O’Driscoll has introduced since he succeeded Dave Penney in 2006 when Doncaster were third tier, he refers to Andres Iniesta’s goal at Stamford Bridge in the Champions League semi-final two seasons ago.
‘We taped the Iniesta goal and showed the players. Barcelona passed and passed and passed and if they’d lost the game then people would have said just that.
'So the outcome dictated what people said about it. We’re trying to say, “Forget the outcome, have a look at it for what it is”.
‘To go back to your original question about where that will take us, I haven’t got a clue. And in some senses, I don’t care. It’s pointless if I’m fixated on promotion.
‘I’m under no illusions that I have to win matches but for me the best way to do that is to have a team that is flexible, made of players who understand why we do what we do.
'And when we do that well, we’re as good as anybody.’[/article]
[article=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1312704/Doncaster-boss-ODriscoll-explains-secret-success-Keepmoat.html]The logo on the signs that pepper the route to Cantley Park , where Doncaster Rovers train adjacent to the racecourse, tells the visitor to ‘Discover the Spirit’.
An hour in the company of manager Sean O’Driscoll reveals that it resides in him. Ideological and combative, O’Driscoll is not the quiet man of common portrayal, the one nicknamed ‘Noisy’ years ago.
He is the voice of a Doncaster side who tonight can move second in the Championship by defeating Leeds United.
Given that Rovers beat Leeds in the play-off final two years ago, and given they were eighth in the Championship table in mid-March last season, it may soon be time to consider ‘Donny’ promotion contenders.
Having been relegated from the Football League in 1998 and been in the Conference in 2003, Doncaster could become the first club to leave the four divisions to return and reach the Premier League. It would be some story. Just don’t ask O’Driscoll clichéd questions about it.
The 53-year-old former Bournemouth player and manager has disdain for glib reporters, for what he calls ‘football rhetoric’ and for a ‘lack of thought’ in general.
Asked about Doncaster’s ambition this season, O’Driscoll’s reply is: ‘Our ambition is to win the next game.’
And beyond that? ‘Win the next game. That’s my ambition.’
But as a club? ‘I don’t know, you better ask the board. My influence is on the football team and I’ll implement the culture I think will win games.
'But in a 46-game season you’re not going to win every game.’
O’Driscoll argues that because the average lifespan of a Championship manager is 18 months, coaches are ‘battered into “three points” every week’ and he is unimpressed.
‘Then you end up coaching like that. Nobody gets time, so you focus on results. Are you going to ask a goalkeeper to roll the ball out from the back if you “need a result”?
'All you’re doing is breeding managers you don’t want to breed. The culture breeds the personalities within it.’
Warming to his theme, O’Driscoll adds: ‘To stay in this division and avoid relegation you need to do certain things. To win promotion you need to do certain things. Write a list and they’d be no different — except for money.
'They’d be things like organisation, attitude, discipline, so why treat it differently? But you have to articulate it: what does organisation look like to a Championship team?
'We think we know — for us — but when people say, “They’re a well-organised team”, what exactly does that mean?
‘Is 4-4-2 rigid? We’ve just had an England team lambasted for that. People think 4-4-2 is tactics; it’s nothing to do with tactics, it’s a structure.
'Within the structure you can do whatever you want. It could be the most fluid system in the world.
'The problem with England was that their 4-4-2 was rigid. They needed to be fluid. But when you’re playing against Spain, do you need a fluid 4-4-2?
'Do you f***. You need to be rigid because they’re better than us.
‘All I can do is send out a team with certain values and the players operate within that. They can agree or disagree but if they disagree it needs to be logical.
'They can’t just disagree because someone in the stands or on the telly said something. But there’s no thought, people do things because they’ve always been done.’
O’Driscoll wants his players to be as curious as he was — ‘If you speak to Harry Redknapp, he’ll tell you I drove him mad’ — but he is sometimes dismayed.
‘I don’t know what players know, I’m gobsmacked at times by what they don’t know. They’re never asked to think. We breed players from eight years old who never ask “Why are we doing this?” or “How does this work?” — thinking players, who evolve.
'All our coaching philosophies here are about understanding your responsibilities. Some players fly with it, some find it difficult, some of the older ones want to be told.
‘We want them to be the decision-makers, we want them to understand their role in the team.
'Suddenly they’ re thinking players.’
As an example of the philosophy O’Driscoll has introduced since he succeeded Dave Penney in 2006 when Doncaster were third tier, he refers to Andres Iniesta’s goal at Stamford Bridge in the Champions League semi-final two seasons ago.
