Tosh Farrell Soccer Magazine June 2020 | Page 14

West Ham Utd assistant manager Alan Irvine has held every position there is to hold in football, Player, youth coach, academy director, assistant manager and manager. Alan shares with TFSM his experiences of over 40 years in the professional game. Alan people talk about different player generations. Apart from the athleticism, and pace of todays modern game. How would you compare players from your generation to todays player. Well, it is a funny one really, because many people talk about how the game has moved on, which it has in many ways. Clearly it’s moved on in terms of athleticism, but that’s not to say that there were not athletic players in my day. Every team had some good athletes. Sport science plays a big part in the development of athleticism and I think it fair to say that at the top level these days, every club needs to have athletic players. I think that the generation I grew up playing with had a lot of technical players. Today there are some very talented technical players, without doubt but there are also some players who play at a high level because they are big, powerful and quick. I also think players were more durable back then. There was never any talk about there being too many games. The fact is that we would play on two consecutive days in at Christmas, new year and Easter, which would be unheard of now. Players would turn out with injuries, which you would argue is wrong, but there were other factors involved. Players needed the money! Appearance money and win bonuses were huge incentives and made up a large part of your wage. Players also took more responsibility back then. Unfortunately modern coaching methods have led to today’s players being much more coach dependent. As a young player coming through I never really got coached on movement, positioning, etc. You had to learn those things yourself on the pitch, in real time. The senior players helped you to learn these things more than the coaches.