Coaches Corner

Recently, a friend sent through this article on Jose Mourinho , and an interesting email discussion ensued. The article could be (and was) argued to be quite a superficial article, saying that Morinho wins 'because he has "tactics" and "a fascination for details and process"... and a lot of money. Has he won without spending a lot of money?' HN I thought that I'd post an edited transcript, in case anyone else was interested! ML It has actually has more insight than most articles I see on any topic. He won the Champions League with Porto, so yes he has won without spending money. And Champions League with Inter was also relatively (compared with the English and Spanish teams he beat) little money. And money does not guarantee success anyway. How he wins is fascinating. Because there are very, very few coaches who ALWAYS win. And he always wins. AL I agree. I love the idea of 'fascination for details and process'. It makes a lot of s

There is no one 'right' way to learn skills, just as there is no one 'wrong' way (there are many, many, many wrong ways!). A lot of what makes something defined as 'good' is actually the context, the situation, the environment the coach and athlete exist in. Australia is a very peculiar environment. I've written before about  Pyramid Schemes , which implies that the way to end up with a certain number of champions is to start training a large number of athlete and then waiting for the best ones to win gold medals. This is obviously simplistic, but in countries with huge populations of athletes of a particular sport (eg: divers in China, football players in Brasil), just training hard and stepping back seems to deliver the best athletes to the podium. The problem is that if you adopt this strategy in a country with a limited talent base you end up with all your athletes getting injured or quitting before too long. So how do you compete with this? To s