‘We taped the Iniesta goal and showed the players. Barcelona passed and passed and passed and if they’d lost the game then people would have said just that.
'So the outcome dictated what people said about it. We’re trying to say, “Forget the outcome, have a look at it for what it is”.
‘To go back to your original question about where that will take us, I haven’t got a clue. And in some senses, I don’t care. It’s pointless if I’m fixated on promotion.
‘I’m under no illusions that I have to win matches but for me the best way to do that is to have a team that is flexible, made of players who understand why we do what we do.
'And when we do that well, we’re as good as anybody.’[/article]
Sorry for the long posts. This is the last from me.
Dated Jun 2009
[article]He’s the first person we meet at the training ground and he’s emptying the rubbish bins in a classic everyone-gets-their-hands-dirty-in-a-small-club kind of way. As we begin the interview he has only one request:
Don’t ask me stupid questions. You know what I mean. You come off and you’ve lost 3-0 and they ask how does it feel or ‘are you going to get relegated?’ What am I supposed to answer?
His disdain of the clichéd football manager, their media personas and clichéd responses will be a recurrent theme as we talk. Here is a man who simply wants to get on with the job and stay well clear of the politics.
To be honest, if you stay away from the media it’s possibly the best thing you can do because if you read everything that people write about you, one minute you’re this and the next you’re something else completely different. I’ve been here two and half seasons and I ain’t read a local newspaper yet.[/article]
[article]Wouldn’t most fans think these sorts of things are already in place in Premiership/Championship clubs?
I don’t know. I think fans going to football matches supporting their teams is commonsense but I go to millions of games where people sit there and don’t support their team, they just moan and groan. Why do they bother going if all they’re doing is moaning at their team? I can’t see how that helps.[/article]
[article]Do you think that’s a more modern phenomenon because fans’ expectations are raised and they want success quicker?
I just think it’s indicative of football generally. Football is exciting and popular, everybody can have an opinion and no-one’s wrong. You can play Championship Manager on your X-box and win the league and think ‘I’m good at this’. Everybody thinks they can do it better than everyone else.[/article]
[article]So has this season has been a learning curve on and off the pitch?
When we came in their byword was Destination Championship but there was nothing underpinning it, no strategy as to how it was going to be achieved, just a strapline. All it did was to put the backs up of every other club in the division thinking we were the big-time charlies. It set us up to fail so we tried to get away from that. Everything now is about performance. We’ve taken away winning and losing and we talk about the performance levels that we need to achieve.
We wanted to get away from looking at whether or not we’d won or lost a game 5-0 to looking at our performance.
Football rhetoric gets up my nose. People say ‘I don’t care how we do it, I just want to win’. That’s fine, I’ll take 46 games winning 1-0 and playing crap but tell me how you do it. I can’t remember any games this season where we’ve played badly and won 1-0. We want to play well and I’d rather we win but if we’re going to lose I’d rather we play well doing it.[/article]
[article]So on a Monday morning you can take positives from the performance?
Well, you can’t put your head in the sand, you have to be realistic about it and say you’ve done well on these things but not so well on these. You ask yourself why you played well and lost 1-0 and it might be that you switched off at a set play. Every team switches off at set plays, it’s not just a Championship phenomenon but there are better players with better delivery so they take advantage more and that’s the difference. So I tell our players that no-one can concentrate for 90 minutes but you’ve got to realise that giving the ball away in the last third of the pitch will lead to goals. When the ball goes out in that area never mind who should be in what position, we have to get the reaction first then the other things will fall into place. Nothing will matter if the players don’t realise the importance of that situation.
What you don’t want is a situation where you’re telling the players something and they’re thinking ‘this is just one manager telling me this and when someone else comes in he’ll tell me something different’. I tell them every game they ever play will have a structure to it, whether you play QPR, Sheffield United or Real Madrid, the game will have a structure and things won’t change. You can alter it but only in the way you want to.
Nine times out of 10, apart from us and Swansea, most Championship teams play the same way. The personnel will be different but the structure will be the same. At the start of each game you know the goalkeeper will kick the ball an average of 35 times so that’s 70 times the goalkeepers will kick the ball. Now you have choice of whether your keeper throws out, kicks or drops the ball. But if you think that the ball is only in play for 60 minutes out of every 90-minute game that’s a massive chunk of the game you can’t control and so you have to be in certain positions when the keepers are distributing the ball. Where you are in relation to what you want to do with the ball and what your opposition wants to do is at these times, is massive and it’s got nothing to do with football.
