By Samindra Kunti
October 8 – As Arsenal blitzed their way past longtime arch rivals Manchester United with a superb brace from the inimitable Alexis Sanchez and a strike from Mesut Ozil inside the first 19 minutes last Sunday at the Emirates stadium, Louis Van Gaal was left stunned on the touchline.
“We beat Arsenal 8-2 a few years ago,” reacted Manchester United’s head of athletic development Tony Strudwick (pictured) composedly on the sidelines of the Aspire Academy Global Summit on Football Performance and Science. “Irrespective of the result, you focus on the process and where we could have improved and what we needed to do. Arsene Wenger and his staff managed to process that [8-2 result] and his players bounced back.”
Alexis Sanchez’s casual back-flick and strike to the top-right corner highlighted an outstanding performance, wherein he demonstrated his usual concentrated application and unwavering energy. Ozil, a less physical player, also imposed himself imperiously from the start and orchestrated Arsenal’s comfortable victory.
Those were performances that Strudwick would approve of. The doctor in sports science from Liverpool John Moores University has a distinguished coaching career in English football, with passages at Coventry, West Ham United and Blackburn Rovers.
“I arrived at Manchester United back in 2008 [as fitness coach],” said Strudwick. “It struck me that United did not only have fantastic talent at the time – Ronaldo, Scholes, Giggs, Rooney and van der Sar, all fantastic players, but the performance culture came from manager Sir Alex Ferguson. It’s about defining what’s important, what value is, the way you do things, the way you conduct yourself and the whole behavior code associated with performance culture. It took so long to build a culture of success, a culture of sustained winning. No team have ever won the Premier League four times in a row, Manchester United nearly did, winning it three years in a row.”
Strudwick joined Manchester United in 2007 and has had the opportunity to work for the club in different coaching roles. At the end of September 2014 Manchester United appointed Strudwick as their head of athletic development. Strudwick’s new role at Carrington shortened his career with the English national team. He had been an integral part of Roy Hodgson’s back room staff at the 2014 FIFA World Cup, where England faltered in the heat of Manuas before meeting Luis Suarez in Sao Paulo.
“The World Cup is a very challenging environment,” said Strudwick. “You can take a relatively conservative approach, where you are concerned about the players and the fatigue and the long tough season in the Premier League or you can take the more aggressive structure and really work the players hard in the preparation phase ahead of the World Cup,” elaborated Strudwick.
“Personally, I’d take the later. You have an opportunity and you need to hit the players with an aggressive approach, but of course the consequences of that approach is that they go back to their clubs and take [more] time to get back into the regular season.”
At United it initially took a bit of time to convince Louis Van Gaal of the in-house performance culture, deeply rooted in a sports scientific approach.
“The challenge for a manager moving into a different club and a different culture is all of a sudden he is thrust into a environment where things may be done differently from how that particular coach is operating,” said Strudwick.
“David Moyes had moderate success at Everton under a different budget and under different constraints. That model at Everton was different from the model operating at Manchester United. Louis Van Gaal had success at FC Barcelona and Bayern Munich doing things in a different way, in his own unique way. It’s very different from Sir Alex Ferguson. The key element for the existing staff of Manchester United was to convince Louis Van Gaal and the new incoming staff of how we do things and the info that we use. You couldn’t expect Louis Van Gaal to arrive at Manchester United and trust our processes straightaway.”
The synergy between Van Gaal and Strudwick, whose main focus at the club is the U23 team, couldn’t prevent Arsenal from outperforming Manchester United. While Sanchez and Ozil played admirably well, Strudwick in a way did not consider their performance as abnormal. In fact, the increased use of a culture of performance and sports science has perversely not led to better players, or athletes, according to him.
“If you look at the global talent, we are not producing better players than we did 20, 30 years ago,” said Strudwick. “What we are doing – we are very much more process-driven. So, and things work in cycles: you have a wonderful German team that comes out of the late 2000’s, you have fantastic Spanish football coming out of the mid 2000’s. Different countries were working in different phases and different cycles. Throughout that cycle you will have a period with fantastic players, like Barcelona with Xavi and Iniesta. Generally, we are not producing more high-quality players, but by the same token there has certainly been a changing mentality in how we approach performance sport.”
A next generation of sports scientists may produce an infinite flux of Sanchezs and Ozils – possibly and preferably Ronaldos and Messis, the ultimate prototypes of the supernatural contemporary athlete – if elite performance, and the study thereof, is taken to a new level in the next two decades.
“What sports science has done is allowed us to record information and data,” explained Strudwick. “Now we can start building up info on what the top characteristics are of the top players – what makes Cristiano Ronaldo the athlete he is, what makes Lionel Messi and Paul Scholes the athletes they are? Twenty, thirty years ago, we didn’t start to collect that information on players. What will allow us to do it, is to build up more profiles and build up more information of what are the key attributes at top level. Once we understand that, we can work backwards – how can we create the environment to stretch our players to take them to the next level? The next phase thereafter is how can we create more players of great calibre?”
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