One For Our Coaches

It is normally supposed to be the promise of football for a team to do better in the next game than in the previous one. Yet such a thing is not so common in Malawi football, and no soul can claim with all conclusiveness that such a scenario is going to happen because the performance of our football clubs usually heralds both hope and misery.

You do not necessarily need to have been a soccer star in the previous moments for you to become the world’s best football coach. It is only imperative that you know what a good footballer needs to possess and what the whole team as an anthology needs to do to win. This includes even if you yourself can never reach that level of perfection that you want your charges to attain.

A coach needs to put into place all feasible criteria that have the potential of making his team win; such is the sole intention of coaching. No coach ever wants to lose, and no club owner can be happy with losing, that is why most coaches get the boot when they fail to impress.

Real Madrid manager José Morihno has never been a soccer star in his life, neither does he possess any record to have played professional football anywhere. Yet, he defied the odds and is now one of the world’s most successful coaches.

Not that there is anything peculiar about him, but his passion for football brought him into the game and as his interest grew, he also improved his coaching tactics.

Another thing that makes Morihno “the special one” is his carefulness when it comes to selection of players who should grace his squad. There are many coaches who are given big chunks of money to buy players with but what they come up with are pathetic boys who can hardly impress on the pitch.

When he took over a pathetic Chelsea in the 2004/2005 season, no one understood at first what he had in store for the English football club, but a season later, he blazed the trail and his popularity made sense to most of us.

But the question that should be asked about the success or failure of football coaches, and of course, all other coaches is: what makes them so – successful of failing?

One thing that has to be appreciated is that coaches too need to be coached so that they improve on their performance. It is true that as they do their job, the next game is normally supposed to be better than the previous but this appears to be just so theoretical in Malawi.

We have football clubs that have coaches that were soccer stars at some point in their football career but they fail to deliver. Of course, there are many factors that contribute to this. One of these factors is lack of knowledge of their opponents.

It is only when you know all the weak and strong angles of your opponent that you can put into place valid strategies of approaching them. But most coaches in Malawi (in my opinion and from how I have seen it) usually use the usual common strategies even if they are meeting another team whose strategies are completely different from those of the team they last met.

Though this appears to be a small issue, it has the potential of adversely affecting the performance of the team because they do not necessarily know how to attack their opponents and how to build their defence.

Another thing is that most coaches are not eager to incorporate into their teams young and inexperienced players who can be perfected right there. They are always eager to get players who have already made it big and the result is that sometimes they fail to control the players because they might have their own ways of playing which can seldom be altered – it’s kind of difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, especially when you have owned it when it is already old.

Patience is another thing that lacks in most of our coaches. They usually do not take long to lose their cool when they see that one player is tripping and they subsequently make frustrated decisions by substituting the player. Hasty substitutions sometimes destroy the progress of the game and get the players disorganized.

Although it is usually supposed to be the nature of football for a team to do better in the next game than it did in the past, this is not so automatic. It requires coaches that are visionary and understand that they are not simply there to give directions to their charges, but to give them the winning formula.

And if our coaches need to do better, they also need to be coached so that they get some winning tips from some successful mentors. Otherwise, one may be forgiven for intimating with all audacity that football clubs in Malawi do not necessarily need coaches because coaches contribute very little to the progress of the clubs, as the clubs usually remain on the same rating.