Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 2 Episode 32

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 2 • Episode 32

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Can public criticism impact a football club's performance? Join us on "Two Coaches and a Coffee" where we tackle the intricate world of managing training loads in professional soccer. Sparked by Paul Scholes' recent comments on Manchester United's fitness, we unpack the ripple effects such critiques have on performance directors and their teams. Drawing from our own rich experiences in top football clubs, we navigate the challenging terrain of balancing demands between coaches and medical staff, maintaining consistent training philosophies, and the risks of straying from a well-defined regimen. Our discussion provides insights into the critical dynamics of safeguarding players while preparing them for the rigors of high-intensity matches.

Shifting gears, we spotlight the delicate art of managing player loads during pivotal periods like finals. Take a deep dive into the balancing act between training intensity and volume through the lens of the AFL Grand Final. We explore the high-stakes decisions that shape a team's fate. We stress the importance of standing firm on professional convictions, despite the looming pressures of job security. Concluding with strategies on steering a team towards success, we highlight the indispensable role of leadership in achieving team alignment. Stay tuned for more, as we look forward to growing this enriching journey with our community.

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Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee. Darren Burgess, Jason Webber, here. How are you mate?

Darren Burgess:

I'm all right. This is what three in eight days or something, mate unbelievable.

Jason Weber:

Can you believe that when we asked the 12 listeners we have Last time to get a 13th, they actually did? We broke all sorts of records last week. I think we had 15 people on the podcast Unbelievable.

Darren Burgess:

Well, I'm heading off next week to To Europe for A couple of weeks, so catching up with our mate, dave Carrolyn, who's had more mentions on this podcast than you have, dave Carrolyn. Well, we should do.

Jason Weber:

Dave messaged me yesterday. We're going to catch up and Dave's a lovely man to sit down and have a cold Guinness with. You can get a good Guinness even in Derby in England.

Darren Burgess:

We'll see how we go. Now, speaking of England, I saw a everybody I'm sure everybody on this podcast knows of Paul Scholes. If you don't, that's absolute blasphemy, because he's one of the greatest midfielders to play soccer For Manchester United. He came out and said that Manchester United team were not fit, so they were playing Tottenham. They lost 3-0 at home, had a man sent off yeah, I can't remember what minute, it was, 50 minutes in 50 minutes in. So they played the last four minutes, but the damage had already been done by then. And if you see the goals, I only saw the goals, I didn't see the game.

Darren Burgess:

So, um, but rather than comment on whether they are or are not fit, because there's some, there's some, you know, guys like ed lang and and they're brought in sam eric, both outstanding in their field, performance director, and Ed Lang has had a performance, he's been there for a while and Warren Gregson, who's looking after their sort of research and innovation. So some really good people there. But the pressure that that puts on the club and everybody making decisions forget the manager for a minute but the pressure that that puts on the performance staff, because the perception then is if Paul Sculls says it, it must be true. And therefore, whose head of performance are? It's Ed Lang, or whose performance, or who's you know and what we know, and I guess you know.

Darren Burgess:

Part of the reason why you and I are doing this podcast is to talk about situations like this and how we might handle those situations, because we know the environment. If a manager says I want this person to train, they generally train. If a doctor says I want this person to not train, then they generally don't train. Person to not train, then they generally don't train. So it's pretty hard to fathom what these guys are. Well, it's easy to fathom what they're going through, but it's hard for the general punter who reads that article, because then they'll watch a highlight of a Tottenham winger running down the wing and crossing the ball in the third minute, which caused a goal, and think he's right, scoles, he's right. It's a tough environment to be in right now.

Jason Weber:

Mate, it's horrible. I'll tell you that when I was in the UK in August, I caught up with Ed and his team up there at man U and, to be honest, the stuff they shared with me because clearly we were discussing speed, sig and running mechanics and all that, what they described to me I thought this is an elite program and I would be, I'll be honest and say I review every, independently review every group I meet with and they were as sharp as anybody. So to then read that you're going, oh my goodness, there's something going on. But the real tough one is if you were sitting on their side of it and you were able to sit down and go.

Jason Weber:

Well, what are the problems we face here? Like you said, we're suggesting they train, let's just say, five kilometers for a session, but the coach is pushing them to six, seven, every single session and it's just loading up on them and we've all I mean I lived through that where coaches just go. No, we're doing it because I understand. I understand what this team needs and, mate, I'm not sure they do you know it can go one or two ways.

