This one is going to be a little bit longer - there’s quite a lot to unpack here and you guys know I’ve always got lots to say.

I don’t know how many of you have seen New Zealand Football’s announcement of Darren Bazeley’s New Zealand squad that he’s taking to this year’s World Cup (if you haven’t I suggest you get to know). We need to talk about it. It’d be silly not to.

World Cup squad announcements always bring a few surprises, looking across the board there are always questionable omissions and some shock inclusions and the All Whites are no exception. Before I begin, I have to preface that this is simply my opinion, everyone that is on the plane to North America deserves to be there and I have full faith in Darren Bazeley and his boys to do the business.

It is very clear that Bazeley is not a eurosnob. He has 10 players in the 26-man squad from the A-league. That being said, I was still shocked when I saw Tommy Smith’s name. Granted, both he and Chris Wood will be embarking on their second World Cup and the word “experience” has been thrown out a lot by Bazeley at the announcement. But… Tommy Smith? Let me break it down for you so it’s not just opinion without fact.

Tommy Smith plays for Braintree Town. This season they finished 23rd out of 24 teams in the Vanarama National League in England which isn’t considered part of the professional English Football League (EFL) system. This makes them a Vanarama South-level team, which according to Opta’s League Strength Power Rankings is the 293rd strongest league in world football. By comparison the A-league is 62nd. Tommy Smith is now no longer considered a professional footballer and his only real experience this season is that of relegation. Bill Tuiloma will be fuming.

I’m not completely dismissing the bloke, if Bazeley wanted the experience he could have him on the plane as a staffer and bring someone along who is more likely to compete for a chance to play (which I doubt Tommy Smith will).

My questionable omissions are Andre de Jong (Orlando Pirates), Luke Brooke-Smith (Wellington Phoenix) and the aforementioned Bill Tuiloma (Wellington Phoenix). With New Zealand’s attack shaping up to be quite competitive for the next couple of World Cup cycles, it was always going to take something special to dislodge the likes of Eli Just, Callum McCowatt and Ben Old. You also can’t include an attacker over the likes of Tommy Smith because it’s comparing apples with pears: it’s no good for the balance of the squad.

Being a Nix fan and from the WaiBOP region I always want to see local talent do well. The Luke Brooke-Smith inclusion shout is probably (definitely) biased. Having registered just two assists all season (both of them won assist of the month) it would be easy to write him off as another all fart and no sh*t kind of player. But this kid passes the eye test! If you look deeper into his season, most of his appearances are off the bench with the pressure to make an impact and believe me, he tries. The fact that he is just 17 works both in his favour and against him. I say he’s worth the punt - let him learn from some of the best attacking talent New Zealand has had in a long time. The counter-argument is just as feasible, he’s only 17, his time is still yet to come. I can’t help but recall Sir Matt Busby’s quote, “if you’re good enough, you’re old enough.” I don’t think I’ll be the only one questioning whether there should’ve been a gamble on LBS.

To finish, I have no real insight into any of these players apart from what I see of them when they play and how they present publicly. I don’t watch them train, I don’t understand the dynamics of the team, I’ve never played footy at a high level and I coach a grassroots team. My opinion means pretty close to nothing. Ultimately, I can’t profess to know more than the guy who works with them and has vastly more experience than I do.

All I can say is, when my players ask me why they aren’t in the squad, every time there is a valid reason. Coaches. See. Everything.

TLDR;

Okay, I do apologise for this section, it is a little bit barren but that’s because I have a little bit of exciting personal news (which I would’ve included here anyway).

Sticking to our World Cup theme, this week’s weekly spotlight is on Callum McCowatt (Silkeborg IF). He’s a lad who embodies the journey from grassroots football to the professional game (and now off to the World Cup). Give our game some credit!

McCowatt grew up on the North Shore in Auckland and started plying his trade when he was five years old for Greenhithe FC. A community club with a “picnic atmosphere” which prides itself on being an “excellent junior club” with some of the “lowest fees on the North Shore.” In his interview with the NZ Herald he says, it started as a kick-about with his mates (like all good football stories), “I was in a similar group from five to 13. We were all good mates, we were just having fun.”

McCowatt left Greenhithe for the larger, more competitive Forrest Hill-Milford United AFC (now Northern Rovers) though his stint there was brief before moving to East Coast Bays AFC (ECB). A current Northern League side, this was McCowatt’s most senior boyhood club. ECB describes itself as “the first club in New Zealand to be issued a quality mark by New Zealand Football.” This provided an opportunity for exposure to qualified youth development coaches and accredited programmes and it is actually where I took my C License!

