Peter Corrigan: Gerard v Gerrard: a dangerous mind-field

Exploring the labyrinths of top sportsmen's minds is rarely a rewarding exercise. Most of them have no more idea of what makes them good at a particular sport than the rest of us have about what makes us so useless at it.

Neither are they much good at explaining why they go through bad spells. They probably couldn't offer any plausible reason for their purple patches, either, but no one ever asks them to analyse those. The best managers and coaches have an instinctive feel for what makes their charges function at or near their peak but even they are often bewildered by sudden twists and turns of form.

It all assists the prospects of sports psychologists, a growing presence in most games, and provides hours of endless analysis by their amateur counterparts in the media, in the stands and in the pubs.

There was already plenty of material available from Australia where England's cricketers are providing, almost on a daily basis, a stream of intriguing evidence of mental shortcomings.

There are mysteries nearer to home, too, and the most remarkable was shared with us last week by the Liverpool manager, Gérard Houllier, who went public with an outburst of criticism at his 22-year-old England midfield star, Steven Gerrard. It is no secret that Gerrard has not been at his best, but these matters are usually handled in-house. The manager does his best to protect the player with excuses while they work frantically behind the scenes to search for a remedy.

Houllier had obviously tired of that method and calculated that a short, sharp shock in the open would jerk the boy back to his best. It is psychology at its rawest, because the manager believes that part of Gerrard's problem is that he has too high an opinion of himself.

And where did he get this inflated notion? From the newspapers, of course. Houllier said: "Once a player starts to believe everything that is written about himself and thinks 'I am king of the world', then there is difficulty and danger." So, presumably, when Gerrard read all the criticism Houllier blasted out via the popular press he would think that he was a bad player and immediately start trying harder. I doubt if this approach was run past Freud first. Furthermore, if Gerrard has to look in the newspapers to see how he's playing, he might not be worth saving anyhow.

Houllier, it must be remembered, was speaking in the wake of Liverpool's 3-3 draw with Basle on Tuesday and their subsequent exit from the Champions' League which could have cost the club £10m. While it is true that Gerrard displayed neither the ability nor the willingness of which we know him to be capable, the team's performance as a whole in the first half when Basle claimed a 3-0 lead was poor. The tactics weren't too hot, either.

Indeed, if Gerrard feels narked that he has been publicly denounced as chief can-carrier for the failure, he may retreat further into the shell upon which Houllier is rapping so loudly.

Young stars who attain so much so quickly are not so much of a rarity that anyone should be unaware of what traps and temptations can assail their mentality. It's all part of the maturity-acquisition process players must go through and I would have thought it is part of the manager's job to ensure the passage is smooth.

But these things happen at all stages of adulthood, as we saw at Twickenham last week when Clive Woodward dropped Lawrence Dallaglio for yesterday's game against Australia. It wouldn't have been an easy decision for Dallaglio was due to win his 50th cap and has spent a long time fighting his way back from serious injuries but Woodward thought the player "did not hit the standard we expect".

Dallaglio agreed that he'd had a quiet game and vowed to come back stronger. I'm sure that beneath that polite exchange many sharper emotions seethed, but the message was sparklingly clear. Perhaps Gerrard would have benefited more from that sort of scenario.

I doubt if either of them would change positions with any English cricketer in Adelaide this week but we are talking about a different game altogether. Cricket is a team sport, but the individual pressures are far more onerous.

A few observers have hinted that a lack of courage may be contributing to the downfalls but this is nonsense. No one prepared to face rampant fast bowling for a living deserves to have his courage questioned. But as they all possess, or have previously shown they possess, the requisite skill it must be a problem of the mind, a lack of the mental stamina necessary to endure the pressures of an Ashes series in Australia. The solution to that can be found nowhere but in the middle of the action. You can only make steel in a furnace. The Aussies have provided the furnace and our only hope is that the hardening takes place bloody quickly.

Whatever happens down under, the toughest and most grimly hostile mind game of the year was the pre-World Cup showdown between Republic of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy and his captain Roy Keane. The clash eventually cost McCarthy his job and led also to the resignation of Brendon Menton, general secretary of the Football Association of Ireland, 10 days ago following the conclusions reached in an exhaustive review of Ireland's World Cup preparations.

Far too detailed to be delved into deeply here, it offers the clearest and most objective view yet of the damaging confrontation, the potential for which, it says, had been visible since 1991. No one from the FAI took responsibility for avoiding the inevitable clash between "two extremely powerful individuals with strong personalities and neither willing to recognise the other's need". They were incapable of achieving a solution on their own.

This was not the only criticism of the FAI in the review, which is a brutally frank and creative document. What it creates most of all is a sorrow that it wasn't commissioned a year ago. The bitterness might have been avoided and Ireland could be getting full satisfaction from what was a very good World Cup performance.

I can think of many sporting organisations of lesser accomplishment who could benefit from such an investigation in their quest for strong and enlightened leadership.

Piqued by the pampering

Having taken the side of the Football Association during their recent power- battles with the Premiership clubs, I was horrified to read the plans for this week's England get-together at an up-market health resort.

The England party will number 80 players and staff and their wives or partners and apart from all the free treatments, therapies, beauty sessions and hair-dos on offer there will also be a visit to the Queen at Buckingham Palace and a dinner at a top London restaurant.

Has anything happened that I failed to notice? Did England win the World Cup? Have they won anything? After their shoddy performance against Macedonia last month I would have expected them to spend a couple of days breaking rocks in Dartmoor rather than being cossetted and pampered at great expense (£150,000 at the last estimate).

My defence of the FA was based on their duty and entitlement to govern all levels of football and to raise money to do this as well as nurturing the grass roots. This pointless profligacy plays right into the hands of the clubs who want to wrest power from them.

A long line of English managers fought hard to establish the right to gather the international squad occasionally for training and fitness sessions and tactical discussions. And after the Macedonia let-down I would have thought that Sven Goran Eriksson would have welcomed the opportunity to point out where they went wrong using video recordings to support his opinions and, preferably, in surroundings spartan enough to remind them that representing your country is a serious business, not show business.