Changing rooms in football clubs have always enthralled me. Even to this day I find it fascinating to enter a changing area I have not been to before.
Each one has a unique identity all of its own and while the more recently built areas can be a little pale in personality, I have yet to visit a changing room that was devoid of something that captured my imagination.
I have been in changing rooms in many parts of the world, and even on the rare occasions when it wasn’t to participate in a game, there was still that sense of nervous tension that is fundamental to every dressing room.
During my schoolboy days at Home Farm FC I experienced everything from good changing rooms to no changing rooms. I have memories of changing for matches under trees, in the manager’s car, under the raised door of the boot of the same car when there was no more room inside, and many times just by the side of the pitch stuffing the clothes into your kit bag and hoping the rain would keep off.
Even as a professional, I found many strange areas that passed themselves off as changing rooms. League of Ireland players will remember the facilities at Athlone Town, where the room was so tiny that when sitting down you had to be very careful some protruding object didn’t poke your eye out.
A similar situation playing against Schalke 04 in European competition with Shamrock Rovers meant we had to use two separate changing rooms, with the forwards in one and defenders on the other.
At some levels of football the changing room is simply place to hang up your clothes before you go out to play football. You arrive, exchange a bit of banter with your team-mates, listen to the repetitive weekly exhortations of the man standing in the centre of the room, disregard the same in a millisecond and go out and chase a leather sphere around a green rectangle for an hour and a half in a manner reminiscent of an inmate who has just found a side door to the asylum open and unattended. You then return sweating to the changing room, put your clothes back on and go for the few pints.
The more contemplative mind, however, considers the changing room to be the psychic equivalent of the Batcave, where the individual slips out of his normal everyday persona, places it on a peg on the wall, and with the simple donning of a shirt and shorts is magically rejuvenated into a 12-year-old, eminently capable of making the most impossible actions seem effortlessly mundane.
The one constant and unfaltering aspect of every changing room, irrespective of the standard it represents is the incessant racket contained therein. Players love talking across the room and there may be a dozen different conversations going on at the same time, ranging from anything like what happened last night to what might happen tonight.
Managers will invariably have to shout above the racket: ‘Lets get our minds on the game’, which usually works, well, at least until he steps out of the dressing room.
In professional football the changing room is of enormous consequence. To the experienced manager it is in turn the nerve centre of his whole operation, a source of rich and varied information and ideally, the perfect location to demonstrate the full extent of his authoritative powers. The changing room is invariably a scene of organised chaos. It is, however, where the experienced football manager does all his best work and learns most about himself and much about his players. Amidst the constant chatter there is quietness and this is where the jewels of information lie.
Today we live in a world of noise, an age of intense activity where people are so consumed by progress and development that there is little or no place for silence. Globalisation is divesting us of our originality, eroding our indigenous qualities and decreasing greatly the opportunity to be silent and still. Image is everything in this world we now inhabit. Our eyes, ears and our minds are besieged from all directions and we have already begun to embrace a culture that encourages the utilisation of our external senses, one that seems to have lost interest in the more intuitive aspects of who we are.
Listening is the great educator. Talking is informative and creative and, especially in this country, can be rich and entertaining, but I have learned that while it is good to talk it is much more rewarding to listen.
In every conversation, no matter how animated, or passionate, there is a silence. It is good to listen to the words that are spoken, but better to listen to the way they are spoken and, to the more enlightened listener, what is not spoken can offer the very best information. The ability to listen to silence increases the power of one’s own instinct, but first one has to become aware of and acquainted with the silence within oneself.
In the noise and chaos of a changing room I became more empowered by watching and listening than I ever did by talking. Players went through their individual routine and acted out their own rituals of preparation percolated by tension and expectancy. Talking to players in such circumstances to good effect requires an awareness of the individual concerned and the ability to understand how he absorbs the information.
The good listener becomes a good observer, but not by observing the obvious. It is what is going on behind the words and the actions that provide the true power.
The changing room is a place where bodies congregate to immerse their minds in a communal challenge for enjoyment and success. It is, despite the unceasing chatter, a place of solitude. The changing room is a reflection of the rooms that house our lives. There can be so much going on that we are eminently capable of losing sight of the fact why we are there in the first place.
