… His 22 goals were instrumental to Eupen’s survival in their first season in the Belgian Pro League. The little known provincial club was bought by Qatar’s Aspire Zone Foundation in 2012. The Pandas were in financial difficulties and Aspire offered them a lifeline. Andreas Bleicher and Joseph Colomer devised the idea of acquiring Eupen to create a pathway for bringing Aspire’s academy talents into the professional European circuit.
The acquisition was made as part of Aspire Zone’s ‘Football Dreams’ programme, which scouts potential stars in developing African nations as well as Vietnam, Thailand, Guatemala and Paraguay.
Onyekuru is one of the Aspire programme’s success stories. At home in Lagos he didn’t play for a club, but just enjoyed kickabouts on the street. Aged 13, he moved to the Aspire academy in Senegal. He stayed four years in Dakar where he combined his training, predominantly by Spanish coaches, with education. Every year Onyekuru would visit the Qatari capital Doha for a couple of weeks.
When Nathan Aké walked into the Bournemouth players’ lounge after scoring an injury-time winner against Liverpool in a thrilling comeback in December, there was disappointment rather than elation fuelling his emotions. Aké was the hero, the on-loan star who has just delivered a landmark victory for Bournemouth in dramatic fashion, yet something was troubling him amid the celebrations.
“I scored a tap-in and, of course, everyone makes it sound like I played a great game and won us the match,” he says. “But I think you always feel it doesn’t matter how much people talk you up or down; you always feel what you’ve done yourself. And in that game I felt like the first Liverpool goal, and maybe a little bit the second, I could have done better. The next week I asked the manager, Eddie Howe, to watch the clips with me and we spoke about what I could have done.”
It is a story that encapsulates what Aké is all about and goes some way to explaining why they talk about his mentality in the same breath as his talent at Stamford Bridge.
… Clair Dunne told me about her teenage son, Reece Staples, who was described by a Nottingham Evening Post banner in the early years of this century as “the next big thing.” He trialled with Manchester United before leaving Notts County youth for Nottingham Forest on a big fee in the days when his world seemed a fabulous place.
Like many boys, the step from youth to senior football proved too much for Reece, who was released at the start of the 2008/09 season, and while Forest and football cannot be blamed for what happened next, there was an obvious cause and effect.
Dumped out of the gilded cage, the boy felt no cause for hope, fell into bad company, then into crime, and died on a police station floor when his attempt to smuggle cocaine into Britain by swallowing it went catastrophically wrong. He was 19.
It’s no secret that performance excellence in sports requires dedicated practice and physical training. Much less is known about mental training to deal with the psychological pressures of competitive athletics, the mental game.
A recent University of Miami study conducted in the laboratory of neuroscientist Amishi Jha, asked if mental toughness and resilience can be trained in collegiate football players. Results suggest that just like physical training, practice is key for mental training. Jha’s team found that greater practice and program adherence in a mindfulness training program, but not a matched relaxation training program, led to more stable attention and fewer attentional lapses in football players.
… “If the athlete is thinking it’s clutch,” Gervais goes on, “they’ve probably made it too big, and they’re thinking rather than doing.”
That’s the core of it all: The more one thinks about “being clutch,” the less likely it is to come to pass.
“That’s where most of us get hung up in clutch moments,” says Dr. Leslie Sherlin, a neuroscientist who co-founded SenseLabs, a company that shows athletes—including Walsh Jennings, the Seahawks and, among many others, basketball players—how their brains function. And, he adds: “We can’t shut it off because we are so focused on the outcome—we’re so focused on the process—that we can’t just execute because we’re busy processing that. People who succeed in clutch moments shut it off.”
The Learning Scientists, Althea Bauernschmidt from
… To get students to focus on the important parts of an example – the structural detail – simply give another example with different surface details. When students have two examples to compare and contrast, it’s easier for them to pick out what is similar – the structural details – and therefore important. This bore out in the experiments Gick and Holyoak ran for a follow-up paper (3). In addition to the general and fortress story above, they gave students a second story about putting out a fire wherein using multiple buckets of water from different sides finally puts out the fire. When students were given these two example stories, with different surface details, and then given the problem, they were much more likely to give the analogous solution. Fifty-two percent of students – a substantial increase over the 20% from before – were able to give the analogous solution.
London-based FitnessGenes, which creates personalized fitness and nutrition plans for individuals based on a the results of an at-home DNA testing kit, has raised $5 million. Sino-German High Tech Fund (SGHF), an investment fund comprised of China’s Donghai Securities and Germany’s Grunderfonds, led the round.
