Messi, Bravo, Ryan Mason and luck and confidence in football

Football, as I have said so often, while the most beautiful of games can be the cruellest of sports.

As he lies in a bed in the neuro-surgery unit of St Mary’s Hospital in London no one will know that better than poor Ryan Mason, the Hull midfielder, who suffered a fractured skull following an accidental clash of heads with Chelsea defender, Gary Cahill.

The thoughts, prayers and hopes for a speedy recovery will reach him from all the corners of the world and from players from the very, very top to the bottom, though no less, admirable, rung of football’s ladder.

They will know just how huge a part kismet or luck, fate or chance - call it what you will - play in defining their careers and therefore their lives.

Ryan is a fairly extreme example of that lottery or Russian roulette that ultimately shapes everyones’ lives, including those of footballers.

Football is one of those situations where, as the old saying has it, the devil is very much in the detail, sometimes to the player’s benefit, other times to his or her detriment.

The minor Tourettes Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) suffered by former Everton goalkeeper, Tim Howard, has been well documented. It did not stop him from making an excellent career for himself both for the clubs and country(USA) that he represented with such distinction.

He is now a leading light in the campaign to increase awareness surrounding the conditions and battle people’s prejudices about them.

He would understand about that because it came perilously close to costing him his own career.

Tim, had just enjoyed an excellent season and was at the very peak of his form when a new goalkeeping coach arrived at Everton with new ideas and methods that he was looking to instil into the club’s goalkeepers.

The results were disastrous. It was not a case of attitude, nor approach; in training no one had a better and more concentrated focus than Tim Howard.

Neither was it the stubborn notion that things SHOULDN’T be done like that, but rather that, in Tim’s world, things simply COULDN’T be done like that. It was not about making choices, there were no choices, there was no other way of doing his job than the way he had been doing it all his career.

What followed was a goalkeeper that started making stupid, nonsensical, inexplicable errors and fortunately the penny dropped with the club. If they were to get the best from their goalkeeper then he needed to train EXACTLY as he had been doing for the previous 10 years otherwise he was, quite simply, not fit for purpose.

Tim got lucky, the club understood and it was the coach that had to change his methodology and immediately Tim’s form returned. A less reasoned approach would have seen the curtain come down on what had been an excellent career. Everton’s foresight and the coach’s flexibility saved the day.

Which brings me to the case of the differing fortunes of two former teamates at Barcelona, Leo Messi and Claudio Bravo, now at Manchester City.

Against Eibar, Messi was once again a quantum leap above anyone else on the pitch; so complete a player putting on so dominant a performance that the words of Chapi Ferrer that we will only really appreciate what we are seeing here and now when he stops playing, ring loud and clear.

In the words of Joni Mitchell, “ Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

When Busquets was injured he helped more in the build up to the plays, was seen more in the centre than on the wings and his own goal was a master class in just about evey aspect of attacking playing from creating the space, starting the move, timing the run and administering the coup de grace.

It was the cherry, the creme de la creme nestled on the top of a sumptuous cake mixed, baked, iced and dished up by the very best footballer there has ever been.

But we need to ask ourselves one question. Why is he so good?

There are many reasons from natural ability to an insatiable desire and work ethic that can help him to be - and remain - the very best.

And just as importantly he has been at just the one club and, metaphorically speaking, has his feet well and truly under the table. He is understood by those around him who now how to deal with him and he how knows what is required of him.

But still we hear the cry; could he do in the Premier League?

Trite nonsense; of course he could, and in fact does on a fairly regular basis in the Champions League against clubs from all over Europe, including the PL.

Now of course after a slight hiccup, Barcelona are now in a situation where they know they are going to have to put an offer on the table to guaranteee he stays in Catalonia.

More importantly, Barcelona now come to that table in a weaker position following the crass proclamations from Oscar Grau that Barcelona needed to keep ‘a cool head’ in negotiating with Messi and Pere Gratacos that Messi wouldn’t be as good as he was, were it not for the players that he had around him.

Barcelona are in a corner; they know it, so do the players, coaches and fans and needless to say, so do Messi and his team who must currently feel they have just bought a lottery ticket containing six winning numbers and a bonus ball. A team that could not have orchestrated the score better and who you sense have only one question that they need to answer when negotiations open, namely "How much do you want.”

As good as things are for Leo, over in Manchester it’s a different story for his former team mate the unfortunate Claudio Bravo where the footballing vagaries of fate seem to be dealing him a far dodgier hand.

The worst of the situation in my opinion is not Bravo’s form per se, although heaven knows it is worrying, but rather the press and public’s perception of it.

“Claudio Bravo is crap,” I hear on a fairly regular basis, many times from people who should know better; an unhelpful, inaccurate, ignorant four word analysis on a professional footballer who won the league in Chile before he became a legend at Real Sociedad, won two league titles, two Spanish Cups and a Champions league with Barcelona, the Zamora award for best goalkeeper in La Liga in 2014-15 as well as the Copa America with Chile for the past two years where he was voted goalkeeper of the tournament on both occasions.

Claudio Bravo may not be in a good place at the moment, he may be very close to losing his place in the City first team, he is almost certainly very low on confidence and what he needs more than anything else is help to re-build that confidence and return as the goalkeeper that he has shown throught the years that he undoubtedly is.

Claudio Bravo is undoubtedly many things; what he is not is 'crap’ and to describe him as such is as outrageous as it is disrespectful and counter productive.

What is inescapable, however, is that out of the last 23 shots on target against Manchester City 14 have registered on the scoreboard. The truth is that he is not stopping as many efforts on his goal as perhaps he should. Caballero will play the next game because it is an FA Cup match and then after that it might be time to take stock, give him one or two more games and if he fails to come out of the trough he is in for whatever reason plan a course of action which may well mean he has to give way to Caballero.

Claudio would argue that he hasn’t exactly been helped either by an extremely generous Manchester City defence or by being in a side that really needs to be stronger in both boxes to be realistic title challengers.

Deep down though, the bottom line is that he should be stopping more of what is coming in his direction and this will be affecting his confidence. As with Tim Howard at Everton, and let me point out here that David de Gea was also deemed as 'crap’ by many fans when he first came to Manchester United, what Claudio needs is the help of everyone at the club to re-build his confidence, go back to basics.

Confidence, and the lack of it, is not so much a two way street as a racetrack. Messi goes into new contract negotiations with his cup running over with it while poor Claudio will feel there is a hole in his side where it is draining out of him.

Sport, keen as it is to look at any complicated situation and describe it in as few words as possible, defines this as 'choking’, effectively losing because of one’s failure to adequately perform the most basic tasks that up to now have brought success.

Duties, normally carried out instinctively, (catching a cross, hitting a tennis ball over the net, sinking a three foot putt, slotting over a conversion in front of the posts etc) begin to suffer what the experts refer to as 'analysis paralysis’. Effectively a return to that early part of your life when you were learning how to do what you have been doing on auto pilot seemingly for ever and a day - until now.

This is where sports psychologists earn their corn. It is their function to make everyone feel at home, in their comfort zone, to regain the instinctive qualities that took them to the top.

No player is immune from the random devil that is choking or from the lottery that can turn everything on its head in a heartbeat - ask Ryan Mason.