Like most of you I've had to reluctantly take a hard look at our manager. I wondered if, at valencia or before, he has ever had a team break down as ours has this season. Has he ever had to deal with a psychological meltdown/loss of form like this? Most of the problem as I see it is in the psyche, what we normally say is in the head but is more accurately in the feelings.....after all, we have virtually the same players as last season when we were on a roll.
I think the points about fulham by abhred, and leeds and scunthorpe by yorky are well made, but what really separates them from us is expectation. I think that expectation in our players heads has been out of balance this year, and though I firmly believe the owners are primarily responsible, Rafa's achilles heel may have been thoroughly exposed too. This expectation is shared by the crowd and of course by this thread, connected as we are, and so disappointment, the handmaiden of expectation as the Buddha taught, has penetrated all aspects of the club. In our defeats, I've retreated into watching how this thread probably mirrors the dressing room, and especially Rafa's attempts over months to turn the ship around.
He's always had this thing around him that he doesn't engage with his players, no arms around the players, strictly professional, team decisions made on the basis of science. Basically, to use my lingo, to deny, perhaps repress the feelings. He appears to do this with himself, as the thread about his over the top goal celebrations attests. Keep the emotion under control cos it leads to poor decisions, or that it clouds the mental acuity....that is how I imagine he rationalises it. But when the team hits a period like this season, where teams even from the championship come onto the pitch against us feeling that if they get after us, they can get a result, then continuing to repress feelings, ( mainly fear, and feeling unlucky, whatever we do it just stays bad, hopelessness ).... just as it has served Rafa so well up to now, appears to me to be a primary source of limitation. I'm suggesting, well, wild guessing really, that Rafa denied the hopeless feelings in him and the squad, and so was unable to look at the reality of the limitations that this group of players might struggle to perform to the heights of the previous season. Might I say that the imbalance of feelings started right at the beginning of the season, and it was the anger and disappointment that the alonso money couldn't be spent. I firmly believe that this literally depressed Rafa and SG, and it is from this place that SG has sometimes looked like he is saying 'what's the point' this season. I should say that as I understand it, feelings nearly always come first before the mind, not the other way around, and the danger of denial/repression is that what we repress, ie. keep unconscious, tends to control us, rather than us controlling it. This repressed anger, and the disappointment that fell from it's boughs, kept us in denial that we had to learn to walk before we can run again, such was the devastation to the teams confidence.
Rafa and the team have had to stare their collective failure to meet their expectations in the face, and it wasn't until the latest few games that Rafa was able to right the ship. They all had to accept, I think, that they had to go 'back to basics' ( ie. become a solid level 2 team and stop the dreaming of 3......much like the thread eh? ), not let in goals, keep it tight. Through this, re-build the confidence that only comes from not getting beat. Rafa's superior tactical game, his one great asset imo, has suffered and become lost amid the crisis of confidence. If I might say Roy, your solution that 'coaching' is the answer is only partially true, for week in week out we would look fine until we let in a goal, and suddenly we had little or no self-belief,......and the crowd, connected to the emotional pulse of the team like a mother hearing the cries of her child, tensed and the players feel it, and their brains (ie the coaching) freeze from the emotional overwhelm, and we all get another miserable lesson in humility.
It has had me wondering what has been tried by Rafa and the management through this 'seasonus horribilus', he must have come up against some personal demons, particularly when so many balloons were successfully inflated only to have them popped in the last moments of games. Build up, build up, fall down, over and over. I'm sure that he stuck to his routines, but even they must have come under scrutiny as doubt infected the team....they certainly have in here! And what has changed, if anything? It's tempting to say that Kyriakos and his mountain man routine, the male roaring defiance to fear and doubt may have been exactly what was needed to conquer fear..a thing far removed from Rafa's cool. And it is Rafa the cool that might have had so much trouble with a team that was plagued with fear, and I suspect that his traditional cool approach might make facing this fear and helping his team overcome it a very difficult task. {this realm of fear management is Mourinho's one great asset.}
I think that although I share many of the thoughts on here about why this player and not this player, in this position or that position, at the end of the day the "fix" is something beyond coaching, or which player plays where, but into a kind of semi-magical realm that, being magical, I don't quite understand. We all have the experience when balance is achieved in any aspect of our lives, but how to make it happen lies always, I think, just slightly out of reach.
Lastly, I think that the expectation at the beginning of the season caused the injuries, especially to torres and gerrard, I've seen it too many times in all walks of life that when the weight of our inner expectation bears down, the stress of it causes either the body or the mind to break, perhaps only enough to cause a systemic imbalance. That the injuries were nearly all "stretching" injuries in various hamstrings I think makes my point.....we were stretching, trying to meet expectations with just too much tension and not enough relaxation, playing too fast, trying too hard, and not playing within ourselves. It's probably no accident that the one player who always understood this critical balance in-game was alonso, and well, 'nuff said. Now, it seems, the expectations are back in line with reality, and the anger has had time to settle, and there seems an acceptance, for this season, of our current reality.
ta for the shout hass