I don’t have to be a football expert to know that if he’s going to kick the ball into this area of the pitch and we want to win it, then it’s a logistical problem. How many people do we want to put in that position to gain possession and when we do get possession we can play the way we want to play. If we don’t then there’s certain things we need to do. These are the boring bits of coaching but they’re fundamental.[/article]
[article]Do you find your players react to that?
Well I was a player for 15 years, I’ve done all my coaching badges, pro-licences and all that sort of thing and I’ve picked up bits from elsewhere but I’ve found that no-one these days asks ‘why we do it that way?’ All the sports that are innovative and forward thinking, like British cycling, have had people who have asked why do we do this and why do we train that way. When I was a player I used to lose on a Saturday and on Sunday morning I’d be running up and down hills and I’d think why am I doing this?[/article]
[article]So is yours a more analytical approach to the game?
I was 22 before I came into the game and I’d been in work so maybe that’s why my approach is different. I wouldn’t say it’s analytical I think it’s just common sense.[/article]
[article]It is commonsense but is it also common in football and do you think you’re in a minority in thinking this way?
Yes because the way football is run there’s no point really. The average tenure of a job is less than 18 months. You’re trying to put something together which is long term and all that really matters is trying to win the next game so f**k everything else, managers just need to win the next game. Then you win the next game and you’re supposedly a better manager for it, then you win the next one after that and all of a sudden you’re going to jump ship because someone else wants you. The whole thing is cyclical.
I did the Warwick Business Course for football managers and we did a lot of essays and reports and one day I took the Sunday papers and cut out every sports headline, 85% of which were negative. It might have been Man Utd beating Spurs 6-0 but it wasn’t about how great Man Utd were, it was about how crap Spurs were. So you’re in an industry which pounds you with negativity all the time. You’re not going to change that but you can distance yourself from it. Radio Sheffield have their Praise or Grumble show but it should be renamed Moan and Groan because I just don’t know where the praise is.[/article]
[article]If you look at the two differing halves of your season can you tell what happened to make things go well?
No. Our performances throughout the season have been really, really consistent – we couldn’t score goals and we were giving away goals, which is how you lose games. We played QPR in the third game of the season and Iain Dowie changed the way he played. We were a brand new team into the Championship and afterwards I said to Iain why did you play 4-5-1 against us? And he said he’d seen us play and he didn’t think he could match our midfield (having a squad with zillions of midfielders and bugger all strikers may also have contributed – London W12 Ed.). That used to happen in League One but it didn’t happen much in the Championship. Most teams played 4-4-2 against us. We gave a goal away in the QPR game because Richie Wellens threw the ball back to a QPR player who had a free kick in his own half. He placed it, next fella whacked it and they scored off that. It might have been crap marking when the ball went in but it’s naive to give the ball back in this league. It meant that Richie was out of position and it gave the opposition an opportunity. We had to tweak those sorts of things.
We had a similar thing at the back end of the season against Preston when one of my centre halves kicked the ball out of play but instead of putting it into row Z, he put it out of play accidentally chipping it to one of their subs who sent it back to the player, the throw was taken quickly, bang, ball in the box, goal.
When we sat down and looked at performances we couldn’t score goals. So we thought we’ll either spend millions on a new striker or nurture the ones we’d got. We couldn’t buy one so we nurtured ours. We took the focus away from scoring goals. We create lots of chances and to create chances you’ve got to pass and move. To pass and move you’ve got to have an understanding of what you’re doing and your role and responsibilities. So although we didn’t have the end product we could say that we were doing the three things that lead up to the end product really well. We did those things right and we told the strikers ‘don’t be afraid to miss’. Then we scored a goal against Forest on Boxing Day. It involved 19 passes and the striker chipped the goalkeeper and from that moment on they believed they were going to score.[/article]
[article]Do you think Swansea deserved more rewards for their style of football this season?
I said to Roberto they drew too many games. Had we drawn some of the ones we’d lost we’d have been much better off. The problem is that the more you pass the ball the more chance you have of losing possession so it’s a dangerous way to play in the English league especially the way our league is organised. We know that the way we pass the ball means that we will lose games. We don’t like it but we have to accept that it’s part and parcel of the way we play. We have to sharpen up on certain things. Our players have to become more tactically aware. They have to know that if teams come here and play 4-5-1 against us and we try to play through their midfield we will walk into their trap.
