The weekly meetings of the Guild of Loudmouth Australian Sporting Pundits (GLASP) are usually fairly robust affairs. After the apologies for those missing due to weekend benders, and the slow, halting reading of the minutes, we get down to business: discussing which players we are going to declare the GOAT this week and which players we are going to declare have their careers in the toilet; drawing lots to see who gets to write the “refs need to be abused more” column and who gets to write the “leave the refs alone lest the game die” column; photoshopping superstars into pictures of white powder; and sundry other routine items.
But the biggest part of our job, obviously, is deciding what advice we are going to hand out to coaches. It’s a long and intricate process, and there’s often a lot of furious debate between the pundits about it. There are a lot of factors to consider when it comes to lecturing coaches. Firstly, you have to decide whether you want the coach in question to lose his job this week, next week, or early next year. Next, you have to decide which character flaw you are going to assign to the coach – is it that he doesn’t listen to the players, or that he listens to the players too much, or that he is too strict or not strict enough, or that he spends too much time with his family, or that he is too obsessive about the job, or that he is tactically naive, or that he has no man management skills, or that he’s at war with the board, or that he punched a sponsor at the CEO’s wedding? And then, of course, you have to select a potential replacement coach to namecheck in your report of “rumblings” from “stakeholders”.
But at some point, it is the pundit’s sacred responsibility to actually make a suggestion, not just as to what the coach is doing wrong, but what the coach should be doing. Some might think this is a dangerous game to play, as making positive suggestions is always a riskier business than simply criticising. But they’re forgetting two things:
- Sports writers are the most courageous people on earth.
- We will never actually have to be held accountable for anything we say. Believe me, it is a GREAT job.
Now, up till now we in the rugby union department of GLASP have given Wallaby coach Joe Schmidt a fairly soft run. It is still official GLASP policy that Eddie Jones is the physical incarnation of Satan as foretold in the profane blasphemous scriptures, so Schmidt remains a sort of avenging angel figure. So we’ve held back to a certain extent on firing angry public missives off on the subject of what Schmidt needs to do differently, preferring for the moment to advise his critics to shut their whining yaps.
(Photo by Adam Pretty – World Rugby/World Rugby via Getty Images)
But I feel that the time has come to offer Schmidt at least a smidgen of advice in my capacity as a man on his couch who knows much more about the game than any professional. And frankly, in doing so, I must confess, I am going to break a little with GLASP by-laws, and risk blackballing. Why would I take such a risk? Well, for one, check (1) above, and for another thing, I am in one of those deliriously noble moods wherein I feel like I care more about Australian rugby than I care about my career. Call me an idiot if you like: it will only make me more self-righteous.
The thing is, the advice I am going to give to Joe Schmidt is that which I would give to any coach, in any sport – and indeed, to players as well. It is, I think, the most valuable advice that a coach can get, and it is advice that no other sports “journalist” is ever likely to give. It is as follows:
There is one quality that every coach of every team – and ESPECIALLY the coach of the Wallabies – needs to have, and it is more important than tactical nous, strategic genius, motivational fire or wonderful interpersonal skills. It is simply this: a coach must not care, even the tiniest bit, what anyone in the media says about anything ever.
You can see why GLASP might object to me sharing this, for it is something every member knows but most would never dream of saying aloud, because a big part of both our business model and our internal sense of a stable identity is presuming that we know better than basically everyone. But the fact is that listening to anything any of us say, allowing any of our opinions to affect one’s behaviour to the slighest degree, can only have negative consequences for a person in charge of a sporting team.
(Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
This isn’t to say we’re always wrong, of course: in fact, we are pretty much all preternaturally intelligent and practically always correct. But whether we’re right or wrong, it is a huge mistake for a coach to listen to us. Because once you start listening to the press, you’re on a horribly slippery slope which will end with a terrifying crash into a Star Wars-esque trash compactor which will crush your career flat and strangle you with an alien tentacle.
Once you start listening to the media critics, you’re going to start losing confidence in your own opinions. You’re going to start radiating weakness and indecision, infecting all the players and coaching staff around you. You’re going to find yourself in agonies of uncertainty at every turn, unable to make up your mind and letting all the firm decisive moves you hoped to make collapes into a flavourless fence-sitting custard.
Moreover, you’re going to be hopelessly confused, because one thing we do as GLASP meetings is make sure that any advice we give varies from pundit to pundit and each hack’s view contradicts the view of every other one. You simply can’t follow everyone’s advice at once or you will rapidly go mad, and the odds of going mad as a coach are so high anyway it would be foolish to risk increasing them.
This is before we even get to the problem of self-esteem. Any coach who takes to heart what’s said about him in the media will not only be changing his methods and tactics every week, he will descend into the maelstrom of self-loathing, as his opinion of himself starts to reflect others’ opinion of him – for he is a coach, and therefore those opinions are never going to be good.
Now, a lot of people are giving their view on what Joe Schmidt should do, which reflects not only the passion of Australian rugby supporters and the desperation we feel to see the nation rise again, but also the basic human desire to interfere in other people’s lives. And there’s no shame in that. It’s just that while we have our fun shooting our mouths off, Schmidt needs to seal himself and his team in a bubble and consider us an irrelevance.
Now, if Joe Schmidt reads The Roar – and why wouldn’t he – he will find a lot of people telling him what to do. Not just me and my fellow Roar columnists, but all the clever and fragrant folk in the comments. No doubt some of them know what they’re talking about, and maybe they’d make great coaches themselves – certainly they seem to believe they would. Nevertheless, Joe Schmidt must, if he wishes to succeed, ignore each and every one of us, and dismiss all of our opinions as worthless ramblings. In the end, what he does might align with what we told him to do, or it might not. But it will be his own work, and a coach has far more chance of rising to glory on the back of his own work than by submitting himself to the fickle winds of public opinion.
Of course, if Joe Schmidt does read The Roar, and he reads this article, and he decides to take my advice, he will immediately have to disregard my advice, and in so doing he will have to then take my advice, which will lead him to disregard my advice, therefore forcing him to take my advice, causing him to disregard my advice, which will …
(TO BE CONTINUED)
Ben Pobjiehttps://https://ift.tt/XbEHJ1l huge mistake Joe Schmidt must avoid as he fights to revive the Wallabies
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