Technical development – why is it important?

We live in a different world from the one that I grew up in. Today, we have many things available to us on demand and perhaps that is what can cause the most confusion in the development of a young player. We stream the movie or show that we want to watch, rather than waiting for a special time in the week to physically watch it when it was scheduled. If we couldn’t find the time to do it, we may have been lucky enough to have a VHS recorder that we could schedule to record the show for a later time.

Researching a topic for an assignment would involve us heading to our local library and sifting through the physical catalog of books and then reading large chunks of text to find the information that we needed. Depending on the subject, we may need to reference several sources, which meant that a lot of reading, underlining, and highlighting would take place. 

We may look back at these times but in fact these methods. which now seem prehistoric to our current generation of young people, taught us about persistence, effort, creativity, and perhaps most importantly, patience. All four of these words are common buzzwords in the world of social media when talking about what is required to become a professional athlete.

On a personal level, growing up in the 1980’s and 1990's, these aforementioned tasks would often lead to something that I didn’t expect to find. Whilst researching an assignment on the extinction of dinosaurs, I stumbled across a VHS video cassette of a Serbian soccer coach that I had never heard of called Dusan Purac. Finding footage like this was rare because youtube and the internet were not a reality in my formative years. Back then, the best I could get in terms of football content was the one-hour Italian Serie A show on Sunday morning at 10:30am – which coincidentally was recorded on my VHS because it fell in the time window of weekly mass. As soon as we got home and changed from our Sunday best, my brother and I would sit down on the floor and watch in awe the wonder that was Roberto Baggio and Gianluca Vialli for him as a Juventus supporter, and Alen Boksic and Beppe Signori for me as a Lazio fan. We wouldn’t know the scores in our early days, even though the matches were from the week before. We would rewind the tape and watch the amazing skills that the players were able to produce in front of big crowds and then go outside to impersonate our idols.

When we pressed play on the Dusan Purac video, we were amazed at his masterful ball control, especially his effortless ability to juggle the ball with all parts of his anatomy. Watching the video again recently, it fascinates me that the isolated movements in this video have been burned into my subconscious so much so that when dealing with decision-making situations in a match during my 21-year senior football career, I can now look at them as being key pillars to my foundation as a footballer. Interestingly, developing these technical movements (for want of a better word) was a labour of love, and a chance to be creative only came in my headspace when I first mastered what Purac was showing in these videos. At that stage of my development, I was technically atrocious and well behind the kids in my team, as I had started being interested in the game quite late and only started training at a club at the age of 12.

Back then, the content in this video made me sad because I saw how bad I was in comparison to the rest of the kids that were training in his academy. I had what we now call ‘conscious incompetence’ – which means that I was well aware of how bad I was compared to the magician on the video, and even the kids in my own team at the Melbourne Knights juniors. My sadness was quickly replaced with determination to copy the moves until I got them right and I am proud to say that I eventually got there. I can comfortably deal with an opponent in a 1v1 situation without having to think too much about the process or the ‘how’, because I practiced those movements religiously at home and at school in unstructured recess and lunchtime games every day of the week. Today we call that 'Unconscious competence' and it allowed me to solve problems on the pitch as a striker for half of my football career and central defender for the second half of my career. The question is - did I learn decision-making before having the confidence in myself to try these 'solutions' in training and then matches? In my case, the answer is no. Without these types of repeated skills, my skillset or 'solutions' were minimal, and I couldn't decide on how to solve a problem if I didn't have the tools to allow me to apply a solution to a situation.  Basically, my decisions were limited by my ability to manipulate and control the ball, rather than the ball controlling me.

Today, the debate continues as to whether decision-making should come before technique/skill, or technique/skill needs to come before decision-making. Well known TOVO Institute founder and coach, Todd Beane, advocates for decision making as a focus ahead of the technical base or isolated repetition because the game is a moving organism that requires thousands of decisions to be made in a chaotic environment. In order to teach this way, the coach must have many ways of creating small sided games that have guided discovery principles for kids to search for solutions. 

Former Dinamo Zagreb and Croatian Football Federation Romeo Jozak strongly advocates for the opposite – that technical competence must come before decision-making, and he uses scientific evidence from the formation of engrams (muscle memory) coming from repetition in a stable environment or ‘without opposition and pressure. The logical argument here is that in order to be creative and make better decisions, you need to have to tools before you make the decision. In order to teach this way, the coach must understand how to break down the correct technique and scaffold the learning so that there is a logical progression.

A recent article on the mercurial Mo Salah shed some light into how he went from Premier League flop at Chelsea to superstar at Liverpool with a step down to Roma in Italy in between. For two years he worked with Jaime Pabón, a former striker from Colombia, spending hours honing his finishing technique in the back garden of the coach’s house in Rome after returning from training.

“I recommended to look at the ball, to make good choices, with angles that were more difficult for the goalkeepers,” said Pabon. “We did a lot of repetitions, employing that advice.”

Maybe the answer lies in the middle: technique and skill with decision-making added in, which is what we try to impose on our students at the Keilor Downs College Soccer School.