Mourinho's Plan For Global Domination
Posted by Zeno in Chelsea, Jose Mourinho | 30 March 2006
Ah, Mr Bond. So glad you could join us. You see, now, how ludicrous it was to ever think you could have stopped me. See the power I have at my disposal! So… choose a city for destruction, Mr Bond. Paris? Lisbon? Amsterdam? Ah… no… of course it must be London. Farewell Piccadilly, au revoir Kings Road. Mwahahaha.
Excuse me… I was just indulging my “Mourinho as Blofeld” daydream. But recent news, if news it is, makes it far easier for me to cast José in the role of pantomime technocrat villain. You’ve all heard of Prozone, I take it? Prozone is a technology package that pretty much all big footie clubs own these days. It uses a series of cameras positioned around the stadium to track, with unerring accuracy, the movement of every player in every game. After the match, managers and coaches can go through a quite ludicrous amount of data… how far their players have run, how they track back, when their “bursts” of effort are, and so on. It’s very clever and quite scary… yes, Frank, we know you run an average of 19 kilometres every game, but we can quite clearly see that you’re not expending your energy in the most efficient way. Now shut up and give me 20 laps.
So… Prozone good, particularly for chaps like José for whom the stat is everything. By his own standards, if you compare his actual results to those of his peers (Wenger, Ferguson, and I suppose for politeness’ sake we have to throw Benitez in there) he’s so far out in front that it’s embarrassing. But now, move over Prozone. Datatrax is here, and set to eclipse its precursor rather as the 2006 Ferrari F1 car eclipses the 1930s Ford Edsel.
Sadly, there’s not much info on the Datatrax site at the moment, nor is there on the company that owns it (Performance Group International). But taking the idea to its logical extension, perhaps there may come a time when management decisions could… well… happen without a human in the loop. Think about it. At the moment, the manager and his team read the performance of their team and the way the match is going, and base their decisions on a mixture of instinct and experience. Prozone works because it gives them something to refer to after the game. But what if the machine itself could make the decisions (based on much harder data than the coaching staff are using in-game… after all, it’s tracking the players itself)? I foresee a future in which football teams are run by massed banks of TV monitors, with a disembodied voice ordering the defence to “Push up the pitch, for ****’s sake” or “I said THREE up front, you ****ing ****!”. And so on.
But which voice? To whom would the modern footballer best respond? There have been plenty of intimidating electronic fellas over the years… one wonders if any players would have dared to speak out last season if they’d known they’d have to answer to Agent Smith from the Matrix (you disappoint me, Mr Johnson) or Arnie from the Terminator (I need your shorts, your boots, and your Bentley Continental). Of course, you don’t have to go with the disciplinarian approach. I was always confused, even as a child, with why Knight Industries would go to all that trouble to make an indestructible supercar for David Hasselhoff (turbo boost and all that) and then give it the voice of a fey middle-aged New Englander with a penchant for Moroccan pre-teens. But it could very well be that the soothing tones of KITT would bring out the best in Chelsea’s star-studded squad. And how could I forget the ne plus ultra of bad boy machines… Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty from Blade Runner. Spouting his cod philosophy while driving nails through his palms in a thinly-veiled reference to Christian mythology… wait a sec… am I the only one thinking “Eric Cantona”?
Tomorrow… a preview of the Birmingham game. Possibly.
Datatrax’s site is here.
You can find out about Prozone here.
Comments
As the technology develops, it could extend into other areas of management too.
A North West one could be developed with a red nasal input for sniffing the whiskey and a robotic foot for kicking things at the captain.
A North London version could be made that reads all the data then says - "actually, I'll play the Frenchman"
And a West London one could be developed that has big huffs in front of the camera when the team loses, or has the voice of a U-boat commander shouting "dive, dive, dive" at it's forwards.
Ah, the posibilities are endless.
Zeno says: I rather like it.
