Friday, March 14, 2014

Mickey Lewis defies Newton's Law of Motion

Everyone thought that the Lewis/Meville combination was a safe pair of hands that could sustain the Wilder philosophy long enough to steer us through to the play-offs. It doesn't seem to be working out like that.

Nobby D lost his dressing room on Saturday morning. His Under 8s – who my daughter plays for – seemed to demonstrate the textbook definition of groupthink. Marshalling them into some form of productive training session seemed largely impossible.

The group are normally a happy and well disciplined lot under Nobby’s guidance, but early on it was clear that one or two had turned up in a bit of a scratchy mood. It was manifest in a lot of very low-level transgressions – smart-alec comments, answering back, playing with a ball rather than listening. Then, like ink being dropped blotting paper, the influence spread across the group.

I noticed it when my daughter came over for a drink. Generally she’s a bit of a follower and quite well behaved at football. A couple of the others had started squirting their bottles at each other and I could see a glint in her eyes and a change to her body language. To her delight, the rules of acceptability had apparently changed and the children were in charge.

Rather than absent mindedly dropping the bottle on my toe, as she’s wanton to do, she walked off with it; ready to join in the squirting game. I plucked it from her hands as she left and she shot off back to the group.

With almost nobody noticing, what was happening was a viral underground revolution that wrestled authority from Nobby’s hands into those of the group. Very Lord of the Flies.

Of course, managing an Under 8s team, Nobby is somewhat constrained by what he can do about it. There are parents watching and most children are there on a Saturday morning to enjoy themselves. Nobby gave them a stern admonishment at the end of the session and let it go in the hope that next week discipline will return.

On Saturday afternoon, against Burton, we started with apathy and listlessness. While Burton didn’t punish us initially, as soon as they found a gear, we found ourselves 2 and then nearly 3-0 down. The game was all bust lost within the first half hour.

The apathy was evident from early on. Perhaps it was the early spring sun, but we seemed to stroll onto the pitch and knock it around with little sense of urgency. Worse still, nobody was prepared to light the blue touchpaper. There was a distinct lack of leadership. Like with Nobby's Under 8s, it was as if the players had taken charge and that as a group they had become satisfied with their passive passing game. Nobody was prepared to tell them it was wrong - not even the manager.

Let's not wear rose tinted glasses, we were hardly rocket fuelled under Chris Wilder, but with him gone there appears to be a group-dynamic of some concern. Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion says that for every action, there will be an equal and opposite reaction. But does our squad have anything, or anyone, to react to or against?

Jamie Cook once described Chris Wilder as being something like ‘a great manager but a terrible man’. But that distance may be just what is needed. If a manager is too nice, too close to his squad, how can he make the hard, objective decisions that are needed to make a squad function?

Mickey Lewis has made a career out of being everyone’s mate – fans, players, management. He’s a reliable nice-guy. But does that mean we've lost the objectivity that comes with a manager watching from distance? If there's nobody correcting them, do the players start confirming each others’ behaviour as being right, even if the results are wrong?

Lewis’ post-match interview had an air of ‘shit happens’, a shrug of the shoulders, about it. This ability to roll with the punches has served him well over the 20+ years he's been around the club. But that shrug of the shoulders may well be spreading across the team. After-all, as Mickey says, there's always another game to play or another training session to get things right.

Cheltenham did little to change the perception of being leaderless. Lewis' response was almost trancelike; all we can do is work hard. But that was hardly the problem; Lewis gutted the midfield, putting Mullins in to add some steel along with Ruffels - a very similar player. With little creativity in the middle, we were reliant on the flanks, where stood James Constable who simply isn't built for playing on the wing. Only Williams offered any movement.

There just didn't seem to be a game plan; the players just needed to work hard. I've no doubt they did, but without any obvious direction.

The answer, of course, is a new manager, which by anyone's reckoning has proving to be a slow process. I don't buy the idea that we should get 'anyone' in, because that's currently what we have.

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