This week I was fortunate enough to travel to Auckland for Rovers’ first Chatham Cup game of the season. It was my first ever time as a coach in the dugout of a knockout game. To be honest I thought it was going to be relatively similar to a league game. It’s not. Against potential banana-skin opponents in Sunday league team Bohemian Celtic it became very apparent to us as the coaching staff that we needed to reinforce the need to focus to avoid complacency. The match itself was very broken and ridden with fouls albeit straightforward resulting in a 3-0 Rovers win (COYR 💪). What I hadn’t anticipated was the challenge that the occasion of a cup game actually brought.

A cup game is one and done. No second chances. For a format so simple, it’s surprisingly easy to overcomplicate things. The temptation is to treat it like something special. To change the warm-up, the shape, talk for too long or focus too much on the opposition. Don’t.

As a coach, if you start coaching the occasion and not the football you are trying to play, you’re already fighting an uphill battle. Players know it’s a cup game, they’re nervous and excited especially during the opening round. The trick is to manage yourself as a coach. Players can feel when you’re nervous. They notice little details, whether it’s a slight change in the warm-up, or a team talk that drags on for too long.

The approach (in theory) is simple. The expectations of your players don’t change because of the format. It’s our job as coaches to carry as much of the occasion as we can so our players can focus on the football. That doesn’t mean standards slip, it just means that everyone needs to trust each other, which is no different from any other game of footy. You trust your players to go out and do the business and the players trust you to give them the right information so they can do their best work.

Put simply, play your football, not the occasion.

Matt Milner was five years old when David Beckham scammed him into being a United fan (unlucky). His free kick against Greece to send England to the 2002 World Cup is one of his fondest and earliest memories of the beautiful game. He recounts this and other moments from cult icons like Joe Cole’s goal vs Sweden and Wayne Rooney’s bicycle kick against Man City as moments that shaped his appreciation for the game.

Don’t be fooled by his poor choice in team though, Matt could play. In his playing days, Matt reached the dizzying heights of the New Zealand Northern League, taking to the pitch for Ngāruawāhia United AFC where, he says, “I wasn’t quite enjoying it how I used to.” A move to West Hamilton United FC failed to rekindle the spark so Matt turned to Claudelands Rovers. He formed his own team with a bunch of mates from his workplace Star Turf and took up the position of player-coach.

This would spell the beginning of the end for Matt as he would go on to tear his ACL at the end of his first season in charge. It would take him a full season of rehab before he would see the pitch again. Upon his return Matt put in what I could only imagine was four of the most hard-working performances the world had ever seen before he would tear his ACL again away at Tauranga Blue Rovers. He knew the feeling instantly, describing the bones “slipping” in his knee and a long car ride home spent thinking, “F*ck me, not again.” Matt was only 21 when he was forced to hang up his boots. That second rupture effectively ended his ability to play and became the turning point that nudged him decisively from being a player who coached into a coach who could no longer play.

Matt’s first formal role as a coach came back where it all began, Ngāruawāhia’s reserve side. He coached for two seasons winning the league back-to-back. That accomplishment was enough to earn him a promotion into the first-team coaching staff at Ngāruawāhia in 2024, where, after a promising start to the campaign they narrowly missed out on promotion to the Northern League.

Matt left Ngāruawāhia at the end of that season in search of pastures new which brought him back to Rovers as the first-team head coach (this guy loves a full-circle story). When I asked him why he chose Rovers he said, “I just love the old geezers around and just the way the club cares about players and me as well […] it was fairly easy.”

When Matt isn’t coaching he’s leading a team of 15 at ACC which he details is similar to coaching just not in a football way. His philosophy on and off the pitch is simple, “if they have a good time, then they’re going to be their best selves and get a lot out of them.” But, enjoyment doesn’t come at the expense of competitiveness, somewhere he believes NZ grassroots football doesn’t get the balance right.

He’s witnessed the impacts of this lack of balance which he says leads to a clear divide in the players in this country, “either you’re social or you’re competitive, and there’s not enough in-between, in my opinion.” Coaching the in-between is where rubber meets the road for the Rovers gaffer, “this is what I like, the niche […] How can you get that in-between?”

For a man that has given so much of himself to the game (perhaps more than he would’ve liked) I thought he’d earned the right to the last word on this piece.

When I was at university I had an amazing lecturer called Will Roberts. Now this guy had been around the block working with Premier League clubs, dissecting and analysing their coaching pedagogy and process. So not just what they were coaching, but how they were coaching it.

He wrote a book called the Constraints Led Approach (CLA) which has a large academic and practical background in terms of skill adaptation. I could write pages about this but in short it talks through the practical ways you can coach people to perform behaviours you want to develop. I promise it isn’t as manipulative as it sounds.

So for the next month or so, I’m going to walk through some of the key principles covered in this book with some examples of how you can execute them yourself. Remember I am a guide, not a guru. If you want to understand the depths of these concepts please do some research because there is so much more to it than I could possibly cover in one section of a newsletter.

Principle #1 - The Session Intention ✅

Before you plan a session, you need to nail down what you’re trying to achieve. If, for example, your team is struggling with creating goalscoring opportunities you may break that down and find that the movement off the ball isn’t good enough. Then your session intention might be to improve movement off the ball in the final third to create goalscoring opportunities. This gives you the foundation to build your session around.

A session intention is important because it shapes how both you and your players think during the session. It also keeps you and the players on the same page in terms of what to expect. Following on from our example, if the players know clearly what your session intention is then they are primed to look for solutions and every decision they make is geared toward trying to make that intention a reality. Your job as a coach is then to design a session where players are constantly challenged to find movements that create goalscoring opportunities.

Lastly, the timing is very important depending on where you are in the week or season. It’s also a little bit of common sense. For example, you wouldn’t set an intention to improve the squad’s overall match fitness two days out from a game, the same way you wouldn’t try and coach a shape or structure change the morning of kick-off.

Next issue we’ll go over principle #2 and start building our coaching repertoire together.