Birmingham came here and played 4-5-1 and we had a message up on our changing room board which was the last thing the players saw before they went out and it said: DO NOT PLAY THROUGH MIDFIELD. I told them if we bypassed their midfield Birmingham’s game plan was out of the window. But they did play through the middle. I had absolutely no problem with them trying but once they tried and failed they became discouraged so what was the point in doing it in the first place. I didn’t mind that we lost the game but I thought we lost it through being naive. That’s a basic thing and it’s common sense.
And then when things don’t go your way people’s body language changes. A player takes a shot which hits the corner flag and the crowd moan and everyone walks back with their heads down thinking we’re all crap and other players feed off that. As a team we should be saying he took responsibility for that shot, it was a crap shot and he doesn’t need to be told that, but the positive is that he got himself into a position and took the responsibility for a shot. So if everyone supported and praised him then the whole atmosphere changes.
I’ve watched team after team after team this season all behaving the same way. It’s all negative and I think it’s a strange way for sports teams to behave. You can be disappointed but still be positive in the way you do things. So if the ball goes out for a goalkick because your striker’s hit the ball way over the goal, the next step is a goalkick and if we all get back into position and regain possession quickly then we’re off on the attack again and if we all have that mentality you forget about the shot and get on to the next stage of play.[/article]
[article]You bought goalfood’s Pass and Move T-shirt – is that your mantra?
We never do passing drills in training. We try to give people options on the ball and the thing I’m trying to coach is for the player to pick the right option, which is what the better players do. I get scouting reports which say ‘he gives the ball away too much’ but I’m trying to train the scouts to ask ‘was it the right ball to play?’ Football’s about giving the ball away – but was it the right pass at the right time? Sometimes I’m more concerned about that than I am about whether or not he completed the pass. I can’t buy someone for a million quid but I want to get someone in who can see options and can take the right one. I’m in a market where I can afford a player because he’s cheap but I have to know that I can develop him because he has the raw materials I can work with. Right pass, right time – that’s two out of three and I can work on the rest. So I just hadn’t seen a T-shirt like that before and I liked it.[/article]
[article]Your chairman once called you the Arsene Wenger of League One, has that stuck like Velcro to you?
No, to be fair, John (Ryan) is as passionate and excitable as they come. I wouldn’t have thought I’m media-friendly so I’m reluctant to do a lot of things so it suits us for him to do interviews. Just sometimes I cringe a little bit.
But he says what he admires about you is that you’re able to squeeze an extra 15% out of players.
Squeezing’s not the word, we just ask them to do different things and look at doing things a different way. We’ll put a session on which has five players against eight and we say to the five can you win the game? And they say yes because we’ll do this, this and that. They know they have to be tight in defence but they have to score a goal. Now, I haven’t said anything to them but they’ve organised themselves, they’ve understood what the task is and have taken responsibility to do it. You’re coaching both sets of players – you would hope the five would lose but can take positives from the fact they did the best they could and know what they would do to improve their performance next time round.
One of my stock phrases in coaching is: ‘would you do it in a game?’ I’ve no problem with the keeper rolling the ball out to the centre-half on the edge of the area so long as that’s what they would do in a game. If it’s not it’s pointless and what are we doing it for in training. I can give direction but the players have to have input too. Once they’ve crossed the white line they have to make the decisions and I’m not going to criticise them for making the wrong decision as long as they knew what they were trying to do. So it’s about understanding and responsibility and we instill that from the first minute they walk out onto the training pitch and even before that.
There’s lots of things in football which have nothing whatsoever to do with winning or losing but in our opinion they all make a difference. You have to walk off the pitch and say: ‘have I done everything I can?’
We were sitting bottom of the league this season and we had a meeting about where we were and what we were going to do and I think we came up with 23 things we thought we could do better and not one of them was football-based. The kit man said people were leaving laundry all over the floor yet there’s a laundry system and we asked players to pick things up off the floor even if the clothes were not theirs.
We’ve got a Be Professional matrix on the board and there’s about 11 things we identified that would make us professional at what we do. It was nothing to do with scoring more goals or defending better, it was about being punctual and having respect for one another. It’s what I imagine, although I don’t know, Manchester United do every day, but in a different way. The culture there is about excellence and as you walk through the doors of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool or Chelsea there’s certain things demanded of you, week in, week out.[/article]
[article]It sounds as if you’re putting quite a lot into practice from the Warwick course for football managers?
