25. WHEN SATURDAY’S GONE By Jonaldo

TRACKING DEVICES

In my role as a senior footballer with a media presence I am deemed to be considered an influencer and in such capacity receive goods of specific interest to players of an advanced age to review, as it were.

I would describe myself as a bit of a fox in the box on the pitch, but as far as sales pitches are concerned you can rest assured. I will give it to you straight, no deviousness or cunning deployed from my quarter.

Thus, I will tell you now. I was sent a performance tracking device to review. I will not name the brand for I have little good to say about it in terms of its value to the senior player. In fact, my advice is to stay well clear.

We are all aware how the professional game has been saturated with these devices. They keep track of many of the athletic facets involved in an individual performance, data being relayed instantly to an app, where on the touchline the manager and coaching staff can see if one of their charges is running out of steam and substitute them for fresher legs. This is all very well in pro soccer and I would endorse this use of modern technology. As it’s kept and used solely in the club.

However, for senior players it’s of no benefit whatsoever. Indeed, it’s a bloody hindrance. You see, there’s no coaching staff on the touchline but it’s still linked up to an app gathering data on one’s performance. The devices go home with the owner in our cases and don’t stay safely locked away in some multimillion pound high performance centre. And at home the WAGs soon cotton on to the tremendous benefits to them of utilizing this data, and encourage the poor player to wear the device during unrelated activities it wasn’t designed for.

If, like me, when assembling flat pack furniture you like to tackle it with some gusto in the early stages so that the skeleton of the object emerges enabling one to then take very easy, thereafter, in fleshing the thing out, the tracking device is a bar steward. For no sooner has one deservedly eased off on the throttle than one’s other half is alerted  and appears with the data at their fingertips providing unequivocal proof that one is flagging.

This process can be applied to a lot of domestic encounters and woe betide the senior footballer who seeks to play away, for if he forgets to discard the vest containing the tracker in his haste to indulge his WAG will not only have evidence of his transgression but also specific information relating to his heart rate, maximum speed and distance covered during the encounter.

Back to using it for football, the literature accompanying the tracker claims that it provides a detailed analysis of one’s performance. I can assure everyone, from past experience, being a striker I receive a very detailed analysis of my performance in the pub after every match free of charge from my fellow players. That is a detailed analysis of anything I did wrong. Goals I score do not receive this microscopic treatment, unless the effort was flukey. This is all I need, as surely the reason for tracking is to highlight the aspects of one’s play that can be improved and I am made very aware of them. Although, I am the player who gets the most stick by quite a margin. No doubt fuelled by my ethos of giving it back in bucket loads by broadcasting my own achievements when I do well.

The obvious reason I will not endorse this product for the senior player is because a lot of what we do falls under the banner of ‘Walking Football’, albeit ours is a hybrid version with very fast walking. If one player starts wearing these tracking devices with instant analytics pinged to an app then the call will go out for everyone to be thus kitted. There would then be less reliance on a referee to blow up for anyone considered to be running, but at the expense of each time a goal is scored then having to delay celebrations while the data is collected and checked to make sure nobody on the scoring side was traveling at a speed of more than 6 mph. It would be our version of VAR.

The only plus side I can see is with the use of the tight vest that carries the tracker. This will be of benefit to older players particularly those who have recently suffered from chest infections. Indeed any inflammation or ailment affecting the chest. As it adds a layer of warmth.

However, that being said, I would only recommend the senior player use it solely for matches. Wearing the device would be a disadvantage off the pitch for the reasons aforementioned, plus one could become too accustomed to sporting it while suffering from the chest ailment and it impose itself unfavourably in other facets of one’s life. I am thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson who suffered badly with consumption which took his life in very early middle age. Had he adorned one it would’ve impacted adversely upon his great literary output. I cannot imagine Long John Silver from his classic tale Treasure Island being quite so memorably menacing if he was described as having a parrot on his shoulder, a wooden prosthetic leg, a bottle of rum in his pocket and a GPS tracker.