To be continually successful a professional footballer must possess a rapacious attitude. The time-honoured cliche that dictates 'success breeds success' is only proven true when there exists in the individual, and within the team, a constant and driving need for ability to be validated by achievement.
It is wonderful to have ability. But in truth, ability is a mere stepping- stone. It allows one to pass over minor obstacles and it can offer some confidence. However, many possess ability and yet never have achievement.
Others have ability and only rarely feel the warmth of the sunshine that achievement casts in the direction of winners.
One of the most depressing aspects of being a professional footballer is when one has a well-founded belief in ones ability, but finds that ability undernourished or even suppressed.
How can ability be undernourished or suppressed? I hear you ask. Well, many times it is a self-inflicted suppression. An individual for example, can all too easily fall in love with his talent and allow that talent to become more important that its fulfilment.
Or, it may be that a talented performer finds himself in a team that somehow fails to realise potential. Then, there may be the occasions when a manager fails to recognise, accept or fully itilize the talents of the players at his disposal.
Sometimes this may be because the man in charge doesn't trust his players or, more worryingly, that he dosn't trust himself. Let me assure you, that in professional football the last couple of examples are much more prevalent than one might imagine.
I have personally suffered at the hands of at least two managers who failed to come to terms with the talents under their command. Thankfully I learned much from this pair of incompetents and the more experienced I became in football management the more imperative it became for me to instil in each and every one of the my players an unequivocal and unwavering trust in their ability.
In my honest opinion, a team can really only begin to reach its true potential when the manager displays his complete trust. It is equally true that any manager can only offer this trust when he has complete faith in his own ability.
To do otherwise would only offer contradiction. This is because it is completely and utterly impossible for a team to trust a manager who is unable to trust himself.
Players, irrespective of the level, or the code, they play, are instinctively aware of such shortcomings in a manager or coach. This awareness is an innate part of the survivial instinct that is well bred in all good performers.
That success builds success is inarguable, but the primary success, the very building block that supports all other and consequent successes, arrives when a player trusts his ability completely, and then extends this trust to his team-mates.
And should this trust be further extended to the manager, coach and even Chairman of his club, then and only then, can real success, in the guise of achievement, be attained again and again.
The natural progression of complete trust in ones ability is to seek a genuine validation for that ability. Such validitation is invariably proportionate to ones ability as achievement over and above the level of ones ability is rarely consistent.
However, one of the amazing ironies of life is that, the greater the degree of trust, the greater the ability can become. Therefore the more profound the achievements can be.