I liked the course. There were 12 of us on my course including Mark Hughes, Brian McClair and people like that. The first task we did involved us being told that as managers we’d just been promoted from the Championship, our budget had increased by x amount, here’s your balance sheet and now what’s your plan? How much are you going to spend on wages? How are you going to balance the books? Forget about the playing, how are you going to manage what you do? We all knew that the idea was still to win games but I thought it was absolutely crucial to know about the rest.
I don’t mean to be different or try to be deliberately different, I just think we can look at things a different way. If we have a free kick in our own half the two centre halves trot up as usual every time and yet they might not be needed so why do they just trot up there – because that’s what they do, and they stand next to each other. So I say to them: ‘if you know their two biggest markers are going to mark you why don’t you stand somewhere different?’ And the players say ‘because we won’t score’ and I say but you’ll give them an awful lot of problems and then we can do something different. If it doesn’t come off I haven’t got a problem but at least we did something different. Let’s not just do things out of habit. These are the interesting and exciting things about football, that’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. 90% of it unfortunately is just tiresome.[/article]
[article=http://www.crawleyobserver.co.uk/sport/crawley-town-fc/reds-linked-with-arsene-wenger-of-league-1-1-3845319]Len South, chairman of the Doncaster Rovers Supporters Club said: “We consider him probably one of the best managers we have ever had.
“He likes to play football, he likes players to get the ball down, he is not one of those who wants it lumped up front. He is a tactician, you could say a bit of purist, he likes football the way it should be played, and was described by our chairman as the Arsene Wenger of the lower leagues.
“If Crawley do appoint O’Driscoll I would say they have got some good football to look forward to, he would be good for Crawley, he could do a lot of good for a club like that.”
O’Driscoll, 54, joined Doncaster in 2006 from Bournemouth, where he spent six years as manager. He is now part of the coaching set-up at Championship side Nottingham Forest, where manager Steve Cotterill has this week reportedly confirmed Crawley’s interest. During his time at Doncaster, now relegated to League 1, O’Driscoll regularly held fans forums, and although results took a nose dive this season, is still highly regarded.
Len added: “He always wanted to be in touch with the fans, they might not like some of the answers he gave them in those forums, but he was there to be shot at.
“He is a very quiet man and does not suffer fools easily.
“Due to cash constraints, we lost two strikers right at the start of the season and he struggled to find a way to put it right. From a personal point of view, I don’t think he knew how to put it right.”.[/article]
Dated Jun 2009
[article]He’s the first person we meet at the training ground and he’s emptying the rubbish bins in a classic everyone-gets-their-hands-dirty-in-a-small-club kind of way. As we begin the interview he has only one request:
Don’t ask me stupid questions. You know what I mean. You come off and you’ve lost 3-0 and they ask how does it feel or ‘are you going to get relegated?’ What am I supposed to answer?
His disdain of the clichéd football manager, their media personas and clichéd responses will be a recurrent theme as we talk. Here is a man who simply wants to get on with the job and stay well clear of the politics.
To be honest, if you stay away from the media it’s possibly the best thing you can do because if you read everything that people write about you, one minute you’re this and the next you’re something else completely different. I’ve been here two and half seasons and I ain’t read a local newspaper yet.[/article]
[article]Wouldn’t most fans think these sorts of things are already in place in Premiership/Championship clubs?
I don’t know. I think fans going to football matches supporting their teams is commonsense but I go to millions of games where people sit there and don’t support their team, they just moan and groan. Why do they bother going if all they’re doing is moaning at their team? I can’t see how that helps.[/article]
[article]Do you think that’s a more modern phenomenon because fans’ expectations are raised and they want success quicker?
I just think it’s indicative of football generally. Football is exciting and popular, everybody can have an opinion and no-one’s wrong. You can play Championship Manager on your X-box and win the league and think ‘I’m good at this’. Everybody thinks they can do it better than everyone else.[/article]
[article]So has this season has been a learning curve on and off the pitch?
When we came in their byword was Destination Championship but there was nothing underpinning it, no strategy as to how it was going to be achieved, just a strapline. All it did was to put the backs up of every other club in the division thinking we were the big-time charlies. It set us up to fail so we tried to get away from that. Everything now is about performance. We’ve taken away winning and losing and we talk about the performance levels that we need to achieve.
