We havent heard from ShirleyMush for a week or so, here we find out why, as he reveals his breakfast habits
It occurred to me this morning as I was spreading Marmite on my toast- confidence, for all it’s brazen swagger, can be as brittle and as hard to recover as the Titanic. As I smeared the beautiful black Tarmacadam onto the bread, I thought back a few months to when my own confidence had been eroded to the extent that I found even the most mundane of tasks almost impossible. Teacher training, and the seemingly constant criticism that accompanied it, had whisked my brain into a foamy mess.
So short of self belief was I that I struggled to transfer a yeasty substance from knife to bread, let alone transfer information from my own dizzy mind to those of thirty children. I vividly remember standing in my kitchen, staring dumbly at the knife, the way a drunk stares at a policeman, as though being human was something I had learned to do a long time ago then forgotten about for a decade. By the end of it I was half mad- limping over the finish line before collapsing into a summer-long stupor in which I did little beyond watching sport and DVD box sets or drinking myself stupid.
I had lost my bottle, well and truly, and I only had to teach in front of one or maybe two pairs of critical eyes at a time. When a footballer suffers a crisis of confidence, it often unfolds in front of thousands. Few players are immune to such spells. Bryan Robson, seemingly, was unaffected even when those around him had stopped believing. I remember watching him charge head first through Dutch defenders at the 1988 European Championships long after the rest of the England squad had given up hope. Only injury could stop Robson.
Likewise, only age and the odd referee could abate Roy Keane’s pursuit of glory, and only excess could keep Maradona down. 99.9% of footballers go in and out of form and some never truly recover it when it goes.
Confidence- the state of certainty that one’s course of action is the right one- is powerful yet capricious. It can desert you at the most inopportune moment- whether you’re staring into the eyes of a beautiful woman or a 6’5” goalkeeper. Sometimes it ebbs away after a series of seemingly unrelated disappointments. Sometimes there is no apparent reason for it’s departure. It just goes, and you’re left wondering if it will ever return, while the enervating hesitancy it leaves in its wake permeates every decision you make.
I’d imagine Jose Fonte can still just about get the milk onto his Coco Pops and his piss into the toilet bowl, but I’m not so sure about Dean Hammond. Saints’ captain is one of a handful of first team regulars who, like a cricketer who has just dropped an easy catch, are praying that the ball doesn’t come to them. Rather than showing to feet when our full backs are in possession, Hammond will now surreptitiously angle his body away from them to minimise the likelihood of him receiving the ball and then losing it. The man charged with somehow restoring these men’s collective mojo is a bloke called Nigel.
The name doesn’t fill me with confidence, but the man is starting to give me hope. Harry Redknapp, that disgusting amalgam of man and mixed grill, is often talked of as “a player’s manager”. This implies that he is skilled in making players feel good about themselves. That he probably achieves this by using all his affected matiness and creepy disingenuousness is beside the point- he is unquestionably a skilled manipulator of footballers.
Nigel Adkins is almost the antithesis of Rednapp- his loyalty to Scunthorpe even in his prolonged exit from the club would have been anathema to ‘Arry, who constantly professes to be “a Football Man” but is, in reality a Harry Man. Yet while Adkins is presumably a nicer bloke than Redknapp (he’d almost have to be), he has inherited a set of problems that may require some of Redknapp’s devious motivational techniques if they are to be solved. I think Adkins knows this.
A less scholarly character might have condemned Saints capitulation at MK Dons (we dominated the first half before succumbing quickly once they had scored) and bemoaned the missed chances against Colchester, yet Adkins knows he needs the players to like him, at least in the short term, and as a result very few negative remarks have passed his lips since he took the reins. Instead he has wheeled out some oddly Pardew-esque metaphors about “diamonds” and emphasised the importance of Kelvin Davis’ save in the dying moments last Saturday.
He also made a big fuss of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain having substituted him with five minutes remaining. This being Saints, we were never likely to benefit from New Manager Syndrome, but there is a cerebral quality to Adkins and he will realise that his interaction with the players in his first few weeks must be geared towards scaffolding their creaking self esteem.
In a surprisingly candid moment, Terry Venables once effectively told a journalist that football management is, to some extent, a confidence trick. “When you go into a club, you’re usually working with players who’ve lost confidence. Management is about building those players up. Obviously you make tactical changes, but you’ve got to pray that in those first couple of weeks, you get a result, so that they believe in it”. In spite of Adkins’ efforts to sin it otherwise, a 0-0 draw at home to Colchester isn’t going to see confidence suddenly racing through the brains of Saints’ beleaguered team. Wins are what we need, and At Hillsborough we have made a start.