You Play Football With Your Mind

By Ronni Cohen

Psycho-Motoric Skills

Apart from physical fitness, strong technique and good mental ability, a football player also needs developed psycho-motoric skills, meaning attention and concentration abilities, multi-tasking, implied perception (ability to perceive in advance), space orientation, information processing (input-output) pace, motoric memory and the like.

In order to illustrate this matter, let us look into the process of information processing and performance of Barcelona's midfielder, Chavi Hernandez, from the point of receiving the ball to its release- the moment of the pass:

A. Identifying an open space in the direction of a passing angle and moving into it.
B. Realizing that the ball is being passed towards him.
C. Moving his look away from the ball and screening his surroundings.
D. Pointing his look at the ball, while it is half underway, anticipating where it is heading to and its strength in the moment of absorption.
E. Receiving the ball (Almost blind absorption), while taking a look at the surrounding area and estimating potential moves.
F. Passing the ball with supreme accuracy to his teammate or towards an open space, where a teammate is moving to.

Now we can better understand Chavi's sentence in an interview: "When you arrive in Barcelona as a child, the first thing that you are taught is: think, think, think and fast. From the age of ten you are taught that it is a shame to lose the ball."

Chavi actually speaks about the brain and thinking functions during physical effort, or in simpler words about training the brain.

In his book "A User's Guide to the Brain" (Zmora-Bitan Publishers 2005), Dr. John Ratey, Neuro-Psychiatrist from Harvard Medical School, concentrates influential insights with respect to the training perception of athletes:

"Imagine what happens inside your head when you have to make a decision. You receive information from the different brain functions: facts, opinions, thoughts, memories and predicting outcomes. You arrange the fractions of information, add reason test possible results and instruct a response. Phases of this process are based on motorial functions, organizing by sequence, adding analyzing and instructing, the neural networks that work within those processes are those that work in motorial processes". He further emphasizes that: "parts of the brain that are used to organize sequences and timing of cognitive function are the same parts that organize a sequence and timing of physical actions"

These kinds of insights are applicable in an effective manner using psycho-motoric training, which is customized to a player individually. In other words: Since it is possible to train a football player and improve his physical fitness, technique and coordination and, as already known, it is possible to train a chess player to improve his decision making skills, then why won't we able to train both at the same time?

The talent Potential

Players who are blessed with a god-given talent, like Pele, Johan Cruyff, Maradona, Messi, etc. are also endowed with very rare psycho-motoric skills. One of their distinctive qualities is their ability to think and take the right decision in motion. Taking Eyal Berkovitz as an example, the unique quality which made him such a good player is his ability to pass (that is, to process information pertaining to space) during constant movement, without taking negative effect on the game's fluency. This kind of skill may sometimes make the difference between good players and very good players and between excellent players to those who are recognized as geniuses.

Coaches use to say that you cannot teach talent. Either you have it or you don't.

This is true, but think how many talented football players work hard and still are not able to utilize their talent potential to the fullest?

A football player, who has a tendency for "attention lapses" ('disconnections') may perform critical mistakes out of momentary lack of attention, no matter how talented he may be. Motivation alone or hard training will not spare the distress from the player and coach. We are talking about a neurological pattern, which the player has hardly any effect on. The first step towards the solution of this problem is the development of consciousness and awareness of these "disconnections" and the second step is a pinpoint interference/ training dedicated to attention. A football player's attention and concentration skills have also an effect on the amount of mental effort that he invests for keeping up his concentration along the game.

Obviously physical fitness has an effect on this issue, but even if we start out from the assumption that the player has an adequate physical fitness, symptoms of mental fatigue will often be noticeable. When a player performs very well on the first half and totally disappears from field on the second half, this cannot always be attributed to his physical fitness. Players that performed psycho-motoric training for several months have reported not only of

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