Kicking clinics and the paralysis of analysis. Ever get the feeling? Ever line up the golf ball or the rugby ball and prepare to hit or kick it in a perfect arc. Ever think your way through the shot in the way the coach told you - position your body correctly, hit through the ball, keep your head down, transfer the weight. You know the story. You cut the ball into the long grass or the car park. You miss it completely or it spins way off kilter, like a drunk heading across a dance floor to the toilet. You don't know why. That's it - the paralysis of analysis. David Alred, kicking coach to the successful Lions team on their tour to South Africa last summer was in Dublin yesterday with Welsh and Lions kicker Neil Jenkins analysing, it must be said, more than paralysing.
"The challenge is to find the key that works for individuals because you want, more or less, the same sort of bio-mechanic laws adhered to. But everyone has a different way of doing it. The key is to get the person doing it so they feel comfortable and then with this new skill, they can perform under pressure."
Alred has worked with England's Rob Andrews and Australia's David Campese, as well as Ireland's Eric Elwood and Thierry Lacroix and Jean Luc Sadourny from France. Yesterday, he was at Old Belvedere's ground at Anglesey Road with 32 Leinster-based players for the Predator Kicking Clinic, going through the drills that will enhance place-kicking and keep it consistent under pressure. "In the Lions, it was actually the kicking strategy that worked very well for them. The kicking game has gotten very, very subtle. You don't play the touch line, you actually play the area, and if you play the area, you have to have co-ordination between the kicker and the 14 other members of the team. That can only work if you've whole-team strategies and that's what I really enjoyed about the Lions."
Alred was first spotted when place-kicking for Bath. The brother in law of the general manager of American football team the Vikings sent back word and next thing, Alred had arrived in Minnesota kicking in the `Franchise' and breathing in the culture of ultra specialism.
"People have the pre-conceived notion that to be a kicking coach you must have learned all of it in the States. I didn't actually learn much technique there. In the States, there are 220 million people and about 28 national football teams. It's a bit like an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of type writers. If the guy isn't good enough, you just get another one."
Having also worked in rugby league, Australian rules football and, last Sunday, with a number of Armagh's Gaelic footballers and rugby union players combined, Alred's conviction is that kicking is a long-term process. He believes that it takes 18 months to become an international class kicker. That is, a player who can consistently return a high percentage of kicks, regardless of their position and regardless of the pressure.
"Sometimes players come off after a match and say: `I just couldn't miss today'. They are in the zone. They've a clinically-clear vision. If you perform the technique in the zone, you've cracked it. Then you can put your mortgage on a fairly high percentage."
Currently studying for a PhD in `the neurology of skill acquisition in rugby,' Alred is now contracted to Adidas. Sound-bite friendly, he advises: "Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent - often, though, people practise a fallible style, but they've gotten very good at it." It's a fact that, with the exception of Australia's John Eales, most goal kickers have small, rather than large feet, perhaps size eight or nine. What Alred strives for is perfect contact - like any golfer - and there seems to be evidence to support the fact that smaller feet might make better contact with the ball. Ollie Campbell, one of the very best kickers, never had a coaching guru. He worked it out for himself. To many people, theory is the practice of making the simple complex, but then they have to ask why some kickers can vary so extremely week to week and under similar conditions. And who is to say that even Campbell couldn't have been better than he was.