Darren Burgess:

Well, it can go a few ways, but in that scenario then people then go into their shells and say we have to protect the players. Um, therefore, um, don't train them as hard. Or um, this superstar player doesn't want to train on a on a wednesday morning because he or she is annoyed with the coach, and and so then you protect them and you you don't train them. And then that makes things worse because you don't allow them to establish any kind of chronic load or any kind of training resilience. And then you expect, having protected them all week, for them to go out on the weekend and play. You know, a fast-running team like Tottenham.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, it's a tough environment to be in, and those scenarios in my experience, because I've been in a bunch of them we had three manager changes in Liverpool and two in Arsenal, so the pressure on those managers were just unbelievable. You've just got to stick to your philosophy and your department's philosophy. So if you run a and I'm not saying one's better than the other, but if you run a sort of hard training, push them out to training at all costs, then you've just got to stick to that. That's the process that you're going by. If you run a training where it's a player dictated because you trust the players and you trust their experience, then that's what you run with and those two can work just fine, given certain scenarios.

Jason Weber:

Yeah.

Darren Burgess:

You can't say we're running a hard training program, except if the superstar player says oh, I've got a bit of a sore back and you don't want to upset him, so that you don't actually push them out there to do something.

Jason Weber:

But the problem with that mate is like I get you, but the the problem with that mate is like I get you. I understand, let's say, we, we have those two, um, two philosophies. You just you just provided. But the concern, my, my observation, has then been you get a new coach, and this happens even with, let's say, assistant coaches who need to prove their value. Right, we have to be doing stuff. So a new coach comes on and says well, we got a new system to learn, we got new this, we got new that.

Jason Weber:

Like I said, we now get program creep where we'd be budgeted to work Again. Let's just use a general number 5K in these main sessions. But they become six and six every week, and so every week we're blowing out by a couple of percent. I've got plenty of data to show and this is not, this precedes all of the chronic stuff is your probability, your odds, risk ratio of injuries increasing in the shadow of that, like, if you're going for a month, six weeks of that shit where you're just overloading by modest amounts, you know like 10%, 15% every single week that you get to that fourth and fifth week and it's like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. All right, now that's where I disagree, where I think, in your view, you've got to stick to your guns. It means if you've got to have a fight with the coach and you've got to bring it to their attention that you are over man, I respect what you're doing.

Jason Weber:

Personally, my thing I do love hard running, hard training programs, but you've got to stop at a certain point. You can't just go to the nth degree. So my recommendation would be, as per yours is stick to your guns. If you've got to go and have a fucking blue every day with a coach fucking glove up, get in there and get amongst it, because they can't like it goes back to that money ball thing where you know Brad Pitt says to the recruiter you know, you come and you look at these kids and you say you know, but you don't, you don't know. And when a coach who's not educated in anything to do with physiology they've got a lot of experience, quite often half of their experience as a player in many cases and they say I know how far I can push, but you don't.

Darren Burgess:

You guess it. The caveat that I'll have on that is if it's the same manager, that's one thing, but if a different manager comes in and when I say manager I mean coach, yeah, yeah, the team's been going crap and the coach comes in and says I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. Ultimately, the team's been going crap anyway, with the greatest monitoring and relationship and I'm not 100%.

Darren Burgess:

I know what you're saying. You have to let the coach do their thing and the problem that the practitioners have. So let's say man United and let's say 10 Hard get sacked, which I'm not suggesting that that's the case, but just for the argument.

Jason Weber:

That's a possibility.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, then the next coach comes in and if you are the performance director and you're relying on the, so my role in that scenario let's say I'm performance director of man United my role is to get the information from um, from the staff, and you've hopefully educated the staff well and everybody's on on the same alignment and and the same page and we're a hard working team. You then go to the new manager and say you need to work them harder or you need to work them less. It puts you in a really delicate situation because that new manager is probably used to their own before. They might be Spanish or Argentinian or whatever, and used to their own way of working. It's a tough environment and it's a real catch-22.

Darren Burgess:

And in my experience anyway, having lived through that, and in my experience anyway, having lived through that, coming from Australia, you can do it because A you feel it's the best thing for the club. B your risk of upsetting the manager. The amount of times I went into Unai Emery at Arsenal and said you know, I think you should do this, you should do that, and you could go in with no fear. A because of the type of person that he was, because he said no, I want you to come in like that, but B I knew if I got sacked from Arsenal there'd be other opportunities, so it wasn't. Whereas if it's your local club and your dream job and your kids are in the local school and all that sort of stuff which which mind more, by the way um, yeah, it's a tough scenario, so I could understand people towing the line a little bit oh, mate, but I think you've definitely pointed out a unique circumstance the switching of coaches.

