#waysofthinking

We must question what we know. Or that which we think we know.

Or better still admit that we really know next to nothing.

Only then can we reconsider what we do and consider why we do it, and whether we can (or should) do it better?

Disciplines often seek to borrow from each other. Sport, business and education cross pollinate with regularity, but sport is as much about structures as it is psychological relationships. What might it learn from physics, engineering, or biology?

Football creates it’s own geometry. The movement of internal organisms structuring and restricting with fluidity and rapidity. This movement creates an on field ecosystem.

The overall system breaks into subsystems. Dyads and triads. Diamonds facing off against squares in a quest for subsystem dominance.  The squares may face triangles as the numerical superiority ebbs and flows.

The game is so fluid and dynamic that in reality only at restarts can a set shape be definitively demanded and deployed.

Dense honeycomb shapes begin to form. Nature prefers the hexagon, the strongest structures in nature will feature hexagonal combinations. The formats of football create a geometry based on temporarily fixed points. Nature doesn’t have to worry about whether it is in or out of possession.

When a team has possession is when the gaps are created and the team in possession becomes vulnerable to counter attacks due to the spaces within its own structure. Spaces that the team has created for itself. A shape often not dictated by the game, not self organised and not natural. A shape created by the coach.

By adopting natures hexagon a team may be able to make itself more secure.

Using natural geometry may help us to solve the issue of dominating territory and possession, being impactful in attack, while not leaving ourselves open to counter attacks.

Search far and wide, you never know where solutions will appear.

I have been told so many times that there is “no need to reinvent the wheel” that it has become my life’s ambition to do just that.

Without change there can be no progress and too often people fight tooth and nail for relatively minor change when what is really needed is sweeping, dramatic change.

Why fight so hard for something that will make so little difference? If you are going to fight, fight for the new wheel.

Football is set in it’s ways. The game has changed in a very small way during the last 150 years. Football simulations have changed far more dramatically in a mere 30 years.

While the classic 11v11 game possibly doesn’t need change for adults, it certainly does for children. New formats to afford greater opportunities are needed and have been suggested.

2v2.

3v3.

Even the 11v11 game can be looked into. When young adults play a different version of the game and declare it to be more exciting then the great footballing edifice may not be as stable as imagined.

Change to progress.

Think. Then think some more.