Coaching? Bah! Just knock it up to the big man!

Henry Winter today on Sky's Sunday Supplement program opined that you can't teach a "football brain", you have to be born with it (he was referring to Theo Walcott, who over the last 3 seasons at Arsenal regularly made bad decisions on the pitch).

I think Henry Winter is talking about the mental parts of a footballer's skills, so things like positioning, anticipation, vision, decision making etc.

Personally, I think this is nonsense. Are we saying you can be taught "simple" things like quantum physics, but football? Christ, you've got to be born with it!

No wonder football coaching in England is so bad if an intelligent and influential journalist like Henry Winter has opinions like that.

Also, in my own experience I've found you can learn football how to play football, no matter your age.

People who know me will know how much I love football, but I only started getting into football relatively late, around 16 or 17 years old.

And around this time I also started playing football games like Pro Evo, which if you want to get good at requires you to have a good understanding of football.

When I started playing it, I was terrible; I'd choose teams like France (who were at that time the World and European champions) and play against teams like China (who are still pretty poor to this day). And I'd still lose. Badly.

But after a lot of practise, watching more football on TV and playing down the park, I eventually got quite good at it, and at my peak for a short time was probably the best player in my group of friends.

I'm not suggesting I've now got the mind of a football genius, but from where I started (having very little knowledge of football) to becoming a decent player (albeit on a video game), the actual knowledge is still very similar.

If someone has shown enough potential to get a professional contract at a big club, surely with hard work and patience you can improve their abilities?

1 star cuisine

I've noticed recently that a lot of takeaways and restaurants have a sign on their door with their hygiene rating, ranked from 1 to 5 stars.

Whenever I see a sign with less than 5 stars, I can't help wondering what it takes to lose a star.

Is a cockroach worth a star? Or does it take a bunch of roaches? And what about rats - a rat's bigger than a roach so it wouldn't be fair for one takeaway to lose a star for one measly roach and another place loses the same number of stars for a rat.

Oddly enough it wouldn't bother me if a place had only 1 star; I'd probably be standing in the doorway munching on a salmonella infested, rat dropping laced burger while wondering how they lost their stars...

Dancing With Controversy

So the final of Strictly Come Dancing was on this weekend, and with it came some controversy.
Though normally not a viewer (I have a dislike for any program which involves the public voting), I happened to see the end of the semi-finals the week before, where there were three couples dancing.

The normal procedure is for one of the couples to be eliminated and for there to be a final dance-off between two couples the next week.
However, this year it was decided all three couples would go through to the final. The next day it was revealed that the reason for this was that with the way the judges scored the couples, the top two couples were guaranteed to go through regardless of how many phone votes the couple in last place got.
Unfortunately the two hosts of the show didn't know this and encouraged the viewing public to phone in anyway to try and get their favourite couple through.
Due to the toughened up regulations on telephone voting, the BBC panicked and decided to let all three couples through, then add the votes that were cast to the final in addition to the phone voting which normally takes place (the judges do not cast votes in the final, the ultimate winner is chosen purely by public voting).

In the end, the couple who should have been eliminated in the semi-final went on to win and in my opinion completely stripped the show of any integrity it may have had (for this season anyway).
Possibly the greatest irony was that the winning couple, Tom Chambers (the celebrity) and Camilla Dallerup (the professional dancer) seemed to perform better than the runner ups and had the circumstances being different would almost certainly have deservered to win the compeition. Unfortunately in these circumstances the win was thoroughly undeserved and any records of the win should be accompanied by an asterix.

The reason I feel the win is undeserved is because the competition began with one set of rules, and because of a unique set of events (the judges scoring and the hosts urging people to phone vote) ended with another.

In trying to avoid punitive action from OFCOM, the BBC failed to protect the integrity of the show, which is far more important.
What they should have done was to donate any money made from the futile public phone voting to a charity to avoid accusations of defrauding the public and braved whatever punishment OFCOM dished out.
And in this case, OFCOM should have warned the BBC over it's conduct in the future but restrained itself from imposing a fine on them, or at least only imposing a suspended fine.

Because there is no material prize at the end of the show, all the entrants are competing for is pride - something that can mean far more to competitors than anything material.
The runners up this year didn't lose to a better competitor in the end, they lost to a unique set of circumstances and to me a loss that can be hard to understand and hard to accept.
Because of this my condolensces go out to Rachel Stevens and her partner Vincent Simone.