Tinker, tinker. Tinkering has been on my mind lately.
This is my first season coaching the football team at my daughter’s all-girl school. It’s a small school anyway, and “soccer” rates somewhere between swimming and buying a prom dress in the sporting priorities, so we have a limited pool of players to choose from. So no drastic wholesale changes every week for this manager. Indeed, if I’m honest, I’m delighted to finish a game with 11 fit players.
What adds to the pressure is the incredibly truncated season: we had our first “district” fixture (league game) on Saturday – we lost 6-0 – and the last one is January 20. The whole competitive regular season squeezed into just 41 days (This is what it must feel like to be Kieron Dyer or Jonathan Woodgate). Not much chance to show my tactical genius in this hotbed of girls’ soccer here in Southern Louisiana.
So I’m left to tinker with the lineup, much the same way the educational sporting powers-that-be have been tinkering with the rules. You may think that if the FIFA rules and regulations are good enough for Didier Drogba, David Beckham and Lionel Messi then they are good enough for teenage girls from Baton Rouge. But you would be wrong.
For instance, the matches are 40-minute halves, but some high schools are allowed to play 20-minute quarters instead. If a player receives a yellow card then they must leave the field temporarily, and they can come back on at the next opportunity to substitute. We have unlimited substitutions, but you can only replace players when you have possession – in other words, you can’t do it when there is an opposition throw-in or goal-kick for instance. During our first friendly we tried to do it on our corner but the linesman said we couldn’t. At the next friendly they told us we could. Even the officials are confused.
Then there are rules for playoffs, and overtime, and sudden-death overtime, and a seeding system based on how you rank your opponents, which by the way must be done on the computer in the headmistress’ office… Anyway, I’m still struggling with this substitution thing, so I’ll worry about all that next month. Or never.
But to get to the point, I think that’s what we need to do with the Chelsea team. Tinker. We don’t need a major overhaul. No wide-scale sweeping changes. Not a raft of exits. A touch of tweaking. That’s it.
In the seventies and eighties a footballer was old at 30 and his career was winding down. That’s not the case anymore, and it’s not unusual to be performing at the highest level in your mid-thirties. Sure the game is faster these days, but no-one wants or expects a 36-year-old to be playing 90 minutes 60 times a season. Football is a squad game, and the club with the deepest, strongest squad wins the league.
Sure the Blues need to be freshened up. We’ve had the same spine for six years or more: Cech, Terry, Lampard, Drogba, and with our new young manager it’s definitely time to look to the future. But you are dreaming if you don’t think that these players still have an important part to play – for example any team in the Premiership would take Ashley Cole in a New York minute – but we all know that they can’t be the bedrock forever. Prepare yourself people: Professional players age and need replaced. Wow. A revelation I’m sure. We all knew it was coming.
So as I write, on the eve of us taking on the pacesetters and league leaders, let’s not wail hysterically and fret about fire sales, a mass exodus or a massive clear out. A wee bit of tinkering, that’s all.
Now if you will excuse me, I’m off to study my Louisiana girl’s soccer rule handbook. Again.
Stephen Rea is the author of the book Finn McCool’s Football Club, a tale of supporting Chelsea from the United States, the formation of a pub football team in New Orleans and the devastating effect of Hurricane Katrina on that city
