World Cup: how will Robert Green recover?
Updated on 13 June 2010
England's goalkeeper Robert Green has been heavily criticised following that calamitous blunder during the team's opening match at the World Cup. Matthew Syed and Michael Fish offer some advice.
Times journalist and fomer champion table tennis player Matthew Syed, the author of Bounce which investigates the psychology of sporting achievement and failure, told Channel 4 News: "The real problem is that if Green becomes infected with self doubt, that is the thing that is most calamitous to a top sportsman.
"So what he needs to do is use the expression that you've heard quite a lot from top sportsmen and women - take the positives, ignore the howler, pretend to himself almost that it didn't happen and focus on the tiny specs of optimism.
"It's a kind of useful form of self-delusion and I think all top sportsmen and performers have the capacity to do it.
"In goalkeeping perhaps more than in any other part of sport you see this capacity for humiliation. The real key for Green is that he gets another opportunity, because the worst of all would be if he has no opportunity for redemption and he has to live in a kind of purgatory of self recrimination.
"Capello in the press conference yesterday said something that will seem utterly surreal to most of us. He said Green had a good game. That was just pure kid-ology.
"What he's attempting to do is to bolster the self confidence of somebody who has experienced a humiliation. What Green has to do is in response to Capello, demonstrate this pragmatism, this psychological pragmatism, not allow himself to do what would be, actually, quite rational and to become plagued by doubt.
"He's got to stay focused and he's got to stay positive."
Make money
Veteran weather forecaster Michael
Fish is still famous for one apparent spectacular mistake, when he
reassured viewers the day before the 1987 great storm that no hurricane was on
its way. "Make the boo boo make money," he told Channel 4
News.
"It was extremely galling at the time getting this, sort of, nasty thing and it was nothing to do with you. But then you roll the camera forward, as it were, 20 years and I retire from the Met Office, no red tape, no rules. And all of a sudden I thought 'this is a good thing, you know, I can go out and make some money'.
"I can do after dinner speaking, I can do voiceovers and adverts, and in the end - I had to wait 20 years for it - it turned out to be a good thing, but at the time, of course, it was absolute murder really.
"Put it behind you, laugh it off and go out and make a new life for yourself.
"I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of a poor old goalkeeper who let a ball in like that, but he'll recover and then in the years to come when you're not playing football any more, make the boo boo make money for yourself."
