Motivation counts a lot in football.
Coaches know this and, whenever necessary, look for ideas and mechanisms to inspire their players to perform that goes beyond the physical, technical and tactical aspects.
It is called psychological doping, the result of some trigger that makes the team, individually and collectively, go beyond what is commonplace.
This strategy is even more important when the team is in bad shape and faces a crisis, even at the beginning of the championship. Worse: it is located in the relegation zone, needing to react quickly to avoid getting into trouble further ahead, finding itself in an irreversible scenario.
Nuno Espírito Santo, 51, a coach born in São Tomé and Príncipe (Africa) and who has Portuguese nationality, took over at West Ham, from England, at the end of September, with the club in the relegation zone. He replaced Graham Potter, fired after a Premier League start with four defeats and a solitary victory.
The situation would hardly get worse, right? In terms. In the first four games, one draw and three defeats, and the London team remained among the bottom three.
Nuno realized that the traditional methods and precepts of his repertoire as a coach were not working. He had to do something to shake up the players, in order to trigger a shift towards survival – of the team and of himself on the team.
At the turn of October to November, he prepared a plan to encourage players. (My parenthesis: just the monthly salary that footballers earn on the team, which varies from R$50,000 to R$4 million, should be enough incentive, but it wasn’t.)
I don’t know how he got the material, but before the match at the Olympic Stadium in London, on Sunday (2), the West Ham dressing room had one of the walls full of photographs. They were images of the athletes as children.
Senegalese El Hadji Malick Diouf, the team’s starting left back, posted the panel with almost three dozen boys on social media.
Nuno’s intention was to make the players “go back in time”, to the time when they dreamed of playing football at the highest level. To remind them that they have come a long, arduous and thorny road to wearing the shirt of an elite club and competing in the most prestigious league on the planet.
This renewed the team. Each one who went to the field, it was clear, gave something more than normal. Extra will, redoubled effort, plenty of energy. Even though they started behind the great Newcastle (which competes in the Champions League), they turned around, and the players returned to the dressing room to offer their “young self” the score of 3-1.
On social media, fans of the Hammers (hammers, a nickname that alludes to the original formation of West Ham, at the end of the 19th century, with workers from a steel mill in which they used these tools) enjoyed what they considered a “touch of love” transformed into fuel for the ardor.
“In the Premier League, we cannot allow ourselves not to work hard, with sacrifice,” said Nuno after the victory. “That was the message to the guys.”
The triumph was insufficient to take West Ham out of the relegation zone, however, on All Souls’ Day, there was life in the team, awakened by memories of nostalgic times of childish experiences.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
