Successful half-time team talks can be stirring oration or veiled threat

Hugh Macdonald

Chief Sports Writer

Saturday 25 February 2012

KNOW your audience.

Lee Marvin tells his audience they have nothing on Big Norrie's boys. Picture: Channel 5

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Hugh MacDonald

The patrons of the moving picture, The Artist, were treated this week in a Glasgow film house to a trailer graphically describing the dangers of carrying a knife.

A sly peek at my fellow audience members revealed the sort of douce gathering that one would expect at the showing of a silent film in black and white on a Tuesday night. That is, the sort of person who has only wielded a knife in anger to remove a stubborn piece of detritus from a fresh aubergine.

The other trailer struck nearer the mark, painfully so. It was a promotion for Titanic 3D, or my career as I prefer to call it. Mind you, the only time the bourgeoisie at The Artist would don dark glasses would be on the shores of Sardinia or the slopes of Davos.Know your audience. It should be the motto of every harassed manager as he attempts to motivate a team at half-time. Apparently, Didier Drogba, the Chelsea striker, stepped into the role last weekend, giving the interval pep talk in place of AVB (an apparently virulent condition that causes paralysis in footballers earning north of £100,000 grand a week but, perversely, invigorates a team like Porto, lifting them to ecstatic highs).Drogba's intervention has been officially denied so is therefore true. He apparently told all the players it was time to take a stand, except if they felt contact and they should go to ground immediately.It is unlikely that Didier's message would challenge the best of the half-time talks. These range from the unbelievably calm to the extraordinarily impassioned. Neil Lennon – his side 3-0 down at Kilmarnock in November – apparently told his players simply to score a goal and then take advantage of any lack of belief in their opponents. It worked and Mr Lennon now stands on the brink of being a title-winning manager.Alex Ferguson, watching his Manchester United side struggle against Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, told his players that they would walk past the cup to regain the field. Did they want that to be the nearest they would ever be to the greatest piece of silverware in club football? Fifty minutes later his players were passing the trophy around as if it was party-time at the local creche and the music was never going to stop.And then there was Big Norrie. He was in charge of a team – 11 combatants, sorry players, and one reinforcement, sorry, substitute – that was known as the Dirty Dozen. They earned their nickname because they were tough. And never took a shower. They had also committed more crimes than the Dirty Dozen of film fame. They had, indeed, committed more crimes than the Five Families in New York. They played with the strength of their previous convictions. Of a Saturday, they – and occasionally I – attempted, with a pleasing success rate, to win football matches in an amateur league that was so physical it made the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan seem like a romantic comedy.Occasionally, the team would be in deficit at half-time. There followed a scene of such power that I still tremble at the very memory. We did not have half-time oranges. In those days, the mandatory five a day referred to alcoholic units. So we gathered round, slugging water from plastic canisters that once contained anti-freeze, and listened to Big Norrie.He was a man of fierce intelligence and even fiercer physical attributes. He was as hard as a diamond left at the back of a fridge. In terms of fighting, he could only be incapacitated by a nuclear strike and, even then, he would come looking for his assailant after the briefest of visits to accident and emergency.His half-time message on days of deficit was simple, unchanging. Scanning a dressing-room that was so dank and foul it made the black hole of Calcutta seem like a Belgravia mansion, he would intone: "Don't come back in here if you have not won."He knew his audience. If, on some day in the late 1970s, you witnessed 11 guys, studs clinking on pavement, wandering about in St Ninians, Stirling, then you would know the score.

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Successful half-time team talks can be stirring oration or veiled threat

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