Practice makes perfect

BLOGGER FROM AMERICAFRI 9 JUN 2017

My guess is that unless you are hopelessly optimistic, or spookily clairvoyant, you didn’t think we would win the league this year. I think most Blues supporters would have settled for fourth after the underachievement and turmoil of the last campaign. So how important was the 2016 preseason? An accurate predictor of what was to follow or just a series of meaningless friendlies?

In July 1997, a full two decades ago next month, I traveled to Goodison Park to watch us win the Umbro Cup, defeating Newcastle and then Everton in the final. I came away from that weekend impressed by our performances, confident we would be a force to be reckoned with that season. It was the year we won both the League Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup and clinched third in the league, our best finish since 1970.

Last preseason Chelsea had a busy schedule. According to the BBC website, the trips to Germany, Austria and the USA to play six friendlies in the space of 22 days meant flying an incredible 14,345 miles. For scale, to cover the same distance I would have to jet from New Orleans to London, back to New Orleans, return to London, and still have enough miles left to nip up to Inverness.

I watched the team train in Los Angeles and Minneapolis last summer. I was particularly keen to see how the sessions were structured for world-class stars as opposed to what I had been taught to do when I went through my licenses to coach teenagers here in the States. The biggest difference was the repetitiveness of the exercises. Antonio Conte had the squad do the same movements, the same passing patterns, work on the same shape, over and over again.

One afternoon at UCLA I was a few feet away from Diego Costa when he spotted a tiny ball on the pitch. I don’t know what it was exactly, but it was about the size of a large hailstone or small bouncy ball. With a single deft kick he flicked it into the air, controlled it, and volleyed it to Kenedy standing beside him. They juggled it back and forth a few times - I’ve never seen control like that with such a small object. Both individually and with the team, practice makes perfect, right?

We won the two matches I attended, defeating Liverpool 1-0 and AC Milan 3-1. But I would be lying if I now claimed that 10 months ago, based on those two friendlies and a few training sessions, I knew we would be champions.

But what do I know. Apart from that you can earn all the coaching qualifications and licenses in the world - but there is no substitute for experience.