LCFC Psychologist Says... (from The Times)

[UpTheLeagueFox]

In future years , it promises to become a case study in sports psychology, a lesson in what can be achieved when players’ hearts and minds are in perfect synergy.

You might imagine that Leicester City’s footballers, closing on a prize that was beyond their wildest ambitions, would be queueing around the block to see the resident psychologist to calm their nerves or help to keep their feet on the ground. The man in question tells a different story.

“I’m not a busy man at the moment,” Ken Way, the club’s performance psychologist since 2011, says. “I was actually busier this time last season. I was even able to take a short holiday last week and not worry about it.”

When Leicester won 2-0 away to Sunderland on Sunday, to move closer to a scarcely plausible Barclays Premier League title triumph, Way was watching in a familiar state of wonder from a bar in the Netherlands.

“I was concerned at one point, earlier in the season, about how [the pressure] might start to affect the players,” he says. “But it honestly hasn’t. It’s not a stressful situation. It’s only stressful if you allow it to be.”


Sporting history, though, is full of instances of “choking”. Jordan Spieth became the latest high-profile victim at the Masters in Augusta on Sunday. So how can Claudio Ranieri and his Leicester players keep the conflicting but equally dangerous factors of self-doubt and complacency at bay? “One issue is where you start thinking about the consequences of the result — the consequences of winning or of not winning — rather than focusing on doing all the things that got you to that point,” Way says. “It can change your thinking and performance. We possibly saw that in the Masters. At Leicester, the players have remained focused.

“The other issue is self-doubt, which evinces itself when you start making assessments of your own performance, asking questions of yourself or saying ‘I’m off form’ or ‘It’s not happening for me’. If you’re not in the right frame of mind, one poor shot or poor pass can knock you off completely.

“There’s a neuropsychological study by a guy called Rick Hanson, who says positive thoughts or visualisations are a bit like Teflon; they don’t stick, they fall away quite quickly, but negative visualisations tend to stick, like Velcro. You can’t allow that to happen.

Ranieri has changed little from the Pearson regime, says Way

“Some teams concede a goal and they say: ‘Here we go again.’ These players aren’t like that. They weren’t like that when they were bottom last season.”

The obvious question to ask Way is about just how things “clicked” — how Leicester went from seven points adrift of safety at the bottom of the Premier League in early April 2015 to seven points clear at the top now — and how so many players are performing so far beyond expectations.

“I think that’s the misconception,” Way says. “People think something suddenly ‘clicked’, but I’d say it was much more organic than that. It had been happening for some time, with promotion from the Championship under Nigel Pearson. There was then a period last season when we were weren’t getting results in the Premier League and people outside were asking, ‘Are these players good enough?’ But we won seven of the last nine and we’ve been on an incredible roll ever since.”

What about Jamie Vardy? The forward who has scored 21 Premier League goals this season has admitted he doubted himself after making the leap from non-League to the Championship and then to the Premier League. “Jamie definitely suffered a little in terms of his belief,” Way says. “He knew he had performed to an exceptionally high standard before, but when a striker stops scoring goals, there’s always a question mark in his mind.

“With the individual work I do, it’s very little with the goalkeepers, a little bit more with the defenders and midfielders, but the strikers are often the ones I work with on an individual basis. That’s true of football in general. But it would be erroneous for me to take any credit for what Jamie has done or what the team has done. I’m just a very small cog in a very well oiled machine.

“Jamie has said himself that Nigel Pearson instilled that belief in him. Under Claudio, he has gone up another level. He’s on a roll. It’s the same with Danny Simpson, Marc Albrighton, Robert Huth, all of them.”

How did this roll start? “I would go back to when Nigel Pearson came in [in 2011],” Way says. “The club wasn’t in a good place. There were some players and possibly some staff members who didn’t fit the profile of what he wanted. I’ll confess I was quite shocked at the time by some of the people he moved on, but it showed that for a team to perform at its best, you have to manage the dynamics. When a team isn’t performing, most managers think about who they can bring in. Sometimes it might be about taking someone out.

Vardy and Mahrez have been among Leicester’s star performers this season

“It’s an exceptional group of characters. Managers talk about ‘energy-suckers’ — players or staff who can suck the positive energy out of a dressing room, the ones who always have a grumble. At Leicester, there’s not one like that. They have the attitude and the energy. Matt Reeves [the head of fitness and conditioning] makes the physical-energy side of things superbly. Shakey [Craig Shakespeare, the assistant manager] is the glue that holds everyone together. He could be a stand-up comedian.”