We wanted to get away from looking at whether or not we’d won or lost a game 5-0 to looking at our performance.
Football rhetoric gets up my nose. People say ‘I don’t care how we do it, I just want to win’. That’s fine, I’ll take 46 games winning 1-0 and playing crap but tell me how you do it. I can’t remember any games this season where we’ve played badly and won 1-0. We want to play well and I’d rather we win but if we’re going to lose I’d rather we play well doing it.[/article]
[article]So on a Monday morning you can take positives from the performance?
Well, you can’t put your head in the sand, you have to be realistic about it and say you’ve done well on these things but not so well on these. You ask yourself why you played well and lost 1-0 and it might be that you switched off at a set play. Every team switches off at set plays, it’s not just a Championship phenomenon but there are better players with better delivery so they take advantage more and that’s the difference. So I tell our players that no-one can concentrate for 90 minutes but you’ve got to realise that giving the ball away in the last third of the pitch will lead to goals. When the ball goes out in that area never mind who should be in what position, we have to get the reaction first then the other things will fall into place. Nothing will matter if the players don’t realise the importance of that situation.
What you don’t want is a situation where you’re telling the players something and they’re thinking ‘this is just one manager telling me this and when someone else comes in he’ll tell me something different’. I tell them every game they ever play will have a structure to it, whether you play QPR, Sheffield United or Real Madrid, the game will have a structure and things won’t change. You can alter it but only in the way you want to.
Nine times out of 10, apart from us and Swansea, most Championship teams play the same way. The personnel will be different but the structure will be the same. At the start of each game you know the goalkeeper will kick the ball an average of 35 times so that’s 70 times the goalkeepers will kick the ball. Now you have choice of whether your keeper throws out, kicks or drops the ball. But if you think that the ball is only in play for 60 minutes out of every 90-minute game that’s a massive chunk of the game you can’t control and so you have to be in certain positions when the keepers are distributing the ball. Where you are in relation to what you want to do with the ball and what your opposition wants to do is at these times, is massive and it’s got nothing to do with football.
I don’t have to be a football expert to know that if he’s going to kick the ball into this area of the pitch and we want to win it, then it’s a logistical problem. How many people do we want to put in that position to gain possession and when we do get possession we can play the way we want to play. If we don’t then there’s certain things we need to do. These are the boring bits of coaching but they’re fundamental.[/article]
[article]Do you find your players react to that?
Well I was a player for 15 years, I’ve done all my coaching badges, pro-licences and all that sort of thing and I’ve picked up bits from elsewhere but I’ve found that no-one these days asks ‘why we do it that way?’ All the sports that are innovative and forward thinking, like British cycling, have had people who have asked why do we do this and why do we train that way. When I was a player I used to lose on a Saturday and on Sunday morning I’d be running up and down hills and I’d think why am I doing this?[/article]
[article]So is yours a more analytical approach to the game?
I was 22 before I came into the game and I’d been in work so maybe that’s why my approach is different. I wouldn’t say it’s analytical I think it’s just common sense.[/article]
[article]It is commonsense but is it also common in football and do you think you’re in a minority in thinking this way?
Yes because the way football is run there’s no point really. The average tenure of a job is less than 18 months. You’re trying to put something together which is long term and all that really matters is trying to win the next game so f**k everything else, managers just need to win the next game. Then you win the next game and you’re supposedly a better manager for it, then you win the next one after that and all of a sudden you’re going to jump ship because someone else wants you. The whole thing is cyclical.
I did the Warwick Business Course for football managers and we did a lot of essays and reports and one day I took the Sunday papers and cut out every sports headline, 85% of which were negative. It might have been Man Utd beating Spurs 6-0 but it wasn’t about how great Man Utd were, it was about how crap Spurs were. So you’re in an industry which pounds you with negativity all the time. You’re not going to change that but you can distance yourself from it. Radio Sheffield have their Praise or Grumble show but it should be renamed Moan and Groan because I just don’t know where the praise is.[/article]
[article]If you look at the two differing halves of your season can you tell what happened to make things go well?
