OK, if you're so clever
The last desperate threat of the bad
teacher. “OK, Jones, why don't you come up here and take the
lesson?”. Hopefully, from the bad teacher's point of view, met with
a mumbled “I'd rather not, sir / miss” by the embarrassed pupil.
Ever been on the end of one of those? I never had the nerve to take
them up on the offer.
The missing point is that they should
be inspiring so much wonder and awe, they should have their audience
right where they want them, they should be exuding so much contagious
enthusiasm, that there'd never be any need for the “OK, up you
come” nuclear deterrent.
I had an English teacher given such
great material: Shakespeare, Dickens, the modern poets, Oscar Wilde.
Somehow (she had a rare talent) she managed to remove every last
ounce of enjoyment and interest and produced a dry, desiccated,
unpalatable and indigestible product that was designed so that only
the most dedicated and diligent pupils would succeed. K and MM have
had a history teacher who transformed their A-level curriculum (based
on what should be a fascinating period of recent history) into an
exercise in distributing telephone directory think bundles of
photocopied notes that the fastest speedreader would not have time to
get through if they did nothing else.
After the sad 0-0 with a struggling
Villa, the press had the temerity to mention the “don't know what
you're doing” chants directed at Wenger. He saw this the way a bad
teacher would see the passing of notes along the back row and went
for the stock response: “why don't you manage the team and I'll
chant from the stands”. Desperate, poor, arrogant. Typical of the
club's management at the moment.
The fact is that Wenger's never been a
master tactician. Look at the record. Losing? Bring on more attacking
players. Holding on? Bring on more defenders. The KISS principle
applied in spades. Cost us the chance of getting back into the cup
final we lost 2-1 to Liverpool. He's a great operator in the transfer
market, if the financial analysis is the measure of success. He was
ahead of the pack with training techniques, diet, the accumulation of
small things that make a difference in elite sport, but being the
first doesn't mean staying ahead, and he's been caught up with. When
your players are eating boiled chicken and broccoli and opponents are
on kebabs and burgers, the advantage only lasts until they join you
at the healthy food table.
The England cricket team lost the first
test match in India. I don't imagine, having struggled against spin,
that they went into the nets to face endless seam bowling?
“Kevin, it's left arm spin you've
problems with.”
“Leave me alone Graham, this is what
I'm good at so that's what I'm going to face.”
Work on weaknesses has huge rewards,
work on honing strengths has that diminishing returns problem. They
just won the second test by ten wickets. Management and players
addressed issues and turned things around.
Year after year, season after season we
have one-footed players, we've had strikers who can't head the ball
and won't work on it and improve. We repeatedly have a squad
effectively reduced in numbers by the inclusion of perma-crocks
(Diably and Ro-sicky at the moment) and players yet to earn the tag
'robust' (Gibbs for one). Our manager has a degree in economics and
that suits a board with both eyes constantly on the bottom line. They
need some lessons in history (and learning from it), geography
(finding the way to the safe and the chequebook), and in how not to
treat the club's fans with total disrespect, and the superb away fans
arrogant disregard. “I've been doing this a long time” does not
mean you've been doing it well, or even adequately.
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