And there in the middle, overseeing it all, is Ranieri. “When Claudio arrived, I was nervous because Nigel had fashioned a great staff and we weren’t sure what was going to happen,” Way says. “Claudio brought some colleagues with him and I thought might change the approach, but one of the great things he has done is to change very little in terms of the way things work off the pitch.

“He has done an immense amount tactically with the players, but what everyone loves is his personality. I expected him to be an austere type of manager, but he has a lovely manner. He will take a situation that could be fractious and take the heat out of it.

“The dressing room is buoyant, with Jamie Vardy playing practical jokes and Christian Fuchs and Robert Huth making people laugh. It’s a wonderful dynamic. The fans sing ‘Jamie Vardy’s having a party’ — and that really is it. There is a party atmosphere, but it’s also extremely focused. Nobody is thinking about the consequences of what they’re doing. It’s one game at a time, like Claudio has said all along.”

[zealot]

Thanks hugely for posting a ll of this I didn't get past the paywall earlier today!

[zealot]

Fascinating particularly the bit about moving some people on is just as important as bringing people in. Credit to Pearson but credit to general recruitment policy in general since he came in -it's not just on footballing side that things are well organised. These roles seem to have really quality people in them at City at the moment.

[limeydale]

Great article on the mental acuity of the players and staff. More than a few of our fans on this forum could benefit from the wisdom of it.

[Guest CityFan 06]

Lovely article. Good insight in general but particularly about Claudio's tactical work. The whole team look tactically excellent this season, the defence in particular. The positioning and organisation of the back four is superb and everybody in the team knows their jobs. 

[UpTheLeagueFox]

It's one of the best insights I think we've had to the behind-the-scenes workings of the club. It certainly highlights the depth of work the previous manager put in as well as the cleverness of the present incumbent.

[Bob Hazels shorts]

Thought I'd dig this out. Lengthy but speaks volumes baring in mind the Sports Physiologist Ken Way being quoted left September last year and not replaced. Article was from April last year, many more throughout the year also giving Ken Way masses of credit.

 

Seems the club didn't see this person/role necessary anymore.

 

Good book by a similar guy ex footballer and coach, title speaks for itself and relevant to us. Rasmus Ankersen now Chairman of Danish club FC Midtjylland and co Chairman of Brentford.

 

Hunger In Paradise

How to sustain success, ward off complacency and develop new ideas before they become necessary. 

 

 

[Lionator]

On 13/04/2016 at 12:30, UpTheLeagueFox said:

“Some teams concede a goal and they say: ‘Here we go again.’ These players aren’t like that. They weren’t like that when they were bottom last season.”
 

The biggest sign that something has changed. Whether it's confidence, ability based or something deeper, the fight and resilience has completely gone.

[Leicester_Numan]

4 minutes ago, Bob Hazels shorts said:

Thought I'd dig this out. Lengthy but speaks volumes baring in mind the Sports Physiologist Ken Way being quoted left September last year and not replaced. Article was from April last year, many more throughout the year also giving Ken Way masses of credit.

 

Seems the club didn't see this person/role necessary anymore.

 

Good book by a similar guy ex footballer and coach, title speaks for itself and relevant to us. Rasmus Ankersen now Chairman of Danish club FC Midtjylland and co Chairman of Brentford.

 

Hunger In Paradise

How to sustain success, ward off complacency and develop new ideas before they become necessary. 

 

 

Claudio thought he was unnecessary, not the club. He doesn't trust them and believes that as the players are adults, they should be able to mentally handle everything without the help of a psychologist.

My opinion is that he has made a massive error, being defending champions is something completely alien to these players. They've been champions before but never had to defend it as they're out of the division. This season they'd have needed the psychologist more than ever. They look lost and short of belief in themselves and each other. As we haven't seen the monks this season, i assume Claudio believed they were unnecessary as well. Whether anyone was religious or not, being blessed certainly wasn't doing any harm and only ever seemed to have positive effects.

Why Claudio felt the need to mess with anything that only proved to be positive for the players is beyond me. It comes across as management by a stubborn old man that can't accept anything he doesn't believe in regardless of positive outcome.

People called Pearson stubborn but he at least was open to new ideas and technology.

And no, that's not a call to re-employ Pearson.

[Matt]

Has he gone?

 

Sure I read something on here or another article somewhere that Ranieri got rid of him back in September? And that Ranieri doesn't give sports psychology much time.

 

Possibly just another reason the players don't have much time for Ranieri.

 

I also have to question how much sports science input is still within the club. Both were installed (very well) during NP's time and questionably been ripped out.

