Spurs should learn from Belgian football coach

Kevin McGreskin, technical director at elite performance coaching specialists Soccer Eye Q explains that coaches often don't understand football is a cognitive sport.

"I think that coaches either forget, or don't even realise, that football is a hugely cognitive sport. 

"We've got to develop the players' brains as well as their bodies but it's much easier to see and measure the differences we make to a player's physiology than we can with their cognitive attributes."

For those unsure of what a cognitive function is a quick extract from Wikipedia may help.

In science, cognition is the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory & working memory, judgement & evaluation, reasoning & "computation", problem solving & decision making, comprehension & production of language, etc. Cognition is by humans conscious and unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive (like knowledge of a language) and conceptual (like a model of a language). Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.

The science is embraced in other sports but virtually ignored in football because it isn't how how coaching has been done before. But Tottenham have had too many weak minded individuals of late to ignore the mental side of the game any longer.

Pochettino is talking about improving the mentality, Kaboul is talking about improving the mentality, not the skills, the mentality because the mentality of players that is causing us our problems and that is caused by buying players with a fingers crossed attitude.

Belgian football coach Michel Bruyninckx is the leader in the field of cognitive football coaching, coaching the brain to be a better tool than it was before. He designs football coaching programmes to improve a players brain and tests have proved it works.

"We need to develop an engram -- a neurological track -- in the brain. We always thought that sporting activities were mechanical activities, but we know that there are interventions from the brain."

Closed minds won't accept such an approach but working with a players football skills in a way that is specifically designed to train the brain ought to be embraced. This lot we have now could certainly do with it.

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The eye for instance can mislead so how many players undertake visualisation training? Training to be more aware of what is around, be it space, team mates or opposition. The best players have the best visualisation, they know where everyone is.It's not hard to continually look around to refresh your memory but players don't do it and then have to take too long to make a decision.

That is just one minor way a player can improve with the right training that he simply doesn't get now and is left to his own devises to learn, if he even realises he needs to.

I'm all for making Tottenham players the best they can be and have no problem buying young to improve, but then you have to coach every aspect, even those that are being coached now to get the best out of players and maximise returns.

The quicker you can improve a player the better but football coaching is still stuck in the dark ages in many respects.

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