Jamie Hamilton on embracing chaos
Referencing: Jamie Hamilton: Time to break free of positionism
Jamie Hamilton on the Training Ground Guru Podcast discussing the differences in embracing chaos between positionism and relationism:
[…] Again, people might be familiar with Jonathan Wilson’s book Inverting the Pyramid, which I suppose would be like the canonical English language account of tactical history.
And the very first opening lines or opening paragraph of Inverting the Pyramid, I’ll paraphrase it, I probably can’t do it exactly. But it’s in the beginning, there was chaos. And the process of tactical thought and coaching theory has been a march towards instantiation of order certainty onto that chaos to try and make the game more organized, more understandable, more clear.
And that movement from chaos to order has come in many different guises and phases could be defensive, could be attacking in many different ways. But yeah, Guardiola again, and many coaches like Guardiola or that follow this school of thought are quite explicit when they talk about chaos being a kind of negative thing. So this is a very important distinction to understand from this more positional mindset or philosophical attitude is that chaos, uncertainty, radical volatility, they are inherently negative in their quality.
So we want to try and have less of that and more of the order that we have a familiarity with and that can then help us and the players to know where they are, to orient themselves and then to execute certain actions within those understandings very quickly and efficiently. So yeah, this is a very important distinction. Relationism, which I would say have a more of a natural tendency towards, just even on a human level.
I think that’s probably why it’s resonated with a lot of people, although there are obviously game theory reasons too. I tend to have a proclivity towards a little bit more chaos, right? I don’t necessarily see that as inherently negative.
Of course, it can be, it can lead to incoherence and things falling apart and all the rest of it, but it’s also very important that systems have an aspect of chaos within them to allow new things to emerge because if things become too static and too ordered, we get a very stagnant, let’s say, landscape, which doesn’t really help the emergence of new things. This concept of chaos and order, very interesting for this.
I’m pro chaos, I don’t believe it’s negative if the team knows how to use it as a tool against the opponent.
When do we ever talk about football history? When do we ever challenge coaches to learn really go deep on football history? If you’re a film director or music producer, probably you’re going to know about the history of films, probably you’re going to know about the history of music or arts.
I think in football, we have set up a real big blind spot. We think it’s some kind of like inferior stuff that is just like overly simplistic, and we’ve moved beyond it now. We don’t need to worry about it.
If you go back and watch The Hungry, the destroyed England at Wembley in 1953, you’ll find some very interesting things. Watch the total football of Johann Cruyff. Don’t just read a book about it.
Watch the games. You’ll see some very interesting things. Watch Columbia of 1990, or even now, watch Malmo over the last couple of years under Henrik Rydström, two-time Swedish champions.
Watch Racing Santander, who currently top of the Spanish Second Division. I’ve mentioned Mjálbj, who already won the Swedish Premier League. The Argentinian national team, another one.
Columbus Crew under Wilfred Nansi. Very interesting team. But this is what I’m getting.
