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