Sports science is now a major player in every professional football club but sometimes it can delve too deep
To what extent is sports science benefiting our national game? As a stats obsessive I'm generally a huge fan, but I'm not convinced that football is really making the best use of a complex field.
Over the years much of what has been described as "sports science" has proved to be some kind of fashion fad. I remember when ladders were introduced in training at Liverpool, as part of a trend called "SAQ" ? Speed Agility Quickness. Like most things in life, if you give something an acronym it sounds official, and suddenly every club in the country were investing in ladders. Ronnie Moran memorably called it "tippy-tappying", and such was the strength of belief in it that even goalkeepers had to run through ladders before they were allowed to catch a ball.
Then there was the bin liner fad ? where overweight players sat in saunas covered in black plastic ? and the dreaded callipers that measured fat levels, remain a flawed practice that players can cheat at by not drinking fluids on the morning of a test thereby dehydrating themselves at the same time.
Along the way there have been dodgy psychologists, nutritionists who tell you to eat as much pasta as you like (Paul Merson at Aston Villa took that literally), and ? mentioning no names ? even rumours of managers cooking their own stats. As sports science has grown in influence over the game, it has certainly increased tensions between managers and their backroom staff. The manager used to be the boss: now he has sports scientists wanting to dictate how long a player should be allowed to train and believing their data should be unquestionable. How does that square with someone such as Harry Redknapp who believes there is equal mileage in putting an arm round a player and telling him he's fantastic?
Actually under Harry, at Portsmouth, the balance worked quite well. Our gym may have been a prefab ? it had a power plate in there that looked as if it had been invented by the Russians in 1986 ? but we had such an enthusiastic and knowledgeable staff working with us that the lack of equipment didn't seem to matter. I'd spend hours after training bouncing ideas around with John Dalzell (now at Burnley) and the analysis work we did with Eddie Prozone, as we called him, has to have been the most thorough of any club I've played for. Of course Harry would come in and say he didn't give a toss about statistics (until we lost and then he'd throw a few at us) but there seemed a workable balance of views.
I would put that in stark contrast to a club like Arsenal who, in my view, have an over-reliance on sports science. Through training at London Colney, with England, we caught a glimpse of the way even the younger members of the team train and it was certainly eye-opening. Anecdotally I've heard that statistics and data inform every decision, even down to whether a player can be selected for a game. That nugget of information reminded me of a trip to the Miami Dolphins NFL team a decade ago where their strength and conditioning guy told me that each morning he would assess the heart-rates of a group of his players via a sensory machine to determine whether they would be allowed to train that day or not. Machines versus common sense? To me that seems like madness. It surely stifles the enthusiasm of the players.
Is the approach successful for Ars�ne Wenger's team? While some may point to Arsenal's consistent qualification for the Champions League, others wonder why they have not won a trophy since 2005. Wenger's ability to send out teams of young men ? their average age against Liverpool last Saturdaywas 23 ? is unrivalled but it also appears to be limited by its own philosophy.
My biggest frustration of all is that sports science is meant to embrace a whole spectrum of medical advances ? from nutrition to psychology ? but these areas in themselves are invariably left off the agenda at most clubs. I can't remember the last time I was given up-to-date information on nutrition for footballers ? it's as though not going for fry-ups at the local cafe any more is about as sophisticated as it gets. With players of Kolo Tour�'s stature worrying about their weight, why do clubs ignore the issue of nutrition?
Certainly the case of Tour� and the diet pills was a huge wake-up call for our game. The issue is definitely a serious problem in football ? I tried diet pills years ago (they were horrible) but it has taken as high-profile a star as Tour� for football to take the problem seriously. This season our training ground has been plastered in posters warning us about drug tests and supplement use and abuse. Now we know that we areto be held personally responsible for what we put in our bodies, which is a big change from the old days when I used regularly to stroll into the local chemist and stock up on a whole heap of things without ever thinking to read the list of ingredients they contained.
But a warning in itself does not go far enough; players need educating. In pre-season the governing bodies of the game came in to give us presentations, which included a missive on drug-testing regimes, but the message was easily lost among a multitude of other issues ? from social media to a debate over Fifa's world best XI.
If football is really going to benefit from sports science, had we not better embrace the whole field of knowledge? The current situation whereby either you cannot get on the training field because of an over-reliance on data or the manager still believes in the magic sponge as a fix?all solution is far too polarised.
David James has donated his fee for this column to charity
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/aug/27/david-james-sports-science
Alexandre Picard Sebastien Piche Alex Pietrangelo Joni Pitkanen
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