[Beerinkol]

The mind game between coaches in football is one of the my favourite aspects of the game. The same techniques which you use to analyse what civil servants and politicans say/do can be used to analyse and understand what the coaches say/do.

If you take a step back and rewind the matches in your mind, you can see that most of the weaker teams are using the tactics mde famous by Greece during their conquest of Europe. The coaches of these weaker teams have taken it and refined it to levels beyond what the Greeks had previously achieved.

So far, the stronger European teams have been having problems with these tactics. IMHO, the coaches with the best tactics in overcoming it are those who played serious mind games against their opponents and won. These are:

Argentina - Basically Mr Hand-of-God played the ref. By making comments about rough tackles, he put the refs on notice that he would complain loudly if they don't their job and ensure a clean match. He then set up his team in attack formation and repeatedly attacked. Since it was his team that was repeatedly going forward, strict refeering favoured him as it enahnced his chances of getting a penalty. It obviously worked and the ref was extremely "on the ball" for the match. The USA-Solvenia game was an unexpected casualty. Beyond the disallowed goal, the ref for that match was trigger happy with his cards which racked up the unhappiness of how he was handling the game. FIFA has signalled disapproval by stating that they are going to do a reveiw of the ref decisions for that match. You can see the immidiate impact of way matches yesterday were refereed.

Netherlands - Here they played the Japanese coach. They got their star striker to make mean remarks about eating sushi to goad the Japanese team and hint they would be adopting an all out attack strategy like Argentina. When the game started, they deployed a strange defensive formation and played at an ultra slow pace. This unbalanced the Japan coach who appeared to have prepared for a relentless attack. To the credit of the Japanese coach, he did not take the bait and launch an attack, adopting a wait and see instead. During the second half, Netherlands changed tactics and went into attack mode. The sudden change in tempo and speed caught the Japanese by surprise and resulted in the game's only goal. What the Netherlands coach didn't count on was the rigorous attempt by the Japanese team to chase the game. He was hoping they would be disoriented and allow his side maybe to sneak in a 2nd goal. Instead they went at his team like a mad sushi chef with twin Ginsu knives. In hindsight, those unkind sushi comments might have played a part. Maybe next time when he plays mind games, he might want to do it in such a way as not to insult the other side and inspire such a fanatical response.