Sometimes Caring Means Not Rescuing Them

Sixteen minutes into a football match this morning, we were 3–0 up and absolutely flying.

I coach an under-11s team and, like pretty much every grassroots football team in the country, mine is made up of a complete mixture of kids. I have a few lads who are frighteningly good for ten years old, the sort who seem to know where a football is going to bounce before the rest of us have even realised it has been kicked. Then I have others who absolutely love football but aren't quite as technically gifted. They have to work a little harder at things that seem to come naturally to someone else.

And that's absolutely fine. They're ten years old and they love football. That's the main thing.

My job isn't to work out which ones might one day be good enough for an academy and build a team around them. My job is to make every one of them better than they were when they turned up, teach them to work hard for each other and, most importantly, make sure they still actually want to play football on Tuesday night and again at the weekend.

So I mix the starting team around every week. Apart from the goalkeeper, they all play roughly the same amount of football, about 33 minutes each in a 50-minute game. Sometimes that means my strongest seven players aren't on the pitch at the same time.

I am fully aware this isn't exactly Pep Guardiola's approach to seeing out a narrow lead at the Etihad.

But there is a reason for it.

Today, at first, it looked brilliant. We were moving the ball around, working for each other and three goals went in before we'd even properly got going. One of the lads I'd put up front scored all three of them.

3–0. Lovely.

I was already mentally preparing my incredibly sophisticated half-time tactical analysis, which generally involves telling ten-year-olds to keep doing the things they're doing well while asking at least two of them to shut the fuck up while I'm talking.

I don't always say fuck.

Honest.

Then, with pretty much the last kick of the first half, they scored.

3–1.

It didn't particularly bother me. We'd been the better team and we'd played some really good football. At half-time I told the lads exactly that. I told them how well they'd played, reminded them to keep working for each other and sent them back out for the second 25 minutes.

They were knackered. The pitch was enormous and a couple of them were talking about how red their faces were and how they hadn't stopped running. In fairness, they hadn't. They'd worked unbelievably hard for the whole half.

But they were happy.

For the first five or ten minutes of the second half, everything was fairly even. Then something changed and the other team started getting on top.

Our goalkeeper made save after save and kept us in the game, but slowly that comfortable lead disappeared. It went to 3–2, then 3–3 and, late in the game, 4–3.

I was gutted when the fourth went in.

Of course I was. I might talk about development and character and all that lovely stuff, but I'm also standing on the side of a football pitch on a Saturday morning desperately wanting my lads to win. I haven't transcended competitive sport and become some sort of grassroots Buddhist monk.

But this is where the easy version of what I believe met the difficult version.

I could have changed things. I could have put the strongest lads back into the positions where I knew they were most effective. I could have protected the result earlier. I could have shortened the minutes of one or two of the less developed players and probably increased our chances of winning the game.

And I didn't.

Not because I don't care about winning, but because I care about something more.

If I start deciding that certain children get fewer minutes when the match gets difficult because they're not quite as good as somebody else yet, what exactly am I teaching them? That they get to participate while everything is comfortable, but somebody better takes over when it matters? That their development is important until there is a result to protect? That they're part of the team, just not quite as much as everyone else?

I can't tell a kid on Tuesday night that I believe in him and then effectively tell him on Saturday morning that I don't trust him when we're 3–2 up.

So they stayed on the pitch.

And we lost.

From the first whistle to the last, though, those lads worked. When their heads dropped, they picked each other up. When someone made a mistake, another one ran back to help him. The goalkeeper was outstanding, a couple of lads played in positions they weren't used to and did really well, and our makeshift striker walked off with a hat-trick.

They were disappointed, obviously. So was I.

Afterwards I got them together and told them exactly that. Losing 4–3 after being 3–0 up hurts, but look at what we'd done well. Look at where we'd improved. Look at the things we'd learned.

Then came one of the more challenging parts of grassroots football.

The adults.

Most football parents are brilliant. They stand in the rain, ferry kids around all weekend, wash kits that appear to have been dragged through a swamp and somehow find enthusiasm for a 9am kick-off in February.

But football does strange things to otherwise perfectly normal people.