FitnessGenes positions its product as a means of figuring out which specific diet plan and exercise regimen works best for an individual based on their genetic makeup. Users provide a saliva sample and send it to FitnessGenes’ UK laboratory, where it will be analyzed for specific genes that reportedly have an effect on the body’s ability to build muscle, burn fat and improve aerobic performance, among other things (although the testing gets more into the weeds than that by analyzing genes for eye color, under the assumption that the production of melanin could impact whether someone is deficient in vitamin D). Based on their genetic makeup and fitness goals, users are prompted to purchase a specific test and coaching plans ranging from simple DNA analysis ($150) to muscle-building plans (up to $337).
The Carolina Panthers have a new eye in the sky – three of them, in fact.
Joining a growing trend across the NFL and college football, the Panthers purchased a telescoping video system to record practices during organized team activities this spring.
The systems, manufactured by 8K Solutions in Titusville, Fla., replace the scissor lifts from which the Panthers’ video team used to shoot practice. Besides being more cutting-edge, Panthers coach Ron Rivera says the telescoping cameras also are safer.
to compare the current methods of appointment, qualifications and occupational experience of club doctors and physiotherapists in English professional football with (i) those outlined in a study published in 1999, and (ii) Football Association (FA) medical regulations. Design
Qualitative. Methods
Postal questionnaire survey of (head) doctors and physiotherapists at each of the clubs in the English Premiership, Championship and Football Leagues 1 and 2. Response rates of 35.8% and 45.6% respectively were obtained. Results
The majority of football club doctors are GPs who have sports medicine qualifications and relevant occupational experience. Time commitments vary from full time to a few hours per week. Most are appointed through personal contacts rather than job advertisements and/or interview. Almost all football clubs have a chartered physiotherapist, many of whom have a postgraduate qualification. They work full time and long hours. Most are appointed through personal contacts rather than job advertisements. They are frequently interviewed but not always by someone qualified to judge their professional expertise. Conclusions
Football club medical provision has become more extensive and increasingly professional over the last 10-20 years, with better qualified, more career-oriented and more formally contracted staff. It is likely that clinical autonomy has subsequently increased. However recruitment procedures still need to be improved, especially in relation to advertising vacancies, interviewing candidates, and including medical personnel on interview panels. In two aspects clubs appear not to be compliant with current FA medical regulations.
Injury rates among elite young female athletes may be higher than what’s been reported, new data suggest.
“Most studies define injury as time loss from participation, whereas many athletes with overuse injuries continue to participate despite pain and reduced performance. When time-loss definitions are used, about 90 percent of overuse injuries appear to be missed,” researchers write in the journal BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine.
The Football Association suspects Manchester United have withheld key information about their England internationals because José Mourinho and his staff do not fully trust the governing body to prevent it being leaked to rival clubs.
Gareth Southgate, the England manager, is trying to improve the relationship between the FA and the relevant people at Old Trafford after admitting there had been a trust issue, citing “the perception of [information] being leaked”.
Southgate was referring to the sports science data the FA requests for international get-togethers so he can examine detailed analysis about the players he has called up. Every top-division club agreed to supply this data for Euro 2016 but that has not continued at Old Trafford since Mourinho took over last summer.
… Last week in this space, I talked about how in baseball, when we see some sort of strategic shift, it takes about a decade for it to work its way through the game, and it’s a slow uptake. What was once a novel idea eventually becomes something that everyone does, negating whatever advantage the original team had, but it’s not an instant process. There’s value in being first.
The interesting question is why it’s a slow process. If a team sees that a strategy is working for another team, it’s likely to work for them. So why not do it? This week, we can dispense with the gory mathematical details. Let’s just assume that we’re talking about something that we know works, and the math backs it up. Why wouldn’t a team—once they read the appropriate Baseball Prospectus article, of course—simply change everything that they do?
… But the second part of the study–what these “freak” teams had in common–yielded the biggest surprise. It was not the presence of a superstar, superior tactics, money, or even a genius coach. Their only shared trait was the presence of a particular kind of captain.
These men and women were not what I’d expected. They were rarely major talents. They weren’t charismatic speechmakers. They generally played supporting roles, carried water for their teams, and clashed with referees and management. On and off the field, they acted as independent intermediaries, selectively adopting the wishes of their coaches or teammates depending on the situation. Put simply, they were middle managers.
Greg Hunt, the minister for health and the minister for sport, recently announced a federal government initiative to develop a National Sports Plan. This is not a new idea. The Labor government’s independent sport panel in 2009, chaired by David Crawford, concluded:
Australia does not have a national sports policy or vision. We have no agreed definition of success and what it is we want to achieve. We lack a national policy framework within which objectives for government funding can be set and evaluated.
It is pleasing, therefore, that Hunt’s proposal calls for public engagement, inviting written submissions up to July 31. Hopefully, those who take the trouble to do so will be heard, and robust debate follow. If the government already has steadfast positions, dialogue will be pointless.