Jason Weber:

I'll go to the other one where the coach has been for a number of years really good at balancing out load and, yeah, we go over sometimes but then we drop back and we balance it all out. Nothing's ever to the exact number, but we've got a good balance and we're working really well over a number of a good period of time a couple of years. But then we start to change strategy and we're going to do more at a certain point of the year, particularly, let's say, going into a finals period, right, and that hasn't been discussed, it hasn't been brought up. It's just because there's now pressure on that person, I need to do more. And it's like, righto mate, we've done a bit more this week and last week. It's all okay, but I reckon next week we probably just need to not taper, just drop him back a little bit. Keep the intensity up. We have to keep training. For the most part, my experience has been volume is what kills people.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I agree.

Jason Weber:

Training intensity is really the problem, it's the volume. How?

Darren Burgess:

much are we doing, and?

Jason Weber:

particularly when you get a team, that a sport where you can train at game speed, and we focus on those type of else. We overload game speed, then everything has to be at game speed. And then all of a sudden you've got this crazy session that runs out of it. Does your budget for volume in like in 25 minutes?

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, ultimately to round off the discussion, because I thought the article, the Sculls article, was interesting and it's let us down this rabbit warren, but the worst type of Everything's a rabbit warren. Yeah, the worst type of practitioner for me and staff member that I guess I've had to deal with in the past is the one who doesn't have the courage of their conviction and doesn't stand up for what they believe in because they're afraid of losing their job. And whilst I can understand it, it's pretty hard to justify putting a player or your own interests ahead of the club that employs you. So that's the and there's plenty of people that we know that are. You know, getting jobs in the industry and having that space. But yeah, that's just something which I think is, whilst understandable to a point, it's frustrating when you're in that world.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, mate, absolutely. Listen. I think we talked about this. We talked about the AFL Grand Final last week a lot, and we knew that you'd won the bet. You'd called Callum Mills out, which I thought, mate, on the surface, once you look at it, I think the Swans made a great decision, and what I'm about to talk about is not. I don't want to make comment on the teams specifically, but the interesting side is exactly what we just talked about managing a player through. Now the AFL season is. You know, depending on whether you play finals or not, your preseason might be between 10 and 15 weeks, then you're in trials for a couple of weeks, then you play whatever it is 22 rounds, 24 rounds.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, 24 rounds 23 plus finals, plus four finals, three or four finals depending on how you went. So you're managing a lot of load, not as much as, let's say, soccer, with playing whatever you said last week, the 80 games, but the AFL game goes. You know, we talked about that too. 90-minute game player time.

Darren Burgess:

It goes for two hours and it's far more impactful on the total body than even the most physical Premier League game is yeah, yeah.

Jason Weber:

So let's look at the grand final on the weekend. So Brisbane Lions smashed Sydney. From my observations outside, I thought tactically it was brilliant, like it looked awesome. But that being said, one of my old athletes from Freya, lockie, neal, blew his planar fascia in the fourth quarter. Had been managing it for some time. Now I'm not, this is not, this is just that hypothetical. So they've been managing that through the final series and it's probably just a point of how fine a line all of this pivots on in that his plan of fashion blows.

Jason Weber:

He felt it pop in Q4. Game was done by quarter four. He stayed out there and muscled it out because he wanted to live it. Great stuff, mate, huge character. But if that blows in Q1, the guy had 30 possessions and was on the back end of the defensive structure many, many times in that first quarter. That changes the game. Now I'm not saying what Brisbane did was right or wrong, I don't really care, but what they did was ultimately succeed. But it just shows you how fine a line it is. If that had happened in Q1, the press would have been saying oh, stupid decision, crazy, they should never have done it. He was at risk. I'm like, yeah, but they clearly just did their very best, and I think you've said this in the past to me, mate, which I do agree. Sometimes you need a little bit of luck.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to try to start with the Scholes comment. So the Scholes makes a comment and people say, okay, who's at Manchester United? Okay, it's Ed Lang, it's whoever it is. What would happen in the AFL, right, if the Swans had chosen to play Mills and he goes down in the first quarter? The camera then pans to the high-performance manager on the bench and they get named, shamed, photographed, videoed. You know, Rob Innes, who's outstanding at his job, would have been the talk of the next couple of days, as would potentially the doctor, maybe. So that pressure is then ramped up.

Jason Weber:

Well, let's look at that one, logan McDonald comes out. So Logan McDonald, big forward right the week before, against what adelaide was it he? He gets his ankle. Now I sent you a photo of that screen. Grab his ankle got his foot got caught under and externally rotated. His foot was 90 degrees in the wrong direction, externally rotated, like that's not only medial ligament.

