Why Harrogate Town Might Have Taught Us the Key Lesson of the Season

We all have our own ways of picking ourselves up after watching our team underperform. In my personal quest for reassurance, I sometimes find it helpful to listen to Martin Paterson’s post-match interviews with Adam Hassel. We’ve all listened to enough of these types of interviews to know not to expect too much from them, but sometimes the words and phrases chosen by Paterson provide important clues about how he is interpreting what he has just witnessed.

After the Harrogate game he said, “we were not ourselves”, and used the word “cumbersome” to describe the first-half performance. At the very beginning of the interview he said, “emotional control is key”. Few who watched the game would disagree with any of these observations. Many of us who watched the game are now left wondering what the coaching team can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I believe that this is a particularly important question, given that the recent game against Harrogate Town was not the first time this season that our players have looked tentative and inhibited against significantly inferior opposition. The match against Brackley Town is another obvious example. So, what happened? Did the players ‘bottle it’ or ‘freeze’? If so, what does this tell Paterson about our players and our squad, and what can he do about it?

One answer would be to say that we don’t have enough players with the right mentality and we need to make this a recruitment priority. Another approach is to understand the problem as a mental fitness issue which can be addressed through better training and preparation. I would like to think that Paterson and his coaching team will be doing both.

You do not need to be an expert to recognise ‘freezing’ and ‘bottling it’ in sport as symptoms of performance anxiety. It is also widely known that performance anxiety can be overcome with the right mental preparation. But mental preparation in football is not something that often gets discussed in any detail, and this makes it difficult to understand exactly what it entails or what work is going on behind the scenes.

In many ways it is no different from other types of preparation. Clubs who feel that they are gaining an advantage over their rivals by adopting certain practices want to maintain that advantage.

I am not an expert and I have no inside information relating to Notts County, but I do have a general understanding of what the term mental preparation encompasses in a footballing context. For any performance activity, there are always two distinct elements of mental or psychological preparation.

One concerns things like determination, confidence, motivation and belief. Performers need to have a strong will to succeed and a strong belief in their ability. Footballers must start the game in the right frame of mind and be ‘up for it’. They must also be mentally strong to keep going in adverse circumstances and, where necessary, grind out results.

There is a growing body of evidence which suggests that under Martin Paterson this is becoming an area of considerable strength. As fans, we love the players who embody this mindset. It shows that they care, and their raw enthusiasm and aggression make them easy to identify with. But this is the easy bit.

The other element, which is much more subtle, concerns the requirements for emotional control and concentration. Put simply, footballers need to be able to keep calm and stay focused. These requirements are necessary to balance the ‘being up for it’ element – Paul Gascoigne in the 1991 FA Cup Final being a classic extreme example of what happens when this balance isn’t achieved.

They are also necessary because of the inherent randomness of football. Football includes many random events with mistakes, ricochets, interceptions and blocks sending the ball spinning or bouncing in ways which are hard to predict and successfully anticipate. A key footballing skill therefore is improvisation. But to improvise well, you must be maximally alert and maximally calm at the same time – a state of mind often referred to as being ‘in the zone’.

It is much harder to achieve than it sounds, and evolutionary biology explains why. Human evolution has valued enhanced alertness as an innate and essential survival tool, used for identifying danger and threat, and this alertness is triggered by our anxiety response. In most circumstances therefore, if you are very alert you will be tense rather than calm, and if you are trying to calm down it is easy to lose focus.

Although difficult to learn, the skills required to attain a state of mind which combines alertness with calmness can be learnt. Footballers who develop an expertise in this area find that, instead of being paralysed by pressure, they can convert it into an enhanced performance. Without wishing to ignite the whole David McGoldrick controversy, it does appear that he was a notable master in this regard.

All professional footballers have pre-match rituals and routines which they use to help them with their emotional control and focus. But pre-match pressures vary from match to match and are often at their greatest when the expectation of impending success is high. So maybe what we are finding out is that, for matches in which Notts are overwhelming favourites – such as the recent Harrogate game – too many of our current players are discovering that their existing routines are not working.

I have mentioned two other clubs in this article. There are ironies relating to each of them. Gary Cowan, the Brackley Town manager, is a man who co-hosts a podcast in which the presenters reflect on the mental side of the game, so we can assume that mental preparation is a particular interest of his.

Simon Weaver, the Harrogate Town manager, famously brought in Gareth Southgate, who lives in the Harrogate area, to talk to his players about mental preparation in the week leading to their 2020 Wembley play-off final against us.

As Martin Paterson is constantly saying, there is always something to learn from a sub-standard performance. It might just be that Harrogate Town have taught us the most important lesson of the season so far.