[lcfcsnow]

This is why you need to have an outlook on how you want the football club ran, with continuity whether the manager leaves or not. Whats the point in building something up over four years to then take it apart? Even worse when it was successful as it was. The same applies to style of football, you set this out from youth level to first team level, you bring in a manager to continue that philosophy. The only person who appears to have been doing a good job at youth level left with Pearson (Idiakez). So coupled with all the other staff that have upped sticks in the past 18 months clearly this isn't being done at our club, we got lucky that Ranieri announced his interest and helped provide last season, but the above applies to Ranieri, he doesn't go along with what was in place previously. In general we don't have a clue who to bring in and always end up with a manager with different ideas that requires different players to play a different style, and you end up with the mess we have now.

[Bob Hazels shorts]

Being a sad git I've read lots about this Sports Psychologist both relating to now and at various time over the past years with Leicester.

 

IMO his departure has had a massive effect on the players. Last season a group average waifs and strays believed they were world beaters.

 

 

[TheUltimateWinner]

He spoke sense, glad we got rid.

[norwichfox]

Maybe coupled with our lack of Academy players it's a stemming of the outward flow of money given the huge pay hikes some of our players were given during the summer....surely this would have been decided at board room level, as much as I dislike Rudkin I somehow can't imagine these decisions would would be down to him.

[EGBFitness]

Probably glad he has gone, can you imagine the queue outside his office now  

[NotTheMarketLeader]

What an absolute disaster of a decision letting this guy go appears to be. Massive mistake. 

 

Much of the difference in sport between success and failure  - as in life - is attitude and state of mind. 

 

Why on earth would this be allowed to happen?

 

To me it confirms the appearance that the club is currently giving out, that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing; and that there is no cohesion between different departments; nobody appears to doing the steering. 

 

 

[st albans fox]

Didn't I read that the sports psychologist wasn't needed most of last season as the players were on auto pilot with adrenalin driving them on, week to week.

 

perhaps it was decided if the guy wasn't required to get us over the line to win the title and we had already coped with the great escape the previous campaign, he would be surplus to requirements ??

 

If so, v naive 

[erlee]

yep & shakey is not even talking to Claudy on match day..

 

 

and surely a hot head like Vardy needs a treatment after/before every match

[simFox]

As usual lots of conclusions drawn and assumptions made but no closer to the truth.

 

Whilst on the face of it, it might be a bad decision to let the guy go, but maybe he wanted to leave. Maybe other costs were becoming apparent that something had to give. I'm not party to the decision process or why he is no longer with the club, but maybe if we were it may have been the same outcome.

 

Things are usually way more complicated than they seem yet it appears to be a forum phenomenon to reduce the outcome to a binary decision.

 

 

[Stadt]

I always felt like the club was in safe hands with Pearson, every decision which was made there was solid reasoning behind it even if it wasn't necessarily a success, it seems like we make decision on the fly without any coherent structure or plan about what to do. That's why Southampton despite having sold loads of players and having two managers poached continue (not so much this season) to achieve reasonable success. In Les Reed they've got continuity, nous and structure whilst we're ****ing shambolic behind the scenes.

[Bob Hazels shorts]

Can only assume why he left. Current feeling and culture would suggest he was seen to be surplus to requirements. The guy himself said he is (was) not busy when things are going well, we possibly got ahead of ourselves.

 

Every chance he chose himself to go as he runs a very successful bushiness.

 

Fact is he has not been replaced.

 

 

 

Is this quote still the same?

 

“Claudio brought some colleagues with him and I thought might change the approach, but one of the great things he has done is to change very little in terms of the way things work off the pitch''

[WigstonWanderer]

I'm old enough and old fashioned enough to suspect that most psychotherapy and psychology is a load of expensive, pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. But surely if something is in place and working well, why would you change it? If only on the time hounoured principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

[foxinsocks]

Something made our players into champions 

Why oh why would you change anything at the risk of transforming them back into mortals

[Manwell Pablo]

Well, tbf the fact he left at the start of the Season makes the Case Study even more interesting!

[Countryfox]

On 4/13/2016 at 12:30, UpTheLeagueFox said:

In future years , it promises to become a case study in sports psychology, a lesson in what can be achieved when players’ hearts and minds are in perfect synergy.

You might imagine that Leicester City’s footballers, closing on a prize that was beyond their wildest ambitions, would be queueing around the block to see the resident psychologist to calm their nerves or help to keep their feet on the ground. The man in question tells a different story.

“I’m not a busy man at the moment,” Ken Way, the club’s performance psychologist since 2011, says. “I was actually busier this time last season. I was even able to take a short holiday last week and not worry about it.”

When Leicester won 2-0 away to Sunderland on Sunday, to move closer to a scarcely plausible Barclays Premier League title triumph, Way was watching in a familiar state of wonder from a bar in the Netherlands.

