January 26 2004

Crystal Palace

SAY sports psychology to the man on the street and he’ll probably think of a piece of paper with ‘There’s no I in team’ written on it, pinned to a changing room wall, writes Chris Fidler.

Despite Glenn Hoddle’s best attempts to introduce different ways of achieving results when he imposed faith-healer Eileen Drewery on the England football squad, alternative methods are still largely viewed with suspicion by us Brits.

But if they are good enough for the Aussies and the Yanks, who, after all, know a thing or two about sporting success, then we’d be fools to close our ears to them, wouldn’t we?

Palace manager Iain Dowie certainly thinks so. He brought fitness coach/sports psychologist John Harbin to Selhurst Park from former club Oldham last week, describing him as “the most important signing I ever made.”

With Harbin playing a key role in players’ day-to-day work on the training ground, the Latics transformed themselves from a struggling Second Division side to play-off semi-finalists within a season, with virtually the same playing staff.

He not only introduced boxing, paintballing, rockclimbing, wrestling and training methods adapted from American football, he also worked on the players’ minds - and got results.

If it all sounds a bit foreign, you won’t be surprised that Harbin has spent most of his life in Australia with his roots in rugby league, not football.

Born in Leeds 56 years ago, his parents emigrated to Australia when he was nine. In his first week at his new school Down Under he volunteered to play for the school football team, but later found out football was Aussie for rugby league. In later years he coached the game before being invited back to the motherland in 1997 by Huddersfield Giants’ boss Gary Schofield.

“I came over as. . . I don’t know what, to be honest,” said Harbin. “I had an eight-week stint with Huddersfield and liked the atmosphere of Super League so came back the following season to coach Wakefield Trinity.”

It was not long after, when Harbin became coach at Oldham’s rugby league side, that his and Dowie’s paths first crossed and a meeting of minds began.

“We met at a function and were talking about coaching. I leant him a book [Brisbane Broncos’ coach Wayne Bennett’s Philosophy of Coaching] and never got it back, so I rang him to get it back.

“Unbeknown to me, when I rang him, he had just been appointed manager of Oldham, so he said ‘come in and pick the book up’ and he offered me a job.”

Harbin added: “I still haven’t got the bloody book back - he says he’s going to buy me a copy for Christmas.”

Squabbles over books aside, Harbin is now concentrating on easing the Palace players into his ways of thinking.

“My philosophy is that there is a strong link between fitness, discipline and mental toughness and sometimes I think a lot of the fitness coaches don’t appreciate that,” said Harbin.

“It’s easy to stand there with a stopwatch and time people, but that becomes boring and repetitive.

“So I think my job is to get as much variety in training as possible that will challenge and stimulate the players.”

Using the mind is something Harbin is big on.

He said: “I always think your mind goes before your actual fitness goes. I think your mind tells your body to stop when I think the body is willing to keep on going for a little while longer.

“You get players that say they are stuffed, absolutely shattered and couldn’t run another metre for me. But if some lunatic came through that door with a gun, the player would get straight up, dive through the door or window and run 200 metres in 20 seconds - so his body isn’t tired.

“It’s mind over matter like the case where the woman lifted up her car with her hands to rescue her kid trapped under it. She then went back later and couldn’t do it. Her mind said she could do it and she did it.”

So in the next few weeks the Palace players will be having their brains worked on, through methods such as self and team-evaluation and visualisation techniques.

And Harbin is also big on man management. “I’m very much a players’ man,” he admitted. And that’s good news for the players at Palace. They will be keeping diaries to record what’s happening in their personal life, so management can quickly find out why they may be not performing as well as usual.

The method certainly helped at Oldham.

Harbin explained: “They contain hints on their nutrition and weights programme, evaluation sheets from games, and a day-to-day feelings sheet so we know exactly how they feel.

“The latter helps us understand why a player’s not performing well. If we find out that he’s been up all night with his kid whose been in hospital then there’s a reason. Rather than give him a flogging because we think he’s a bit lazy, we’ve got to look at the reasons.

“At Oldham there was a player not training as well as he normally does. We looked in his diary and he had just had two wisdom teeth pulled so we sent him home for two days. If we didn’t know the facts we could’ve made it worse for him so it’s getting to know the nitty gritty.

"If the wife’s pregnant or you’ve been at work and she’s bumped the car we want to know that. There’ll always be some smarty that’ll invent some reasons and in the end they get caught anyway.

"The worst thing a player can do is be dishonest, as he will get a flogging.”

The diary may have been a success at Oldham, but there are a couple of exercises from his Wakefield days that Harbin won’t be trying again.

“During pre-season I sent the lads on an orienteering course and lost five players. It took us about five hours to get them back and to make it worse, one of them was the captain!”

Harbin also had a brush with the authorities.

“I got into serious trouble with the local council, and I’ve still got the letters to prove it.

“It was in the middle of winter and we were doing this obstacle course around this lake.

“Four of the players had cheated on it so I made them swim across the lake, not realising some of them couldn’t swim or the fact you weren’t allowed to swim in the lake. There were signs everywhere which I hadn’t seen.

“There were big problems over that. The council wrote letters to the club and so on. Those are two of the more bizarre things that didn’t work and I won’t be trying them again!”