There was tension around the pitch by the end of the game. A few people were clearly pissed off that we'd thrown away a three-goal lead. There were comments about substitutions and decisions and, somewhere along the way, the children's wellbeing was mentioned.

Which did make me smile afterwards.

Imagine playing the wellbeing card with me.

Mr Dead Hard Who Writes About His Feelings on the Internet.

I sent a message to the parents later explaining my position. Politely, I should add, although the first version composed inside my head on the drive home contained significantly more swearing.

I explained that I give up my evenings and weekends because I want these kids to develop. Everyone will get opportunities and everyone will play. I'm not going to reduce a child's game time because we're defending a lead and I think somebody else gives us a better chance of winning.

If that's the price of losing the occasional game, I'm comfortable paying it.

One parent then messaged me privately about their lad. He's having a bit of a difficult spell at the moment. In training he's absolutely fine, but when a match starts he sometimes loses confidence. His fitness isn't quite where some of the others are and, once he gets tired, you can almost see the belief disappear from him.

That's something we'll work on. He'll get there.

But something about that conversation stayed with me on the drive home.

At first I was still annoyed. I had a good little rant in the car about parents, football and the general injustice of the world, as any emotionally intelligent and highly evolved man would.

Then I started thinking about what we're actually trying to do.

Not just with footballers. With people.

We've become very good at talking about wellbeing, and that's undoubtedly a good thing. I spend a lot of my life talking about it myself. But sometimes I wonder whether we've started confusing caring for people with removing every uncomfortable experience from their path.

Those aren't the same thing.

A ten-year-old being disappointed because he lost a football match isn't necessarily something that needs fixing. Frustration isn't damage. Tiredness isn't trauma and losing isn't failure. Sometimes those feelings are simply part of learning how to live in a world that isn't going to hand you everything because you tried hard.

The important part is what happens around those experiences.

If a child loses and gets screamed at, humiliated or made to feel useless, that's a problem. But if he loses, feels disappointed, talks about it, understands what he could do differently, remembers what he did well and comes back next week wanting another go, something useful has happened.

That's resilience.

Not the bullshit version of resilience where we tell people to toughen up and stop complaining. Actual resilience. Experiencing something difficult in an environment where you still feel safe enough to try again.

And I think that's what I realised today.

Sometimes caring about someone means resisting the temptation to rescue them.

It means allowing them to struggle with something while making sure they know you're still standing beside them. That's difficult because rescuing people often feels kinder in the moment.

Take the kid off who's struggling. Put the better player on. Protect the lead. Win the game. Everyone goes home happy.

But what has the kid we've taken off learned?

More importantly, what have I taught him about what I think of him?

And this doesn't just happen on football pitches.

I've seen it at work when somebody makes a mistake and a manager immediately takes the difficult job away from them rather than helping them learn how to do it. I've seen it in relationships where we try to solve somebody else's problems because sitting beside them while they're hurting feels unbearable.

I've done it myself plenty of times.

Sometimes we're not actually protecting the other person at all. We're protecting ourselves from the discomfort of watching them struggle.

That's a much harder thing to admit.

Because being a role model isn't about making sure the people around you always win. It's about how you behave when they don't.

Can you stay calm when something goes wrong? Can you separate disappointment from blame? Can you demand effort without humiliating someone? Can you point out what needs to improve while still leaving somebody believing they're capable of improving it?

And can you accept that sometimes doing what you believe is right means other people won't agree with you?

I think that's the bit I learned today.

I want my football team to win. I'm competitive as fuck and I'd be lying if I said otherwise. But I don't want to teach a group of ten-year-olds that winning is the thing that decides whether their afternoon was worthwhile.

Life doesn't work like that anyway.

You can work incredibly hard and still not get the job. You can love somebody and still lose them. You can do everything you think is right and still watch something fall apart.

Life can be shockingly shite at times and there won't always be a coach standing on the touchline able to make a substitution that fixes it.

What matters is whether you learn how to carry on. Whether you can look honestly at what happened, take responsibility for the bits that belong to you, recognise the bits that went well and turn up again.

Perhaps losing 4–3 after being 3–0 up isn't the worst place to start learning that.

The scoreboard said we'd lost.

I'm just not convinced that was the most important thing those lads took home with them.