Pension, coaching and Pele's feet

Pele

I have been wondering what I'll be doing when I retire from active service. It is a long way off but the reality is that time flies like a jetliner and I might as well get prepared for that beautiful letter from my employers telling me in the face that my time is up. And so what? And so vamoose! You have outlived your usefulness.

For a good number of people, going on pension is a death sentence. Their first headache is this:

"What am I going to be doing from morning till night?" And the answer is nothing!

Others think they deserve some rest, but that rest must go without thinking about paying the bills from your meagre pension, paying school fees for your pension babies and generally having a difficult existence when it is supposed to be restful.

Some people die soon after going on pension, not because they are too frail or sick, but because they are either bored to death or cannot bear the financial weather. For such people, they die before their time.

For some of us, it is not going to be that boring. We have a passion for exploring into the vast expanse of the world's wealth of knowledge. But I wouldn't want to do writing alone if I'm strong (by the grace of God) and my mental faculties do not fail me.

I have been thinking of taking a course in "coaching". I mean coaching footballers! I have noticed two things radically wrong about African football that I can change if given the chance. First, some African players are not adventurous and so fail to consciously use the entire perimeter of the playing field, and rather play the game mostly in the middle. They are, therefore, not expressive when in action.

The second thing is that African footballers are trained to be physically fit and brawny but not given that psychological pep-up. In other words, they are not trained to use their brains. The game is all about the mind. That is where soccer starts. What happens on the field is only a manifestation of the mental process.

Apart from the skills and flair, your players must also be intelligent. To be honest, football is all about geometry, algebra and trigonometry. It is about mensuration - that is measurement and angles. When the likes of George Best were playing in the late 1960s and early 70s, one could feel what it was for a player to even exploit the height of his opponent to his advantage.

Players must necessarily be intelligent, else they cannot hold on to the ball and they'll always be prone to making faulty passes. It needs brain matter and, of course, courage for a player to take on an entire defence and force opponents to play nonsense. Needless to say, the game of soccer should be played like chess. Any player who hasn't got a big brain must play second division.

When I become a coach at age 60, I'm going to develop a team that plays the game in the boardroom before going into the dressing room. The game has become scientific and needs scientific understanding and calculation.

In those good old days, we didn't have money to buy good footballs, so we made do with cheaper versions, called 'Obey the Wind'. When you kicked the ball hard in the direction of north, the ball readily disobeyed your kick and headed in the direction of the wind.

Bewildered players had to stampede into each other in the frantic effort to catch the ball in its leeward flight. It was worse than rugby.

But the 'obey-the-wind' soccer tournaments made us mathematically savvy. For example, if you wanted to score a goal while in a position acutely angular to the goalkeeper and the wind was blowing south-west while you were facing the goal post from a due-North position, you knew how to play the ball and at what speed in order to beat the advancing goalkeeper.

The curvature, which is the trajectory of the ball, was based on the estimated velocity of the wind and the force the players applied to the ball and the direction of the force. The ball must curl round the keeper into the posts and that can only be achieved using calculus dy/dx. So the clever children were scoring goals because they had something - their rudimentary knowledge of scalar and vector quantities, differentiation and integration. This is sounding a bit too mathematical, I guess.

These days, we don't have 'obey-the-wind' so the children are not tested in their gutter-to-gutter tournaments and open-air-championship. The modern game has lost the thrill of dealing with factors other than skill and flair.

Now this question has reared up once too many who is the better player; Pele or Maradona? Many pundits have tried to do the analysis with statistics, permutations and combinations. But there is really no basis for comparison because the two footballers played in different eras and the rules have even differed over time.

The rules that applied to the game in Pele's time do not apply today. So where is the basis for comparison?

The off-side rules, for instance, are now different. These days some tackles are red carded so players are more circumspect on the field. In times past it was pretty rough. In the days of Pele, holding onto an opponent's jersey could be excused, unless it became too deliberate. It was fair-play. Today, you can get the sack for that gimmick. So when the rules are different, you cannot compare players of the two 'generations.'

However, if I'm to base any comparison on natural flair, I'd pick Pele as the better player. The reason is simple - he was ambidextrous. It means he could use either legs or feet equally well and so could easily play and score both from the right and left. Maradona could hardly use his right foot although he was a wizard with his left. Pound-for-pound Pele has a slight edge over Maradona.

The other reason is ability to use the head. Pele uses the head and many of his goals were headed. His goal in the 1970 World Cup final was a header. Maradona uses the head too, but sometime not without the famous Hand of God. Peter Shilton, the English goalkeeper, has still not forgiven him for that historic goal. It was fraudulent.

Credit: Merari Alomele [Email: [email protected]. Website: www.merarialomele.com.]