With an unprecedented three-peat of league titles, alongside winning trophies with four different teams, Gavin Hunt shares his blueprint to lifting the league title from his trophy-laden career.
Form is temporary, class is permanent...
I believe it was Brian Clough who termed that phrase.
Those words are fitting as despite a bit of a rollercoaster season where my SuperSport United side have blown hot and cold alongside being blighted by injuries, I’ve won three titles on the bounce during my first spell with the club.
I’ve also lifted trophies with almost all of the teams I’ve coached and I’ve guided teams to lofty positions that they’ve never been before and never replicated since.
I’m also the only coach to disrupt the current juggernaut known as Mamelodi Sundowns, with my Bidvest Wits side in the 2016/17 season.
To have achieved this, I must have learned something in over 35 years of being involved in football on how to lift trophies.
So, here’s my blueprint on how to win the league titile!
Goalkeeper – A shot-stopper’s first job is keeping the ball out the net
I like an old fashioned goalkeeper. In setting the modern trend, Pep Guardiola ruthlessly ostracised Joe Hart from his Man City team who he felt was not good enough to play from out the back and brought in a replacement in the Brazilian Ederson.
Personally, I still prefer the old-style goalkeepers when building a team, who doesn’t have to be too good with his feet, as we’ll try and improve him in that department.
The boxes though a goalkeeper needs to tick is:
Is he a good cross taker?
Is he brave?
Is he a good shot-stopper?
Is he good with his angles?
Is he quick off his line?
You know, those type of things. I still look for in an old-style goalkeeper.
I always say, if you give me R100 million, would I want to buy a striker or would I buy a goalkeeper?
I’d rather buy a goalkeeper because I know a keeper can save me 15 points.
Whereas the striker is maybe not going to give me 15 goals. So let me rather get a good goalkeeper.
Watch the full below below:
Fullbacks – A defender who defends first
Everybody looks for attacking overlapping fullbacks these days. I like proper defenders who are good one v one players and good passers of the ball.
I always say, people talk about number 10s as the position in your team who is your playmaker, but your playmakers are actually… your fullbacks.
Generally they are the ones to receive your first ball out the back. Then it’s a question of what do they do with it.
They need to be good passers of the ball, can they see a pass whether long or short and they need to have different techniques of passing.
Inside of the foot, laces, and bending passes, or straight driving passes. So the technique of your fullbacks is important, but they must remain good one on one defenders with a little bit of aerial power to help you defend your box in set plays and of course maybe one of them can help you in attacking set-plays.
Centre-backs – You need proper defenders who can dominate
Trust me, you’ll do better as a team in the long run if you have better quality defenders.
Yes, they need to be good passers of the ball, but they need to be able to play on the halfway line.
Now, you can have good defenders who can play in front of your box, but what is crucial is you’ve got to have good defenders who can play with the space in front of you… and importantly, play with the space behind you.
So, let me give you an example.
What made the difference in Liverpool winning the league? Virgil Van Dijk.
I don’t care what anybody nowadays says, there’s been a move away from that where you want technically good players to play out the back. Okay maybe one of them, but then at least one of them needs to be able to at least defend properly.
But for me, first prize is aerial power. Can we dominate? Because your defenders are going to have to help you in your box and in the opposition’s box.
So that’s what you need to look for!
Centre-midfielders – It’s all about balance
People understandably admire ball-playing players. But, if you’ve got two good ball playing centre midfield players, well, when you’re under pressure, they’re not going to really help you that much.
So, what do you look for?
I don’t go looking separately for a defensive midfield player, and then for an attacking midfield player. I look for people who can do both!
Those who can go box-to-box.
I always say, in your centre midfield player, you need to have somebody that can play in a two-man midfield before they play in a three.
Because, if you get somebody who plays in the three, that’s easy as you cheat a little bit in there.
But can they play in the two though, with all that space you have to cover. Bursting forward, moving laterally… you need legs, you need most importantly power.
I like somebody who can play in the two.
Obviously, if you can get a left-footed player and right-footed player, it’s like with centre backs, then you’ve got nice balance. But, that’s almost always impossible to find.
Then, can they pass? Do they have a wide range of passing, short and long range, while making the right pass at the right moment.
The biggest thing we don’t have in South Africa is that we don’t have goals from centre midfield.
