Random reminder

Press, 15 May 1981, Page 19

Random reminder

COACHING SKILLS

In amateur sport the impetus to perform well comes from a strange and shapeless assortment of drives: competitiveness, peer-group approval, the need to get the game out of the way before the serious business of after-match socialising can begin. Under the banner of sport people will do things it would be impossible to g'et them to do if, for example, it were part of a job. Watersiders who anxiously scan the sky for cloud during their working day and who go off the job if two drops of rain fall on a spread handkerchief within a minute, can be found up to their necks- in mud and jockstraps at the week-end. Whitecollar workers who would baulk at shifting their own desk are seen throwing 16-stone flankers around, for fun. It is not at all easy to understand why footballers risk teeth and the shape of their noses, let alone the contiguity of their limbs, for such intangible rewards as satisfaction or admiration, however they could be measured. Some few gain

job advantages from sport and many have the sports club as the centre of their social circle. Sometimes, though, there are more obvious reasons for putting in some hard graft in the scrum. A Reminder staff investigator recalls playing for his school against a scratch team put-up .by a Borstal. The Borstal, side consisted of three ferocious ex-Army-model P.T. instructors (complete ’with cauliflower ears, barrel chests, and hardly able to club together to make a full set of teeth among the three of them) and 12 reluctant Borstal inmates who were clearly in it only for the bus trip and the slap-up meal the school traditionally served up after the game. The school team had an easy time of it in the forwards until their entire pack was reduced to paroxysms by the earnest instructions of the Borstal pack leader, one of the P.T. instructors. No intangible reasons for performing there: “Chalky White, if you don’t put your back into it, you’ll get no dinner.”