Italy and USA, football and basketball, national team (Euro) and inter-club (NBA), two different countries and two different sports in different types of competitions. Are there similarities between them in terms of mentality and culture? And if not nationally, at the level of how each team operates?
The failures of the recent past have hurt both of these teams, as they have failed to live up to the expectations set inside and outside the teams. For the Italian national team, it was the failure to qualify for the groups of the 2018 World Cup, which was considered catastrophic inside and outside the country. For the Bucks, it was a failure to achieve something really great in the playoffs of the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 seasons, despite their excellent performance in the respective regular seasons.
But it is well known that failures perform other positive functions: they “sculpt” characters, increase the motivation for success in the future, “build” mental resilience, mature people. The key factor, which determines the success of the merging of all the “crushed pieces” after the failure and conquest of these positive functions is to ensure and strengthen the cohesion of each team. And in this purpose, everyone plays a significant role and puts their little stone: the administration, the head coach and the entire coaching staff, each athlete individually and all together, the rest of the team staff. In order for all of them to recover, they do not focus on the past, they just learn from it and move forward with a warm atmosphere within the team in the future.
Starting with the NBA and the Milwaukee Bucks, each athlete individually and all together continued to work after the failures. They kept constant their routines individually and all together before, during, and after the races. At the end of each playoff match, an athlete wrote with a marker on the locker room table in front of everyone the number of matches remaining until the championship was won. Clear goal setting to keep team concentration constant. After winning the championship, Khris Middleton was asked to comment on the mental characteristics that prompted the Milwaukee Bucks team to reverse the development in the two series of playoffs with the Brooklyn Nets and the Phoenix Suns, where they were losing 0-2 in the first games of each series: “We lost 0-2 in the series and all we did was get closer to each other. Some groups are divided, blaming each other. “None of us ever left the other.” Thanasis Antetokounbo, without having a leading role in the course of this team within the four lines, is praised or praised by many for the huge reserves of positive energy and help he had to all the members of the Bucks throughout the course of the team.
Giannis Antetokounbo, who inevitably stimulates our interest more, works a lot in the intellectual part as well. In the middle of the 2019-2020 season, when he was named MVP of the regular season for the second consecutive year, he refused or rather did not settle for this kind of recognition, typically saying: “Do not call me MVP, until I’m a champion”. His motivation and focus have always been high and as it seems, he devotes a lot of time, effort so that it is not enough to achieve a simpler one, but he also pursues the most difficult goal. He worked and still works hard on his weaknesses. In a predominantly psychological process, the execution of the free throw, follows a strict and often annoying routine for the opponents, without always increasing the degree of accuracy of the shots. However, as he characteristically stated after the fifth match of the finals: “I just missed. I live with this because I followed my routine and I failed”. Result in his last match where he was crowned champion? 17/19 accurate shots in the last game with the Suns.
Continue with the Italian national football team. A team that was rebuilt after the failure of 2018 and the new coaching staff changed both the competitive and the spiritual approach of the team. The first coach Roberto Mancini chose as his assistant his 57-year-old good friend and old teammate Gianluca Vialli, who became a central figure in terms of imagination and symbolism within the team, with his long and so far victorious battle with cancer. An inaccessible part of the team routines, at the beginning of the team’s route by bus for each race, boarded after a few meters in the middle of apotheosis. middle of apotheosis. He gave well-thought-out and targeted speeches to the team’s athletes, such as at the joint dinner on the eve of the final with England, where he read an excerpt from a lecture by Theodore Roosevelt from 1910, which referred to the late reputation of the brave and persistent fighter. After winning the Euro, he was mentioned by many, including Alessandro Florenzi: “Every day he shows us how beautiful life is. I want to tell him that he is special to us,” he said, among other things, to flatter him.
Looking for other invisible heroes in the rich Italian national team, we can not miss Daniele de Rossi, world champion as a footballer in 2006 and caretaker of the 2021 team: “I put myself at the disposal of the national team and I was the last to join the technical team so I had to do the ‘dirty’ work. I was the one carrying the balls and the cones and picking up the vests but I don’t think it was anything special. Nobody treated me like I was the last. I’m glad I was part of this adventure. ” The experienced Salvatore Sirigu, 34 years old with the role of the third goalkeeper, supported with technical advice but also to strengthen the self-confidence of the 22-year-old protagonist goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, who praised the help provided by his senior.
In conclusion, let us never forget that many times at the top level the success of a game (winning a championship) is not far from the failure of a game (not winning a championship): a shot where the ball did not enter the hoop for centimeters or even millimeters, a crossbar in which the ball hit and for a millimeter did not enter, a penalty, an injury, a questionable refereeing decision. Certainly, if these two teams had not been declared champions, we would not have dealt with them so thoroughly. As we may not have dealt with other groups-models of organization and maintenance of cohesion, which for some reason or detail did not conquer the top. But is racing success or failure worth overshadowing and distracting our attention from these psychological parameters?
Vasilis Xernos
Psychologist-Sports Psychologist-Psychotherapist