We don’t get enough goals because they don’t get close enough to the goal and obviously they all look to play short, short, short, short, short. But, can they switch it, can they play in behind people, you know, and there are various techniques of passing as well.
They obviously also need to also have the right character with toughness and mental toughness.
Wingers – If they don’t score, don’t assist… what are they doing?
On the sides, again I’m a little bit old school, I like wingers who still like to play on their natural side, right and left, where everything is a bit inverted these days.
When you play invertedly that means you might have more chance of scoring by shooting but I still like to play with natural width because then you can have a chance of a cross or a chance of getting the ball on your back foot on the touchline side.
You’ll generally find if you play invertedly, you’re having a touch on the inside of the line, and you’re eliminating one part of the field.
If you’ve got a good fullback against the inverted players, you can push them to the touchline side. If you’re a fullback playing against an inverted guy, it’s easy because you can shut him off his angles.
If your wingers are also not scoring five to six goals a season and their assists are not big, what do they do?
There are many wingers in South Africa where they don’t score, they don’t assist, but they dribble, and they make a little movement and people say, Oh, fantastic!
But it’s not effective.
Strikers – It’s all about goals
Well with strikers, you know people have moved away from the double striker system.
Why?… Fashion?
They want an extra player in midfield.
Now with the good old 4-4-2 system, yeah you might get overrun in midfield but I still prefer a striker as a 10 over a midfield player as a 10.
Why? More chance of scoring goals.
So what type of striker, as a 10, would I like, the type like Dennis Bergkamp is the perfect prototype.
When you build teams, you need to have an idea, but you can’t just put square pegs in round holes.
So, you can’t sort of say well I want to play like this, and I’m going to try and make this player do this, but he’s unable to.
So sometimes I have to play with an extra midfield player, because you don’t have that striker at 10. Or I’ve got wingers who don’t track back and tuck in and help you defensively, so you’ll play more 4-3-3, leave them a little bit wider.
When you build a team, it’s like centre-backs. Can you trust them to play in a two?
I don’t know, sometimes you have to play them in a three-man attack, they’re then better.
Going through your team. With full-backs, are they better as wing-backs or are they better as full-backs? You can only change that if you’ve got money, then you can say I don’t want him, so I’m going to buy someone else.
But if you haven’t got the financial clout you’ve got to make a plan to try and get a result. But people don’t understand that, and then when you lose a player because you sell him, you’re struggling.
Winning football – It’s about making the right decision at the right time
Winning football is about the result at the end of the day.
I think winning football is effectively playing the right pass at the right time with the right speed into the right place.
So what does that mean? Does that mean we play from out the back? Yes, then again does it mean we play out the back… no!
Does it mean we play square balls into centre-midfield? No, does it then mean we play square balls in the next passage of play, yes.
That’s winning football, I think what you need to do is, how do you sustain pressure, how do you maintain pressure and how do you keep the opposition as far away from your goals as possible.
How do you do that?
You need a little bit of game intelligence, and there’s a few rules I’ll always put into place. But nothing to the effect of what I’ve just mentioned to instruct players to don’t put the ball in there or don’t play the ball in there…
Play the intelligent ball, play the right ball, like for instance, if you’re the centre-back and you play the ball into the centre-mid and he’s getting pressed. Is that the right ball to play?
No, so why’d you play the ball. I think the biggest thing is football intelligence, that’s winning football.
Team spirit – Paintball shooting doesn’t create team spirit
Don’t let anyone ever tell you that we’ve got a great team spirit here.
They haven’t won in five games, do you think that team has great spirit? Winning creates spirit and a good feeling. But the problem is it ends, and it has to start the next game, and the next game.
So that’s why it doesn’t come from the coach, yes you set an atmosphere in the place but it has to be created from inside the team.
The players have go to drive the culture of the team. Once you lose that, then you’ll have a problem.
You need to create a culture with people who care, with players who doesn’t use the word but.
There are two words in football, but and care. If a player says but then you’ve got a problem. There are no buts, and care meaning they care about making the run, do they care about tracking back, do they care about pressing, do they care about those things.
That gets driven from internal team ethics of that spine or care in that group then you’ll have a good group.
So you can do all this paintball shooting, mountain climbing team buildings, it doesn’t create a winning culture. Winning is about – realising you are not going to win all the time – but getting as close as possible to, to then give you that burning desire to go again and say can we get it, then once you finally do, the team flows.
