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RBSC Chats with Technical Director Carl Brown
Friday, October 25, 2002
This is the fourth part of the RBSC’s interview with Carl Brown conducted by Karl Wallace and Mosiah Marshal
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| MM: What did you learn there? (In reference to his stint at Bolton Wanderers) CB: The most important thing to me than anything else is there is still one thing common in all of it, whether we play at our semi-professional level or the professionals like in England, that hard work is still the answer. It's good attitude and hard work. At Bolton, for instance, that is at the bottom of the Premiership ladder, there are facilities that have made a difference in what we have seen of Ricardo Gardner. As you can see his total body structure has changed greatly because of the availability of infrastructure. (Carl passed around some photographs of Bibi lifting weights and of the practice fields.) MM: Do we have any field that compares to this? (Everyone laughs.) CB: You should just ask if we have any field and stop right there. The management structure that I saw at Bolton is directly what I always thought it should be. The gaffer, Sam Allardyce, when he gets there in the morning or in the afternoon, he is probably the last person to get the team. Everybody has a responsibility there. The medics are the first ones who get going and he pulls those people who need treatment, who need to do fitness tests. He pulls 7 or 8 players from the group. The gaffer knows he has no chance of getting those people. And then the coach gets in, Phil Brown, who is the head coach. He separates the ones that he wants for the first team as opposed to the reserves. The reserves are given to the assistant coach. The gaffer now comes and tells them what he wants. He has allowed his staff to operate. He doesn't impose on Phil Brown, for instance. He doesn't get out there in a training session Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but Phil is implementing the things that he wants. That is done in the office in the morning. So everybody who leaves from that office knows what the gaffer needs and what they have to do. And believe you me, it is a pity that Bolton is doing as badly as they are doing because the management structure is so much better than a number of other clubs above them. Again it comes back to finance. They don't have the sort of money to finance the sort of programs that they have on paper. MM: On the website, some people are asking, what is the philosophy of the technical director? Are we going to see some letters from you? (Prolonged laughter.) MM: Are you going to wake up at 3 in the morning and put pen to paper? CB: You know, I have done that for years. I remember in 1993 when I took sick, I went to the doctor and we sat and spoke about my rest during the period, and I couldn't find one day where I got eight hours of sleep for weeks. It was a matter of waking up at 2:00 in the morning to try and prepare for a 5:30 session. An idea always comes up and you sit there and you spend time thinking about it. So, my philosophy started 30 or 40 years ago. It was partially fulfilled when we went to France in 1998, but I have always wanted to see, people like George Thompson, a local coach, doing something like that. My dream was for a Thompson, a Jackie Bell, a Leighton Duncan to do it. My philosophy: honesty, hard work, and if I can get that across to the players I believe I will get a right attitude that will make it so much easier for them to put on the field the sort of ability that we know they have possessed over the years. KW: As TD, what would you outline to be the main areas that we should work on to get the program moving in a certain direction? CB: We initially spoke about the formation. What are we going to do to reach Germany in 2006? How are we going to play, what are we going to do? As I said earlier, Japan was all about the attitude of the players and if we can continue to improve on that, that would take away a major part of our problems. We have to look at it two-fold. One, we have the local players who are going to be part of it, we have to think about improving their professional attitude towards the game. They have to move away from that feeling of just being part-timers. They must feel that it is a job that they have to do. Presently, our local players are not being paid by the JFF. Again, it comes down to finance. So, when you pull a local player from his club for the whole week, or for the whole month he is in training, and at the end of that time he doesn't even get a dollar, that is going to be very discouraging any way you look at it. That is something we are battling with at the moment. MM: Well, how do you plan to fix something like that? CB: That came about from the withdrawal of a subvention that we were getting from government. And when you look at the fact that the JFF finances six national teams, but only one we are able to raise cash through, and that's the seniors. But we also have the women, the U-23, the U-20, the U-19 women and the U-17. The President, from June, has promised to pay some part of the subvention to the players, but he has not been able to do so. So, these are some the setbacks that we face. So we have the local group, but we have to try and look trying to bring up not only the technical part of their football, because we know that is important, but to me, one of the things that we have to do more than anything else when we ask for a training, because to compete out there with the big teams, that is the big mark. How quickly do you get the ball under control is going to make a difference whether you make a good pass or you get a good shot to goal. That has been our downfall and it is because of a lack of proper facilities. When you see that field at Bolton you don't even need to look at that ball when it is coming, so you can spend a lot of time looking around and controlling that ball. In Jamaica, you better make certain you spend 99% of the time ensuring that it doesn't go in any direction. So that's what we are doing at the moment, looking at our local segment and then trying to harness what we have overseas and to build that sort of unity which is going to be very, very critical. We are faced with overseas competition at all times. When you look at a player out of England, take for example Joel McAnuff, who played in the game against Nigeria for us. I met him in London and he expressed a lot of interest. His aunt is part of our government, Phyllis Mitchell. We invited him for the Nigeria game. Now, three months later, he is not interested in playing for Jamaica any more. He is now a big thing in England. His name is being flashed all over. I am almost certain that once the window opens in January, we will see him moving from Wimbledon. So these are the sorts of things we are seeing. The agent now sees the opportunity in making a lot of money. Don't leave Wimbledon to go and play any practice match for Jamaica. You need to be playing for Wimbledon every day. If you leave, you might not get your game. Kevin Lisbie is another case. He played a match on Tuesday for Charlton. he came and played for us on Thursday (against India), when we really didn't expect him. So we invited him to go to Japan and his coach…well, he said this to me, 'I just spoke to the gaffer and he said if I come back on Friday I'm not going to get in the team on Saturday, and I would like to play.' 'Kevin, watch me,' I said, 'we have a commitment to the Japanese federation to take X amount of overseas players. If you pull out, I just got the withdrawal of Onandi Lowe already, the federation (JFF) is going to be faced with the possibility of the Japanese canceling the game. The following day, I got a call from Kevin's agent that he was down with gastroenteritis. Could be true, not saying it isn't, but just looking at the series of things leading up to that point. That is the reality of what we are faced with. It comes back again to when I talk to you about the lateness of filling out an application to send off to whether CFU or CONCACAF. We have to be waiting very, very late for it. Part 5 of this very informative series will appear on this website on Sunday, December 8th. Please stay tuned! |