sun tzu
sun tzu, via his "art of war", is one of the most closely-studied and best-regarded military theorists and strategists in the history of this planet. one of his basic premises, if i may be so bold as to sum up such a rich and deep treasure-trove of ideas into a single sentence, is that strategy, and not force of arms, is the key to victory. ("victorious warriors win first, and then go to war"). another is that knowing ones self and ones enemy is an absolute prerequisite to success. ("if you know your enemies and know yourself you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles"). another is that tactics are what we can most easily observe, while strategy is, by definition if successful, far less apparent. ("all men can see the tactics whereby i conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved").
in reflecting on the schoolboy nonsense of the previous post, it's clear that the pajamas media guy believes wholly in tactics. he believes that he can take a collection of 11 year olds and configure them into "winners" by simple exhortation and rearrangement. it's the same sort of american gung-ho-ism that leads so many of us to rah-rah our invasion of third and fourth-rate military countries like iraq and afghanistan, without properly understanding the depth of strategy necessary to earn that success, and the cost implicit in achieving it. (not to mention how it's entirely a different sport than competing with real armies from real countries like russia and china). at the risk of falling into the same arrogant trap into which he's already fallen, i might suggest that, given a few minutes with the team he so proudly bested, i could reconfigure the result with even less effort. (what is it that bum phillips once said of his mentor, bear bryant? "he can take his'n and beat your'n, and then take your'n and beat his'n"?)
what has me so exercised today is that we have become a nation of armchair quarterbacks (armchair coaches, to be more accurate) who are all sooooo much smarter than everybody else, and, to paraphrase sun tzu, knowing neither ourselves nor our potential opponents. (we can't even tell an actual muslim from a terrorist sham of one). our "strategy" is a reliance on tactics (let's NUKE 'EM!) and, more clear today than ever, we go to war before ever understanding how it is that we might be able to actually win. (would you prefer to have to visit downtown iraq today, or downtown iraq 10 years ago?) it's written all over the daily news, and its written all over opinion pieces like the tripe in pajamas media where someone who understands nothing about soccer, and, according to sun tzu, nothing about winning, tries to pretend he's teaching 11 year olds anything about either.
i've written previously about the norwegian university study that shows that conditioning, not practice with ball skills, yields best results on the soccer pitch compared with presently accepted training methods. (nobody is suggesting that one be practiced without the other). i've written a bit here about how superior players should not be positioned on the field to touch the ball the least, despite what mr. pajamas media would have you believe. there are litany of other things to be understood (know yourself and know your enemy, and know how to win before you go to war) and the ultimate truth is that you will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to judge from your observations the strategy used by someone else to win, unless they explain it to you.
if i were teaching 11 year olds to play soccer, (which i have done with great reward and success in the past, though not success as mr pajamas media might measure it), i would start by explaining that the key to true and lasting success on a soccer field, as well as life, is in maximizing the contribution of ALL players on a team--not maximizing the contribution of a few. (this would be contrary to middle school american football coaching that focuses on the star quarterback, and, apparently, anathema to pajamas media soccer coaching that focuses on putting the most talented players as far away from the middle of the field as possible). i would put my best athletes where they would find the ball in front of them and towards the opponents goal with greatest frequency, and i would ensure that my opponents' best athletes would never be far away from several players who were their match in speed and athleticism. from there, i would guess, knowing my pajamas media opponent as well as myself, that it would be just a matter of time before non-scoring frustration would pull more and more of his better athletes further and further ahead of the ball, until none of them remained where they could do anything about the counterattack that would defeat them.
i worry, with our military stretched to such an extent waging war on multiple fronts, whatever might have happened (or may still happen) if a well-strategized opponent chose this time to attack us. i fear we would not fare so well.
though i'm sure many of our 11 year old soccer coaches would be extremely quick to blame everything else but the truth about why that might be so.
in reflecting on the schoolboy nonsense of the previous post, it's clear that the pajamas media guy believes wholly in tactics. he believes that he can take a collection of 11 year olds and configure them into "winners" by simple exhortation and rearrangement. it's the same sort of american gung-ho-ism that leads so many of us to rah-rah our invasion of third and fourth-rate military countries like iraq and afghanistan, without properly understanding the depth of strategy necessary to earn that success, and the cost implicit in achieving it. (not to mention how it's entirely a different sport than competing with real armies from real countries like russia and china). at the risk of falling into the same arrogant trap into which he's already fallen, i might suggest that, given a few minutes with the team he so proudly bested, i could reconfigure the result with even less effort. (what is it that bum phillips once said of his mentor, bear bryant? "he can take his'n and beat your'n, and then take your'n and beat his'n"?)