No. Our performances throughout the season have been really, really consistent – we couldn’t score goals and we were giving away goals, which is how you lose games. We played QPR in the third game of the season and Iain Dowie changed the way he played. We were a brand new team into the Championship and afterwards I said to Iain why did you play 4-5-1 against us? And he said he’d seen us play and he didn’t think he could match our midfield (having a squad with zillions of midfielders and bugger all strikers may also have contributed – London W12 Ed.). That used to happen in League One but it didn’t happen much in the Championship. Most teams played 4-4-2 against us. We gave a goal away in the QPR game because Richie Wellens threw the ball back to a QPR player who had a free kick in his own half. He placed it, next fella whacked it and they scored off that. It might have been crap marking when the ball went in but it’s naive to give the ball back in this league. It meant that Richie was out of position and it gave the opposition an opportunity. We had to tweak those sorts of things.
We had a similar thing at the back end of the season against Preston when one of my centre halves kicked the ball out of play but instead of putting it into row Z, he put it out of play accidentally chipping it to one of their subs who sent it back to the player, the throw was taken quickly, bang, ball in the box, goal.
When we sat down and looked at performances we couldn’t score goals. So we thought we’ll either spend millions on a new striker or nurture the ones we’d got. We couldn’t buy one so we nurtured ours. We took the focus away from scoring goals. We create lots of chances and to create chances you’ve got to pass and move. To pass and move you’ve got to have an understanding of what you’re doing and your role and responsibilities. So although we didn’t have the end product we could say that we were doing the three things that lead up to the end product really well. We did those things right and we told the strikers ‘don’t be afraid to miss’. Then we scored a goal against Forest on Boxing Day. It involved 19 passes and the striker chipped the goalkeeper and from that moment on they believed they were going to score.[/article]
[article]Do you think Swansea deserved more rewards for their style of football this season?
I said to Roberto they drew too many games. Had we drawn some of the ones we’d lost we’d have been much better off. The problem is that the more you pass the ball the more chance you have of losing possession so it’s a dangerous way to play in the English league especially the way our league is organised. We know that the way we pass the ball means that we will lose games. We don’t like it but we have to accept that it’s part and parcel of the way we play. We have to sharpen up on certain things. Our players have to become more tactically aware. They have to know that if teams come here and play 4-5-1 against us and we try to play through their midfield we will walk into their trap.
Birmingham came here and played 4-5-1 and we had a message up on our changing room board which was the last thing the players saw before they went out and it said: DO NOT PLAY THROUGH MIDFIELD. I told them if we bypassed their midfield Birmingham’s game plan was out of the window. But they did play through the middle. I had absolutely no problem with them trying but once they tried and failed they became discouraged so what was the point in doing it in the first place. I didn’t mind that we lost the game but I thought we lost it through being naive. That’s a basic thing and it’s common sense.
And then when things don’t go your way people’s body language changes. A player takes a shot which hits the corner flag and the crowd moan and everyone walks back with their heads down thinking we’re all crap and other players feed off that. As a team we should be saying he took responsibility for that shot, it was a crap shot and he doesn’t need to be told that, but the positive is that he got himself into a position and took the responsibility for a shot. So if everyone supported and praised him then the whole atmosphere changes.
I’ve watched team after team after team this season all behaving the same way. It’s all negative and I think it’s a strange way for sports teams to behave. You can be disappointed but still be positive in the way you do things. So if the ball goes out for a goalkick because your striker’s hit the ball way over the goal, the next step is a goalkick and if we all get back into position and regain possession quickly then we’re off on the attack again and if we all have that mentality you forget about the shot and get on to the next stage of play.[/article]
[article]You bought goalfood’s Pass and Move T-shirt – is that your mantra?
We never do passing drills in training. We try to give people options on the ball and the thing I’m trying to coach is for the player to pick the right option, which is what the better players do. I get scouting reports which say ‘he gives the ball away too much’ but I’m trying to train the scouts to ask ‘was it the right ball to play?’ Football’s about giving the ball away – but was it the right pass at the right time? Sometimes I’m more concerned about that than I am about whether or not he completed the pass. I can’t buy someone for a million quid but I want to get someone in who can see options and can take the right one. I’m in a market where I can afford a player because he’s cheap but I have to know that I can develop him because he has the raw materials I can work with. Right pass, right time – that’s two out of three and I can work on the rest. So I just hadn’t seen a T-shirt like that before and I liked it.[/article]
[article]Your chairman once called you the Arsene Wenger of League One, has that stuck like Velcro to you?
No, to be fair, John (Ryan) is as passionate and excitable as they come. I wouldn’t have thought I’m media-friendly so I’m reluctant to do a lot of things so it suits us for him to do interviews. Just sometimes I cringe a little bit.
But he says what he admires about you is that you’re able to squeeze an extra 15% out of players.
