Learning from Tragedy

When I was starting out blogging, the most popular articles would invariably be those looking at young players.  There seems to be an insatiable desire to get to know of prospects before anyone else; to be able to make predictions about a player’s place and future in the team.

As the years progressed, however, I stopped writing such articles.  Partly it was a decision that came about out of a desire to write pieces with more substance to them.  But there was another equally as powerful motivator: the realisation that these were kids that I was writing about.  Any criticism of them, even the most innocent, might have a disproportionate impact on them should they get to read it.

That view was reinforced when I recently read “A Life Too Short”.  This biography tells of the life of Robert Enke, a goalkeeper who had battled back from a misjudged move to Barcellona early in his career and returned from obscurity to the national team where he was to be the German number one at the 2010 World Cup.

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Blueprint According To...Pedro Mendonca

Ambition.  There are still some people who see that as a dirty word, particularly for coaches involved in youth football.  These should be content with the age category they are assigned to look after and not aim to achieve anything more than that.

For some that works and there are indeed coaches who feel most comfortable coaching particular age groups and whose effectiveness would suffer were they to be moved to a different group.  Many others aren’t like that, however, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Just as any player should have a target to work towards, so too should coaches.  Unless they have an ambition that drives them forward they cannot progress.  And, for some, that ambition might be of working at a higher level than the one they’re currently in.

Pedro Mendonca is one such coach.  At the moment he is working with the Real Madrid foundation but he is aiming to achieve much, much more than that.

The rest of the article can be read on Blueprint for Football.

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