Why is Arsene Wenger so obsessed with head checks

Why is Arsene Wenger so obsessed with head checks

In our last article, we wrote about individual tactics and the three steps individual tactics consist of 1. Perception, 2. Decision and 3. Execution.  

What is perception? 

We found out that every situation a player is involved in, in a match starts with the perception of the situation. The perception of a situation is the identification, organization, and interpretation of the information that’s presented to us. A human gets information presented through their senses, there are five senses in a human. The five senses a human body has are vision, sound, touch, smell, and taste. On a football pitch, we mainly use three senses to get useful information for football situations, vision, sound, and touch. The most used one is vision, we get information through our vision and form a perception of the situation.  Another sense we use in a game is sound. A lot of coaches always talk about the importance of communication. For example, giving the player in front of you directions about which passing lane he needs to cover. The third sense is touch, for example by touching your opponent you know where he is if he’s balanced and which way he’s moving. 

The dominant sense in humans is vision, which means we collect most of our information through our eyes. This is no different for a football player. That’s why we think there should be put a lot of emphasis on forming the right perception through vision. Both other senses we use are indirectly or combined with vision. When you get information through the sound of another player it’s his vision that gets the information and processes it. In a way, you can say this is second-hand information. First of all, because there’s a delay in the information, because it needs to go through the other player’s brain first and then to you, second because it’s your teammate’s decision, so trusting him plays a big role in this and third the opponent can fake being a teammate. The sense of touch is often combined with vision. You see a player and you decided to use your body against him, for example giving him a little push to disrupt his movement. So now we know that vision is the most important sense to form a perception of the situation. 

 

 

How do we form the right perception through vision? 

We all know that the human eyes are in the front of the head. Thus it’s not possible to see what’s happening behind you, without turning your head and/or body. The limits of human vision are around 200-220 degrees horizontally (to the sides) and around 130-135 degrees vertically (up and down). This makes up the visual field of a human.

 

 

 

The visual field of a human is split into two categories, direct vision, and indirect vision. Direct vision is also known as the point of fixation, where the eye focuses directly and indirect vision is known as peripheral vision, which makes up everything else outside of where the eye focuses on, you can describe this as the corner of one’s eye. 

Both are important in getting information and forming a perception of a situation. The information we get through our direct vision is most detailed, the information through our indirect vision is less detailed and thus less reliable to form a perception on, but can still be important in a game. 

So the point we focus on directly with our eyes gives us the most detailed information. But if you would fix your vision on only one point all the time, for example, the ball. Then you would get all the information of everything around the ball. But because football is so fast-paced and dynamic a lot of things around you would go unnoticed and you don’t have the right perception of the situation to make a good decision. For example, you’re a midfielder and you look at your central defender with the ball. He’s passing the ball to you, you receive the ball and turn. The moment you turn and the ball is in front of you to pass it, the opponent steals it from you. This could have been avoided by changing the point of fixation of your vision to get the right information.  

The way to do this is by turning your head to change the fixation point of your vision. Turning your head/neck to get a different fixation point is also called a head check. 

Arsene Wenger says that “a top player has a head like a radar”. With that, he means that the best players in the world see everything around them like a radar by doing head checks. It’s been analyzed that Steven Gerrard on average did 0,61 head checks a second, Frank Lampard did 0,62 head checks a second and the best of all was Xavi who was doing 0,83 head checks a second. This means that Xavi does a head check 8 times in 10 seconds. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePc-pF5VXdU 

We know now that you have to do head checks to form the right perception of the situation. But just turning your head to change the point of fixation is not going to help. You have to know why you’re doing a head check, when you have to do it, and which way you’re going to look. All this we will write about in the next article. 

 

Summary 

The perception of a situation is the identification, organization, and interpretation of the information that’s presented to us. 

The five senses a human body has are vision, sound, touch, smell, and taste. On a football pitch, we mainly use three senses to get useful information for football situations, vision, sound, and touch. The most used one is vision. 

That’s why we think there should be put a lot of emphasis on forming the right perception through vision. But how do you get the right perception through vision?  

A human has a visual field of around 200-220 degrees horizontally (to the sides) and around 130-135 degrees vertically (up and down). This makes up the visual field of a human.

This visual field is split into two categories, direct vision, and indirect vision. Direct vision is also known as the point of fixation and indirect vision is known as peripheral vision, which makes up everything else outside of where the eye focuses on.  

So the point we focus on directly with our eyes gives us the most detailed information. But if you would fix your vision on only one point all the time, for example, the ball. A lot of things around you would go unnoticed. The way to solve this is by turning your head to change the fixation point of your vision. Turning your head/neck to get a different fixation point is also called a head check. 

Arsene Wenger says that “a top player has a head like a radar”. With that, he means that the best players in the world see everything around them like a radar by doing head checks.