Squeezing’s not the word, we just ask them to do different things and look at doing things a different way. We’ll put a session on which has five players against eight and we say to the five can you win the game? And they say yes because we’ll do this, this and that. They know they have to be tight in defence but they have to score a goal. Now, I haven’t said anything to them but they’ve organised themselves, they’ve understood what the task is and have taken responsibility to do it. You’re coaching both sets of players – you would hope the five would lose but can take positives from the fact they did the best they could and know what they would do to improve their performance next time round.
One of my stock phrases in coaching is: ‘would you do it in a game?’ I’ve no problem with the keeper rolling the ball out to the centre-half on the edge of the area so long as that’s what they would do in a game. If it’s not it’s pointless and what are we doing it for in training. I can give direction but the players have to have input too. Once they’ve crossed the white line they have to make the decisions and I’m not going to criticise them for making the wrong decision as long as they knew what they were trying to do. So it’s about understanding and responsibility and we instill that from the first minute they walk out onto the training pitch and even before that.
There’s lots of things in football which have nothing whatsoever to do with winning or losing but in our opinion they all make a difference. You have to walk off the pitch and say: ‘have I done everything I can?’
We were sitting bottom of the league this season and we had a meeting about where we were and what we were going to do and I think we came up with 23 things we thought we could do better and not one of them was football-based. The kit man said people were leaving laundry all over the floor yet there’s a laundry system and we asked players to pick things up off the floor even if the clothes were not theirs.
We’ve got a Be Professional matrix on the board and there’s about 11 things we identified that would make us professional at what we do. It was nothing to do with scoring more goals or defending better, it was about being punctual and having respect for one another. It’s what I imagine, although I don’t know, Manchester United do every day, but in a different way. The culture there is about excellence and as you walk through the doors of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool or Chelsea there’s certain things demanded of you, week in, week out.[/article]
[article]It sounds as if you’re putting quite a lot into practice from the Warwick course for football managers?
I liked the course. There were 12 of us on my course including Mark Hughes, Brian McClair and people like that. The first task we did involved us being told that as managers we’d just been promoted from the Championship, our budget had increased by x amount, here’s your balance sheet and now what’s your plan? How much are you going to spend on wages? How are you going to balance the books? Forget about the playing, how are you going to manage what you do? We all knew that the idea was still to win games but I thought it was absolutely crucial to know about the rest.
I don’t mean to be different or try to be deliberately different, I just think we can look at things a different way. If we have a free kick in our own half the two centre halves trot up as usual every time and yet they might not be needed so why do they just trot up there – because that’s what they do, and they stand next to each other. So I say to them: ‘if you know their two biggest markers are going to mark you why don’t you stand somewhere different?’ And the players say ‘because we won’t score’ and I say but you’ll give them an awful lot of problems and then we can do something different. If it doesn’t come off I haven’t got a problem but at least we did something different. Let’s not just do things out of habit. These are the interesting and exciting things about football, that’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. 90% of it unfortunately is just tiresome.[/article]
[article=http://www.crawleyobserver.co.uk/sport/crawley-town-fc/reds-linked-with-arsene-wenger-of-league-1-1-3845319]Len South, chairman of the Doncaster Rovers Supporters Club said: “We consider him probably one of the best managers we have ever had.
“He likes to play football, he likes players to get the ball down, he is not one of those who wants it lumped up front. He is a tactician, you could say a bit of purist, he likes football the way it should be played, and was described by our chairman as the Arsene Wenger of the lower leagues.
“If Crawley do appoint O’Driscoll I would say they have got some good football to look forward to, he would be good for Crawley, he could do a lot of good for a club like that.”
O’Driscoll, 54, joined Doncaster in 2006 from Bournemouth, where he spent six years as manager. He is now part of the coaching set-up at Championship side Nottingham Forest, where manager Steve Cotterill has this week reportedly confirmed Crawley’s interest. During his time at Doncaster, now relegated to League 1, O’Driscoll regularly held fans forums, and although results took a nose dive this season, is still highly regarded.
Len added: “He always wanted to be in touch with the fans, they might not like some of the answers he gave them in those forums, but he was there to be shot at.
“He is a very quiet man and does not suffer fools easily.
“Due to cash constraints, we lost two strikers right at the start of the season and he struggled to find a way to put it right. From a personal point of view, I don’t think he knew how to put it right.”.[/article]
Is anyone surprised? FSG haven't a fucking clue about the footballing side.
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