WHILE THE LIONS CONTINUE THE STRUGGLE against the All Blacks in New Zealand, the man whose winning theory helped Sir Clive Woodward to land the rugby union World Cup has moved on to the round ball. Yehuda Shinar still talks regularly to Woodward — and perhaps they need a chat after Saturday’s defeat — but his focus has most recently been on Blackburn Rovers, after he was invited to work with the youth team and academy staff.
A Tel Aviv-based handwriting expert, Shinar has yielded tangible results since arriving at Ewood Park in February. The most astonishing of these was the team’s comeback from 3-1 down in the 90th minute of the academy final against Coventry City. The result after five minutes’ stoppage time was 4-3 to Blackburn.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in football,” Tony Faulkner, the academy physiotherapist who first contacted Shinar after reading about him in Winning!, Woodward’s autobiography, said. “You would have expected them to lose control and belief, but they didn’t panic.”
It was excitement enough to evoke memories of Jonny Wilkinson’s last-gasp dropped goal that won England the World Cup in Australia in 2003. Shinar was involved in shaping both victories. “Normally under pressure you don’t think because it is seen as time-consuming. And pressure equals no time, correct? So if there is no time, you don’t think, you just react,” he said.
“The major message is there is always more time than you feel because it is completely subjective. How much time don’t you have? No one can tell. Jonny Wilkinson remembered that and was relaxed.”
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Shinar developed a computer programme to assess individuals’ abilities to perform in trying circumstances. Shinar’s first sports client was Ronen Goldberg, an Israeli squash player, whose biggest opponent was himself. He later became five-times national and California state champion. He then helped Maccabi Tel Aviv to defy the odds to reach the group stage of the Champions League.
Blackburn was his first foray into English football, a sport less accepting of perceived psycho-babble than rugby. “Initially it was a problem for them to sit there and be self-critical,” Faulkner said. “Now their opinion of how they played is 99 per cent identical with the coach’s.”
Blackburn hope that Shinar will help more youth-team players to make the first team. It is a transition achieved by only a few, including Damien Duff and David Dunn. Mark Hughes, the manager, has shown interest and Premiership players could be introduced to T-CUP (Thinking Correctly Under Pressure), one of Shinar’s winning behaviours made famous by Woodward.
“In too many cases, debriefing happens only when there is a failure. Winners take it one step beyond and debrief all the time,” Shinar said. “They are driven by one goal: winning. Winning is not psychology, it is strategy.”