McCowatt played 1st XI school football for Westlake Boys High School (they’re quite good) and had a poster of The Admiral Ryan Nelsen in his room, who I am obligated to dislike because of his links to Spurs. He told the New Zealand Herald of his dream to play for the All Whites, “Obviously every kid playing football wants to play for the All Whites […] I remember I had a poster of Ryan Nelsen on my wall for the longest time […] I always wanted to play for the All Whites.”

It wasn’t until McCowatt left the Shore at 15 that people would start to take real notice. He moved to live full-time at the Olé Football Academy in Porirua headed up by former All White Declan Edge. McCowatt would play for the Olé affiliated club Western Suburbs from 2015 to mid-2017 where they would win the Central League and reach the final of the Chatham Cup (McCowatt didn’t play as he was on trial in Holland).

Having spent some time with Olé academy graduates, they say that Declan taught them what it meant to be a professional and though he can be tough at times, they would’ve never made it without him. And it shows. USA international Tyler Boyd and All Whites Ryan Thomas, Eli Just and Nando Pijnaker (I could go on) are all alumni of Olé. I think it’s fair to say that if you want to give yourself a decent chance at a footy career, it isn’t a bad place to be.

McCowatt’s real breakthrough would come with Eastern Suburbs in the domestic campaign. After moving from Auckland City to Eastern Suburbs, the club were chasing their first National League title in nearly 50 years.

McCowatt would go on to score 21 goals in 16 appearances including a hat-trick in the National League Final, giving his side a 3-0 win over Team Wellington, all at just 19 years old (what am I doing with my life). His personal accolades (back-to-back Steve Sumner Medals for player of the match in the final and NZ domestic player of the year) would be enough to earn him a spot in the professional game at Wellington Phoenix where he said, “I don't think I quite reached my best.”

In 2020, he would sign an overseas deal with Danish top-flight side FC Helsingør, making 86 appearances and scoring 19 goals from 2020–2023. This earned McCowatt a move to his current club Silkeborg where, last season, he won their player of the year. This season he’s shown no signs of slowing down, with 11 goals and five assists in 32 games.

It’s hard to fathom, Callum McCowatt. A kid who grew up in the same neighbourhood as me, went to school with my mates and kicked ball at the clubs I used to watch, is now on the plane to the World Cup. Starting out as a five-year-old at Greenhithe. He’s well and truly cemented his dream of playing for the All Whites, and people still say fairy tales aren’t real.

Last week we covered session intention - the first of our Environment Design Principles (EDPs). This week we cover EDP #2: Constrain to Afford.

The whole principle of this is that you design an environment that offers, invites and encourages players to explore the behaviours related to your session intention. To do this you layer in constraints. These can be related to the task, the individual, or the environment.

Task constraints are what coaches will play around with 90% of the time. Task constraints are the constraints of the activity itself e.g. rules, methods of scoring and pitch size. Task constraints can further be broken down into something called STEP.

Individual constraints are more to do with the players you will be coaching and these aren’t necessarily things you can manipulate but more things you need to be aware of when planning your sessions. For example, a 15-year-old has a different set of individual constraints than a 25-year-old in terms of physical ability, technical skill and emotional control.

Environmental Constraints are things that are outside of the player and the coach’s domain. Again, not really something you can manipulate but definitely something to be aware of. For example, if you are going to play your next opponent under lights and you have the opportunity to train under lights then that’s an environmental condition you can replicate to make your training more environmentally realistic.

If the word constraint refers to the what, then the word afford refers to the how. An ‘affordance’ is an opportunity to perform an action that the environment (you have designed) offers. Putting it all together, ‘constrain to afford’ means using constraints to create opportunities to perform the desired behaviour/action.

There’s an easy test you can run by yourself to check if your constraint is helping to achieve your session intention. Firstly, does your constraint offer opportunities for the action (create lots of chances for it to happen). Secondly, does your constraint invite the action (make it the obvious and natural solution to the problem). If you answer yes to both of these questions, then congratulations, you have just come up with a good constraint.

Following on from our example from last week of improving movement off the ball in the final third to create goalscoring opportunities, a good constraint for this might be that you can only finish in one touch. This would force your players to move in order to create space rather than trying to carve out a chance for themselves. It makes sense because most goals are scored in the box using one touch.

One thing to be careful of is that you always have to think about what you take away from the player as a result of your constraints. I hate the “two touch” constraint because it isn’t real. If you want your players to play using two touches then make the playing area smaller and give them no choice but to play using two touches. If they don’t they’ll lose possession. By prescribing an action you take the decision-making autonomy away from your players. At the end of the day, football is a game and like every other game, if you’re going to play it well you have to be able to problem-solve.

Catch me again next Tuesday for EDP #3 and we’ll take a deep dive into what it means to make your training sessions representative.