Last year, the BBC’s Tim Vickery penned an intriguing tome concerning the impact upon team spirit of the proliferation of personal technology.
Writing from his base in Rio, Mr Vickery submits that footballers’ mass use of iPods, PSPs and laptops on the way to games is denying them the all-important male bonding time that they probably don’t get enough of in training, on pre-season trips and while sipping £6 bottles of WKD Blue in various London ‘nightspots’ after a game.
What they should be doing on them there coach journeys, you see, is playing cards and board games, staging eating competitions (as George Graham’s Arsenal squad apparently used to) or even forming a beatnik poetry circle.
However, Sky Sports is full of pre-match footage of players emerging from coaches sporting gargantuan headphones and, for all we know, the interior of the coach is lined with 20 separate isolation tanks so that not a single molecule of a player’s breath need mingle with another’s.
How on earth can a manager foster team spirit and unity between a group of individuals who’d rather listen to Phil Collins’ Greatest Hits on repeat for four hours than exchange anecdotes about how they stayed in with the missus every night of the week eating pasta and watching crap DVDs?
In Vickery’s piece, he claims:
“Towards the end of his international career, England defender Gareth Southgate observed that when the squad were together at the end of the day, those sitting round a table having a chat and swapping experiences were the older players. The younger ones had scuttled off to their rooms and their laptops, DVDs, video games and so on.”
What Southgate declines to mention is that said older players would stay up until 3am nattering about golf handicaps and getting steadily hammered, while the younger players would tire themselves out shooting pixelated zombies and fall asleep at a reasonable hour to the soothing strains of 50 Cent.
Do footballers dream about playing football in the same way that dogs dream about chasing their tail? Legs twitching, arms occasionally raised over head and sporadic, barely coherent mumbles of “referee!”. It’s difficult to imagine the majority of footballers having the kind of weird dreams that regular folk are accustomed to.
In fact, Did You Smash It? is willing to bet good money that Jamie O’Hara has never dreamt about his shoes talking to him, or that Gareth Barry has never woken up screaming “my face is made of yoghurt!”.
Benzema...loves his Rachmaninov
In fairness, the problem of personal technology stifling team bonding is more applicable to international sides than it is to clubs, given how infrequently they pool together. As such, Vickery extols the virtues of Dunga’s supposedly tech-free approach to managing Brazil.
He quotes Dunga as saying: "[The 1994 World Cup-winning team] had something fundamental. It was a group that taught the country how to win. We went without for 24 years, with exceptional players, but unable to take that step. And that ‘94 generation did it, showing that work comes first."
No mention of banning mobile phones, no tales of irate managers snatching iPods out of the hands of dozing players, and not even an allusion to Robinho and Ronaldinho getting bollocked for checking out each other’s FarmVilles while they should have been filming a Nike advert or some such.
So what’s the solution? Where does it all end? And are four-player Mario Kart tussles really a worse way of bonding than developing gambling addictions on long coach journeys?
Did You Smash It? kindly requests that you send in any comments that you may have on a scrap of papyrus strapped to the back of a carrier pigeon.
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