GAME INTELLIGENCE PART 4

In the final part of this Game Intelligence series inspired by this monster article I'll take a look at how movement fits into all this and finally in-game decision making, which is how everything presented up until now presents within a game, why it presents as such and who it presents to specifically.

I've deliberately left anything from the physical co-active out until now and my reason for that is that is because at local/amateur levels of football we think that everything can be fixed with more - more running, more training, more of everything - when in reality more of anything physical should be the very LAST thing you look to because for every add something physical into your regime, then everything is affected mainly from a fatigue point of view.

A lot of the things I've mentioned in the previous 3 parts can be trained by coaches and players of any level and with physical fatigue and joint stress plus they'll have far more impact on what happens game day against those 4 x 400's you did just 36hrs ago.

That being said if players can possess of the things we've already talked about then if you can add efficient movement qualities players who already possess a  high processing speed, then on top of that and their elite emotional management abilities, can take in, and process, more information than other players.

As mentioned earlier, information processing takes time that can overwhelm some players but if they can stay calm then they can make smarter decisions, faster.

The process of efficient movement is a very fast coordination effort of the lower and upper centers of the brain where they access a database of simulations stored in their brain and the more emotional/cognitive resources that are available, the more accurate/quicker the decisions.

This part is very important and SHOULD have huge implications on how you train from now on.

Earlier I said that:

Training = Thinking

Game = Action

This means that at training you can provided with time and constraints (environment, task etc) that can make things easier, harder or slower to develop which is perfect when you are teaching new concepts but in a game situation everything needs to be automatic and it's an actual skill to be able to play like that so players need training time under their belts performing exactly like that.

No player has the capacity to make sense of all of the information that comes in during a game at once so the brain hands over to the subconscious which hits the button on decision making and if you've had a mammoth game and can't remember many specific details of it, then this is what it "looks/feels" like.

An in-game decision is made based on patterns before the brain communicates with our motor cortex on what move to do next (with or without the ball) so while the game is chaotic, there are only a certain number of patterns to recognise.

This results in players being able to develop a memory capacity for the game, its patterns and its (ball/player) movements which is why building game model can substantially improve your team cohesion and on-field performance.

As always though there are outliers and things out of your control (especially during football!) and some things haven't been rehearsed at training (as you can't rehearse every action you come across during footy) but they happen in a flash and require "specialised hardware" to deal with - in this case a highly knowledgeable and experienced brain working unconsciously to make split second decisions under high pressure.

Here's how a split second game action could carry out with everything that has been mentioned in this series:

First you scan using your powers for multiple object tracking to inform you of what pass selections are available.

Then your visual clarity and contrast sensitivity helps you spot an open player through the congestion and against a backdrop of fans.

Your near-far speed enables you to switch your attention between who you want to pass the ball too and who you want to get it past, around, though or over.

With efficient movement allowing for a subtle body manipulation can disguise their proposed movements by forcing the defense to move when they do and the receivers cerebellum (which controls balance/coordinated movement) kicks in, reading the kickers body movement and using that to predict the trajectory and location of the pass.

Reacting to in-game stimulus requires awareness, anticipation, quick thinking and vision which are all subconscious actions of the brain and hours of training can encode a players cognitive system with the software to handle all of this, but you it's on you, the coach, to provide a training environment for this to happen.

On top of processing the chaos you also have to follow the game model so you need to be mentally versatile to many roles and responsibilities quickly, again being rehearsed at training.

This has been a pretty in-depth series so I suggest giving this multiple reads to really get a handle on everything included here as 2020 gave us a time to reset everything pretty much and footy coaching can be one of those things considering it's still in the dark ages at a lot of local/amateur levels.

If you have any questions or want to discuss anything in this 4 part series then just hit me up.