“I was concerned at one point, earlier in the season, about how [the pressure] might start to affect the players,” he says. “But it honestly hasn’t. It’s not a stressful situation. It’s only stressful if you allow it to be.”


Sporting history, though, is full of instances of “choking”. Jordan Spieth became the latest high-profile victim at the Masters in Augusta on Sunday. So how can Claudio Ranieri and his Leicester players keep the conflicting but equally dangerous factors of self-doubt and complacency at bay? “One issue is where you start thinking about the consequences of the result — the consequences of winning or of not winning — rather than focusing on doing all the things that got you to that point,” Way says. “It can change your thinking and performance. We possibly saw that in the Masters. At Leicester, the players have remained focused.

“The other issue is self-doubt, which evinces itself when you start making assessments of your own performance, asking questions of yourself or saying ‘I’m off form’ or ‘It’s not happening for me’. If you’re not in the right frame of mind, one poor shot or poor pass can knock you off completely.

“There’s a neuropsychological study by a guy called Rick Hanson, who says positive thoughts or visualisations are a bit like Teflon; they don’t stick, they fall away quite quickly, but negative visualisations tend to stick, like Velcro. You can’t allow that to happen.

Ranieri has changed little from the Pearson regime, says Way

“Some teams concede a goal and they say: ‘Here we go again.’ These players aren’t like that. They weren’t like that when they were bottom last season.”

The obvious question to ask Way is about just how things “clicked” — how Leicester went from seven points adrift of safety at the bottom of the Premier League in early April 2015 to seven points clear at the top now — and how so many players are performing so far beyond expectations.

“I think that’s the misconception,” Way says. “People think something suddenly ‘clicked’, but I’d say it was much more organic than that. It had been happening for some time, with promotion from the Championship under Nigel Pearson. There was then a period last season when we were weren’t getting results in the Premier League and people outside were asking, ‘Are these players good enough?’ But we won seven of the last nine and we’ve been on an incredible roll ever since.”

What about Jamie Vardy? The forward who has scored 21 Premier League goals this season has admitted he doubted himself after making the leap from non-League to the Championship and then to the Premier League. “Jamie definitely suffered a little in terms of his belief,” Way says. “He knew he had performed to an exceptionally high standard before, but when a striker stops scoring goals, there’s always a question mark in his mind.

“With the individual work I do, it’s very little with the goalkeepers, a little bit more with the defenders and midfielders, but the strikers are often the ones I work with on an individual basis. That’s true of football in general. But it would be erroneous for me to take any credit for what Jamie has done or what the team has done. I’m just a very small cog in a very well oiled machine.

“Jamie has said himself that Nigel Pearson instilled that belief in him. Under Claudio, he has gone up another level. He’s on a roll. It’s the same with Danny Simpson, Marc Albrighton, Robert Huth, all of them.”

How did this roll start? “I would go back to when Nigel Pearson came in [in 2011],” Way says. “The club wasn’t in a good place. There were some players and possibly some staff members who didn’t fit the profile of what he wanted. I’ll confess I was quite shocked at the time by some of the people he moved on, but it showed that for a team to perform at its best, you have to manage the dynamics. When a team isn’t performing, most managers think about who they can bring in. Sometimes it might be about taking someone out.

Vardy and Mahrez have been among Leicester’s star performers this season

“It’s an exceptional group of characters. Managers talk about ‘energy-suckers’ — players or staff who can suck the positive energy out of a dressing room, the ones who always have a grumble. At Leicester, there’s not one like that. They have the attitude and the energy. Matt Reeves [the head of fitness and conditioning] makes the physical-energy side of things superbly. Shakey [Craig Shakespeare, the assistant manager] is the glue that holds everyone together. He could be a stand-up comedian.”

And there in the middle, overseeing it all, is Ranieri. “When Claudio arrived, I was nervous because Nigel had fashioned a great staff and we weren’t sure what was going to happen,” Way says. “Claudio brought some colleagues with him and I thought might change the approach, but one of the great things he has done is to change very little in terms of the way things work off the pitch.

“He has done an immense amount tactically with the players, but what everyone loves is his personality. I expected him to be an austere type of manager, but he has a lovely manner. He will take a situation that could be fractious and take the heat out of it.

“The dressing room is buoyant, with Jamie Vardy playing practical jokes and Christian Fuchs and Robert Huth making people laugh. It’s a wonderful dynamic. The fans sing ‘Jamie Vardy’s having a party’ — and that really is it. There is a party atmosphere, but it’s also extremely focused. Nobody is thinking about the consequences of what they’re doing. It’s one game at a time, like Claudio has said all along.”

 

So what you saying then ...   ?