Darren Burgess:

I'm saying that's probably syndesmosis well, yeah, I, yeah, I guess, regardless of the injury, like he came out and was clearly unable. Yeah, they played him, they subbed him out. But your point about Lockie Neal is they made an educated guess and you could say they fought on that, he was able to play through it. But you know, like you said, who knows what would happen if Brisbane Lions not arguably he's been their most consistent player over the last four or five years goes down in the first quarter? Who knows what happens?

Jason Weber:

Oh, I think it changes. I think it changes mate.

Darren Burgess:

But I guess my point on that is or a point on that is, if you're an aggressive-minded team and this is the way that you are doing it, and this gets set up, I guarantee you, if you have a philosophy in February and March where Lockie Neal complains a little bit of some foot soreness and you put him on ice straightaway and say, right, you're out for three weeks and then bring him back and any kind of soreness, put him on ice straightaway. When you ask him that grand final day, he won't be able to because you've got this level of pain I've experienced before and you've told me that I need to protect myself and now you're asking me to play through it. So that's why their philosophy and of course they had some luck, but their philosophy, as with the Swans, same thing, yeah, yeah, I'm not saying that anyone's different, but in this case they needed some luck and they got it, whereas potentially the Swans might not have got their luck with it.

Jason Weber:

Oh, 100%. But don't forget, we sat here last week and both of us described bringing or testing players in a grand final who were clearly injured the week before, and we took them through grand finals and while you got the gong, we didn't get the gong, but the player played out really well, like we. There was no.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, no ramifications, no ramifications. Well, I mean he got.

Jason Weber:

He had a huge calf tear afterwards but he got through the game and it was a good decision. But I guess the point of all of this is how fine an edge this all runs on. And you mentioned monitoring and yeah, look, mate, I'm a data guy with the best of them. But there is a point you've got to acknowledge. We don't know, like we can say acute, chronic ratios and all this shit, and we do our very best and yes, we should keep doing our best to get closer and closer to understanding the truth, but it's like a fucking black hole man, like we don't understand black holes. We know they're there but we can't know what's in them. We can predict to some extent but we don't know. So I mean, I guess there's probably in that regard some humility for some younger in the sports science spectrum, people who've never lived life without GPS. You know there's a limit to how much we actually know and those decisions, I mean we've just noted a few. I'll be the other one.

Jason Weber:

Isaac Heaney was clearly managing a stress fracture of some description. Now, how a stress fracture bobs up at the back end of the season is another whole question. Like, generally speaking, it takes six weeks for a stress fraction to rear its head and become symptomatic. So what changed six weeks ago? I've got no idea. Did he roll his ankle? And now they tape his foot up? And I've seen this. We did this with speed sick a couple of years ago. Kid rolls an ankle I can measure on speed sick. His ground contacts change because they're taping physios taping his ankle up to keep him on the field, but it changes their mechanics. So yeah, I applaud. I mean, excuse me, I'm going to just shout out to Damien Austin, who's the head of performance for Lions. Brisbane Lions, I think an unsung sort of guy Did a great job. His team were really well prepared, two grand finals in two years, oh mate.

Jason Weber:

They looked awesome, yeah, and there was a lot of good. As you said, rob, I think, did a great job with the Swans. So all of this is just hypothetical, but I would say our industry pivots on a knife's edge and the perceptions, the perceptions can be horrible. As you example, there's some really good practitioners up there and God knows what is actually happening. We're never going to know. The story is Darren. We've got to stick to our guns, be humble.

Darren Burgess:

Have the philosophy and you live or die by it. Obviously, you make adjustments as you go and you, you, you do things and you tricks and but I think, yeah, for me most importantly is have the whole club, staff department, whatever you're managing, on the same, the same pathway, and you'll get a few wrong, but but if you believe in it and you work towards it, you'll get more right.

Jason Weber:

And that's probably it. Maybe that's one for us to talk about later is how we get everybody on one page.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, that's a good one.

Jason Weber:

I think that HPM thing and ultimately that's what it is, you know you're guiding a group of people in one direction is how do we get them all going in that direction, which is no doubt challenges you faced, I've faced. Maybe that's for next time, mate, but that's a pretty good hit out.

Darren Burgess:

Let's do it.

Jason Weber:

So now we've got 15 listeners, we've got to try and get to 20. So shout out to your buddies, let's get 20 followers. You know, mate have a good day.

Darren Burgess:

Have a good day, good See you.