Thoughts on Charlie Francis and soccer

[svincenz]

@Race_Radio

The greats such as (Diego Maradonna, George Best, Di Stefano etc) spent hours upon hours everyday/week speed juggling, usually a smaller ball than matchball (size 5), regular juggling, tennis/ping-pong/golf balls etc, wall work developing left & right feet usually till there feet got very sore, on the beach from dusk till dawn (if they had access), the beach having positive effects when applying the same skills on turf.

Thats gone now. All they had then was a ball. I never see good two footed players anymore, never see a player with a great Maradonna-esque first touch, them qualities (balance/coordination) have to be trained everyday (which are mentally demanding), in its place now is the internet, computer games for players etc… A lot do gym work, some with good programs, but greatness isn’t made there, although a player can certainly reep the benefits.

Its on the player to dedicate his life to the ball. And when I mean dedicate his life, I mean DEDICATE his life. Maradonna slept with his ball.

Carlos Tevez needed soccer to stay alive. When your life is dependant on it, you’d guess he would get pretty far.

Actually, as far as I know, it was only Maradona’s the documented case of juggling with small balls (I did that too, but not documented). An interesting anectode is when during half time of an important match, Maradona began juggling with a lemon in the changing room to ease the tension off.
It’s not true that you don’t see any two footed players. There are many of them, probably (it is my impression, but I’m pretty confident) more now than years ago. Maradona is a typical example of using only one foot. As for sleeping with ball, yeah, I probably did that when I was a child, but I’m happy to having changed that in favour of girls.

Now, RR is throwing here a bunch of anecdotes and there is nothing wrong about that, apart that an underlying theory is necessary to meaningfully organize the information, and I don’t see any such theory.
For everyone interested, I suggest a couple of articles the nyt published, one it was published a couple of years ago about skill development of Russian tennis players in a Moscow club (then it became the book The Talent Code) and the other one is about Ajax Academy, this one was published I think a couple of weeks ago. Both very interesting.