YET MORE WIT & WISDOM FROM AROUND THE WORLD
ON COACHING
I never predict anything except that we’ll play tough on Sunday. If you don’t predict too much you don’t have to take anything back.
Jack Gibson
I left because of illness and fatigue – the fans were sick and tired of me.
John Ralston
A successful coach is one who is still coaching. Coaching is the only profession that, as you get older most people think you get dumber. All a coach has to do is to keep the reserve team happy. The first team is happy because they’re in the first team. They sacked me as nicely as they could. One of the nicest sackings I’ve had.
Tommy Docherty
ON REFEREES
Our job is the only one where you have to start out perfectly and get better each time. For refereeing is the only occupation in the world where the highest accolade is silence. I think he must have an egg timer there because every four minutes he blows the whistle. His limitations are limitless. I occasionally get birthday cards from fans but it’s usually the same message – they hope it’s your last! It’s not the referee’s fault, it’s our fault. Through a hundred years of adding rules we’ve got too many of them. We need to get rid of some of the rules and let the players play football.
ON FANS
If people don’t want to go to football anymore how are we going to stop them? I told the players it was our job to win the fans back, it wasn’t the fans job to come back to us.
Tom Landry
I told the team it’s not the fans job to cheer. It’s our job as a team to make the fans cheer. The fans are a test of your character and how you perform, so if they boo you, there is probably something wrong – and it’s justified.
Tom Landry
The fans pay their way and they have a certain proprietorship over us. If they want to boo us that’s fine and if they want to cheer that’s their prerogative. A man in an eight-to-five job has to control himself, or get fired or hated. But when that man goes to the football game he couldn’t care less. He yells and screams and boos and cries. The whole crowd gets to live vicariously through us.
ON COMMITTEES AND DIRECTORS
I have never tried to win friends on committees. You know you can never please them all, so don’t bother trying.
Jack Gibson
Those sausage-roll eaters. I was on the general committee down there and it was like the Keystone Cops.
Referring to the N.S.W. General Committee
The abandonment of the old 42 man committee that sat every second Monday was a plus. The tucker bill alone was a big save.
N.S.W. again!
Behind every fired football coach stands a club president. The secret of managing a club is keeping the five guys who hate you away from the five guys who haven’t made up their minds. The ideal Board of Directors should be made up of three men – two dead and the other dying.
Tommy Docherty
AND FINALLY….
Pay no attention to what the critics say, no statue has ever been put up to a critic.
Sibelius
[With thanks to ‘The Jack Gibson Collection’]
