Forcing footballers to play with their knees. Making defenders carry tennis balls. New England manager Thomas Tuchel has deployed some creative coaching techniques over the years.
It takes a special intensity to drive a football team to the top and Tuchel, once described as a ‘footballaholic’, has that in abundance.
In the space of four months in 2021 he turned Frank Lampard’s wilting Chelsea side, marooned in mid-table, into a Champions League-winning force, dispatching Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City in the final.
Harry Kane claimed the German will bring ‘a lot of energy’ to the England camp and that is an understatement. Listen to anybody who has worked with or under the 51-year-old and they will tell you of his maverick zeal, pushing his players to the limit mentally and physically.
Sometimes influences can come from unexpected places and one man who has shaped how Tuchel coaches is Professor Wolfgang Schollhorn, a German scientist.
New England manager Thomas Tuchel is famed for his intensity and unorthodox coaching
The German boss arrives at England with a reputation for pushing his players to the limit
Professor Wolfgang Schollhorn influenced Tuchel with the theory of ‘differential learning’ – essentially, forcing players to train under a variety of conditions rather than stable ones
Tuchel met Professor Schollhorn at FC Mainz, the second club he coached, as the scientist was based in the same city and that had several encounters.
Professor Schollhorn is an advocate for ‘differential learning’ – the idea of disrupting a student’s learning environment, rather than giving them a stable one, to force them to improvise and react on their feet.
It is an idea that Tuchel took on board and has worked into his coaching.
‘(It) totally changed my role as a coach. I started to orientate myself more and more towards the fact that training provides the players with much more complex tasks than a match does.
‘The problems the opponent creates in the game should seem as easy as possible to them.’
That’s why, as The Athletic reports, Tuchel would turn the attacking third into a triangle in training at Borussia Dortmund to force attackers to play more direct and manipulate space better.
And why he would make them play on incredibly narrow pitches, or take extra touches with their knees, or carry tennis balls so they could not rely on wrestling with the opposition.
And why he would on occasion stop them passing through the centre circle, or prohibit any play down the left wing.
The new England manager often make players train in limited spaces and creates odd rules
The idea was to make training much harded than matches so when they were confronted with a problem at the weekend, they had the flexibility and resilience to find a way around it.
Tuchel’s sessions can be so mentally taxing that Eugen Polanski, who played under him at Mainz, said ‘you need A-levels for some of these exercises.’
Also not afraid to give a player the hairdryer treatment if they fall below his standards, Tuchel is a handful to come into contact with, a force of nature.
Whatever you think of his appointment, one thing is for certain – England’s stars will be pushed to their limits.
