Mason Mount, graft, craft and vision
Ron Greenwood used to tell his West Ham United players about having “pictures in your head” of where everyone was around you. He’d stop training, tell the likes of Trevor Brooking to close their eyes and ask them where everyone was, friend or foe. Greenwood challenged them always to have an awareness of who was on for a pass, and who was closely marked, so they wouldn’t hesitate in their decision-making and execution.
The Norwegian School of Sport Sciences took this a stage further two years and equipped players in a local league with special glasses that recorded their “gaze”, as they called it, and the speed of their eye movement. Norway’s most elite two players, Erling Haaland and Martin Odegaard, were not involved in the experiment but their “scanning” was assessed from video. Their constant checking of where the ball was, and where opponents were, was off the scale, unsurprisingly. Vision matters.
Manchester United even employed a vision coach, Professor Gail Stephenson from the University of Liverpool, under Sir Alex Ferguson to strengthen his players’ eye muscles. As a defender over on the right, Gary Neville’s left eye was stronger because it had more of the field to focus on. It was worked more. He explained it to me once and it was fascinating, although I had to go through my notes a couple of times afterwards to understand fully. During the warm-up, Neville would focus on an individual blade of grass a yard away, train one eye on it, and then the other, preparing his vision as he would stretch his hamstrings, calves etc. It’s marginal gains and more. United even wore black armbands during a pre-season game in 2015 when Stephenson passed away. She was that highly regarded.
And so to the current United. They had that rare joy of Mason Mount starting for them in the Europa League against Bodø/Glimt last night. Mount didn’t score, he didn’t make an assist, but made a good impression on United fans with his reading of the game. He had the “pictures” in his head of where Bruno Fernandes, Manuel Ugarte, Antony, Alejandro Garnacho and Rasmus Hojlund were.