After so many years of growing up playing the game almost coach-less…always thinking about the technical aspects of improving this magical game, the young Whisperer was constantly striving to develop perfection in the game around him. In spite of the talented, highly rated and successful players on our junior team, it always seemed that things could have been easier done and to greater effect.
So even when playing with the champions, on the obviously best team, the personal discomfort with the quality and style of our play was the unbearable. This frustration was continuously felt long after the final whistle, even though we had won. The conviction grew and remained strong that there were much better ways to win and to enjoy the game without the bundling and tumbling confusion that persisted in the run of play.
This continuing condition over many seasons and different teams, lead the Whisperer to secretly wishing to be one day the worst player on a team. That would be his ideal dream team because if all my team mates were making fewer errors than I, it would be soccer/football heaven. But players were not only making unforced errors, but they were also going to great lengths in creating them…and the sickeningly high turnover rate would still be accepted as long as we were winning!
So the community coaches and team very were happy, while a player who definitely contributed to the win was now becoming more noticeable melancholy after the games. The reason being, that players were needlessly losing the ball, yet the team was getting points for it.
The situation developed into the conditioning of a very high sense of responsibility for the future of the game. So a youth player begins to feel strongly and constantly concerned whenever his own team or opponents were playing what he considered to be sacks of good looking rubbish all over the pitch. It has to stop; It must be stopped; finally, it stops right here!
But at thirteen years old, how would you go about singlehandedly undoing a culture of sloppy thinking and information deficit disorder on the ball, that was clearly the evidence of an impending soccer/football disaster that would hit and spoil the game for everyone, everywhere and forevermore?
One option to diminish the continuing discontent would be to instruct all coaches so that the game would be played according to certain failsafe dictates, to prevent a global soccer/football meltdown. But thankfully the game has improved greatly over the decades, and while not sufficiently so, a culture of fairly good quality soccer/football has spread across the globe.
The first line of first credit must, above all, be to the FIFA organization bar none, for its leadership and global support of the game, as so it should rightly be the case. With all that has transpired over the years, it is evident that this project had started long before the younger Whisperer realized that love and malcontent is the fuel of his fiery passion that has remained unabated for over 50 years.
So it must be admitted, and apology offered, for the great temptation to include only the totally personally developed material for this project. And it could possibly be attempted; after all, most of this work represents the accumulation of the empirical experiences and irrefutable evidence gathered by the Whisperer over many years, coupled with the acquisition of the verbal and technical competence to express it.
The realization that the Whisperer could actually do something concrete about it (the self-imagined pending soccer/football disaster) has nurtured within the author a coaching attitude of abrupt directedness in his coaching communication style. With little time to spare, coupled with the indisputable (researched) evidence to support coaching by the Principles, it is expected that the Whisperer informed club leaders will be inclined to give unilateral instruction while entertaining very little discussion expressed as “…you will not do this…you MUST do that now! So caution and restraint must be applied to ensure that the atmosphere of respect in the communication cycle and civil obedience are preserved at the club.
This grossness, along with the conviction that indeed the Wilguard Project has something special to offer grew louder and bolder towards improving the standard of the world game. However, due to training and experience the outspoken abruptness and zero-tolerance attitude has gradually subsided, and now wisdom is dispensed with due care to maintain the atmosphere of respect in order to communicate successfully.
The Inclusion, recognition and credit for the like-minded influential work of others had to be incorporated develop and reinforce creative synergies. So, in spite of the highly empirical nature of the Project, and the laborious mental and physical work done to create original designs and field-testing of the new performance evaluation and management tools, the references are gratefully recognized as influencers who support the work.
In spite of the highly empirical nature of the work done, intellectual honesty must be shown and accounted for with the proper accreditation whenever the works of others is mentioned. Having done so, it makes the way clear for the reader to re-confirm the credibility of the Whisperer’s tried-and-proven concepts. Surely some must be know to them, and this previous knowledge will enable quicker understanding, acceptance and willingness to proliferate the new concepts for elevating performance.
Certainly, the openness to exposure of other sources of information will lead to the wider edification of the crowd that will be converging on this material. It opens the door for the seminal aspect of the work to be expanded by others, to eventually make a more sterling contribution to this field that is now expanding through more seriously taken independent scientific study.
