Life of Bryan

In our first few months in charge, there is no doubt that there was a resistance to the simple system of play that we were asking for. For various different reasons, quite a lot of players believed that the ball should be passed nicely from the goalkeeper to the defence, into the midfield and on to the forward players.

This is what they watch in the Champions League, La Liga, Bundesliga and English Premiership matches, which are beamed into our living rooms every night of the week. The one problem that I have with this is that we are all Junior football players for a reason.

We don’t have the skills and game awareness of the players at the top level, so it makes it almost impossible to execute the kind of plays they do. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of good players in the Junior game but for all that I like to be positive, we must have a healthy realisation of our limitations. We can always improve in the future, however the future has no effect on our specific skill set in the present. That goes for life in general, I suppose. What we needed from the players essentially was a paradigm shift towards our way of thinking.

In straightforward terms, your paradigm is the way you see the world, your concept of what is happening, your outlook on things. The way Arnie and I saw it, the player’s paradigms on football were based around the top level game which they watch on TV and also maybe what a lot of them had been told while playing Pro-Youth football with senior clubs. Our paradigm in Junior football was drawn from what had made us successful players in the Junior game. Both these paradigms were at differing ends of the spectrum in a lot of cases.

To illustrate the point of a paradigm shift, I’ll unashamedly steal from Dr. Stephen Covey’s experience in the New York subway on a quiet Sunday morning. As you read his account, try to picture yourself sitting there and you might experience a small shift as well.

“I remember a mini-paradigm shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly - some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.

Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.

The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.

It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?” The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.” Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behaviour; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.” That was a non-football related paradigm shift just so you could get some understanding of where I’m coming from. I’m sure if, like I did when I first read it, you experienced a small shift then you realise that it’s happened to you quite a few times before. It certainly made me realise that by taking things at face value and jumping to conclusions, we can lead ourselves down the wrong path and make mistakes. I suppose ultimately it’s just about trying to keep an open mind and not set our ideologies in stone when there could be other information very close at hand which can turn things completely around.

Coming back to Largs Thistle, Arnie and I tried to encourage the players to play for the percentage much more often. What I mean by that is we really needed to get the ball a lot nearer the opposition goal, instead of ours, for a greater amount of time. The problem that we identified early on at Largs was that far too often, passes were being made into the centre area of the pitch where our players were under pressure and we ended up losing the ball. This meant that we were defending a lot more than we should have had to and this stopped us from getting into the opponents’ defensive area.

Without giving any more away, the majority of the players came round to our way of thinking, essentially through having a paradigm shift, and the result of it was that they went on to avoid relegation with one League game left to spare.

Now that doesn’t mean that Arnie and I take the credit for the survival, far from it. As I said earlier, it’s our job to lead and all we did was show the players the escape route. It was a great credit to them that they decided to discard what they thought to be the way forward, took up our escape route and worked hard to follow it to the end.

Having returned for the new season now, it’s apparent that there has been a small degree of backslide into old habits again but with the right amount of guidance and prompting, I’m confident that it won’t take a full paradigm shift to get us into the right gear for this season.