what has me so exercised today is that we have become a nation of armchair quarterbacks (armchair coaches, to be more accurate) who are all sooooo much smarter than everybody else, and, to paraphrase sun tzu, knowing neither ourselves nor our potential opponents. (we can't even tell an actual muslim from a terrorist sham of one). our "strategy" is a reliance on tactics (let's NUKE 'EM!) and, more clear today than ever, we go to war before ever understanding how it is that we might be able to actually win. (would you prefer to have to visit downtown iraq today, or downtown iraq 10 years ago?) it's written all over the daily news, and its written all over opinion pieces like the tripe in pajamas media where someone who understands nothing about soccer, and, according to sun tzu, nothing about winning, tries to pretend he's teaching 11 year olds anything about either.
i've written previously about the norwegian university study that shows that conditioning, not practice with ball skills, yields best results on the soccer pitch compared with presently accepted training methods. (nobody is suggesting that one be practiced without the other). i've written a bit here about how superior players should not be positioned on the field to touch the ball the least, despite what mr. pajamas media would have you believe. there are litany of other things to be understood (know yourself and know your enemy, and know how to win before you go to war) and the ultimate truth is that you will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to judge from your observations the strategy used by someone else to win, unless they explain it to you.
if i were teaching 11 year olds to play soccer, (which i have done with great reward and success in the past, though not success as mr pajamas media might measure it), i would start by explaining that the key to true and lasting success on a soccer field, as well as life, is in maximizing the contribution of ALL players on a team--not maximizing the contribution of a few. (this would be contrary to middle school american football coaching that focuses on the star quarterback, and, apparently, anathema to pajamas media soccer coaching that focuses on putting the most talented players as far away from the middle of the field as possible). i would put my best athletes where they would find the ball in front of them and towards the opponents goal with greatest frequency, and i would ensure that my opponents' best athletes would never be far away from several players who were their match in speed and athleticism. from there, i would guess, knowing my pajamas media opponent as well as myself, that it would be just a matter of time before non-scoring frustration would pull more and more of his better athletes further and further ahead of the ball, until none of them remained where they could do anything about the counterattack that would defeat them.
i worry, with our military stretched to such an extent waging war on multiple fronts, whatever might have happened (or may still happen) if a well-strategized opponent chose this time to attack us. i fear we would not fare so well.
though i'm sure many of our 11 year old soccer coaches would be extremely quick to blame everything else but the truth about why that might be so.
posted by kad barma at 4:44 PM
2 Comments:
Well, this is all my fault, for setting Kad off on, not one, but two rants.
But, I think the substitute coach is being too harshly condemned and the regular coach is skating on this. As I said in my own Comments Section, the regular coach is like an accountant who is interested in everyone having the same amount of playing time and everyone being happy. There was no indication that he was helping the kids learn the game or that he had any plan to help them develop either tactics or strategy.
As for the coach wanting to help the kids get a sense of winning, I think that isn't all bad. Having been on some losing teams in my childhood, I know the frustration. Even when the parents are not keeping score, the kids are. Yesterday, walking up from Lunch at the Lockheed Martin Cafeteria there was some talk about sports where there are no winners and no losers and the two youth sports coaches (I was not one of them) said that the kids are keeping score even then the parents are not.
As for our strategic thinking here in the United States, I agree that there is a lot to be desired. Further, there is a lot of education missing on the part of decision makers. One thing I have figured out is that the national policy/strategy machinery of today is not like the machinery of World War II. For one thing, we have a lot more bureaucrats managing the store. A George C Marshall would never emerge, not would he put up with it. We have brought in a lot of experts out of the Academy and politicians who seemed very smart while in Congress, but who were in over their heads in the Executive Branch. I give you Les Aspin as Secretary of Defense for one example. Mr Aspin, whose district included my wife's home town, was an exceptional chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He was a terrible Secretary of Defense—this week in an EMail I read someone pegged him as the worst so far.
Further, as with the stock market, people working Foreign Policy issues are asking about the short term payoffs. In Mr Bob Woodward's book, Obama's War you can see that President Obama thinks that he has to fix the problems in Afghanistan and then begin to withdraw combat troops, because he cannot sustain the fight over a long period of time. Unfortunately, if it is a counterinsurgency we are trying to fight, or having forced on us, the solution is usually of long term.
I fully agree that in our nation we often go for the tactical, or the logistical, over the strategic.
Regards — Cliff
Just observing that we have one man's word for this, and given his judgment about soccer strategy, I'm not sure he'd recognize it if the coaching were sound--all he could see (and you as well) is the "everybody gets the same playing time" and the fact that the "terrible" kids were given positions of responsibility under the old regime. The point I would make is that if you're teaching the game to a group of kids, neither of these two "facts" would contradict the possibility that what's actually happening is better for the kids' long term prospects. Though, I would agree, we have not the information to tell either way.
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