Field hockey is one of the fastest sport on earth. It's so fast that in the blink of an eye the ball have traveled to another area of the field. What else in a penalty corner situation where a direct execution will take less than 3 seconds to complete. Not an easy task for a coach to extract any information.
More the reason a coach needs to be forward-looking and having a good support team will be an impetus to him and his team. And one that is pivotal is a sports psychologist as he can prepare the players to learn to use mental skills to prepare for a specific motor skill, such as for a Goalkeeper in defending a penalty corner,drag-flickers or in a shootout. In essence, a sports psychologist does mental game coaching to guide players to improve their performance via mental training.
Does your team have a sports psychologist? If not, Why?
Let's move on to our topic, that is, "The Unstoppable Drag Flickers. Are They? They are if the goalkeeper is not able to look at the subtle patterns of movements and postural clues and extracting information from the drag-flickers approach with the ball. (more information on this in my earlier article on this subject)
At this level, most teams have a goalkeeper coach who with his yesteryear's of experience will be guiding the goalkeeper. And if he has not updated his knowledge with time and without a sports psychologist, sports biomechanics, kinesiologist, and video analyst to support him then he will be without the necessary knowledge to guide his goalkeeper.
The way forward here is, first know how the brain works. The tale of two brain systems i.e explicit and implicit system.
The explicit system is activated when you are a novice learning the various part of a complex skill step by step and after many hours of practice, you will migrate to the implicit system. Whereby you have chunk the various part of the complex skill into one fluent whole. This is called motor chunking; an ability to execute a skill without even thinking about it.
It's like a chess game. If you are a world class goalkeeper using the wrong brain system i.e the explicit system in defending a penalty corner then you would be striving to save the ball using the neural pathway of a novice. Your highly sophisticated skills encoded in your implicit part of the brain would count for nothing.(This happens when the Goalkeeper consciously monitoring the drag-flicker's footwork, arm, hockey stick with the ball moving on the shaft, hip, and trunk).
At the elite level like the World Cup, it's implicit system of the brain that's being used by players. To be the best get the best support team to guide the Goalkeeper coach in formulating a training module that will give the right input into his goalkeeper's implicit memory to defend a penalty corner.
Before I pen off, coaches, you can also collect qualitative and quantitative statistic of a drag-flicker over a certain period of time. It will help you at the crucial moment as studies as shown that they will repeat the same pattern.
I would like to take this opportunity to wish all the teams in the World Cup all the best and enjoy playing hockey.
Thank You
The above article is my personal view from my experience as a national player for Malaysia during the 90s', a learning coach and an avid reader.
Keeping to my dateline, I could have missed some points. Please feel free to email me for any further information at enbarajkanniah@gmail.com.
