After a full week of working on every player – drilling into each individual the understanding of their role in the team and how it would affect everything if he did not carry it off – I would then set about the ways we could hurt the opposition.
Obviously set-plays have now become a byword for how teams can do that successfully, but that was the case before me and it is the same now I have retired.
As well as attacking set-plays, defending them was something else we would work on. Whether it was in attack or defence, every individual knew his own personal challenge.
On the Saturday, I would turn up for a home game at about 11am, and in my early years I would also train myself before games.
At this stage, with only a few hours to go until kick-off, I would run through everything again and wait until the lads started to arrive. Once they were all settled, I would have a quick chat – nothing too rousing! – and then leave the dressing room.
Once the opposition teamsheet arrived, about 75 minutes before kick-off, I would check our markers against their players – this was important because I always man-marked!
I would take that board into our dressing room, and out I would go again, until they arrived back from their warm-ups. Everything said from then on until the players left to start the game was confidence filling, with no negatives at all.
The actual team talk itself and the last things you said to the players could be very different depending on the occasion. It was not always me who gave it, either.
Again at Stoke, I got Ricardo Fuller up to speak right before our FA Cup semi-final against Bolton at Wembley in 2011.
Ric was such a great character and also a player with exceptional ability. Unfortunately he was injured and out of the game but he delivered a once-in-a-lifetime speech to the team, quoting Nelson Mandela.
We won the game 5-0 and to this day I am sure Ric believes his speech drove the lads to that famous result. The players would all tell you it certainly got them going.
It just shows you that the way to succeed in football management is not set in stone. You need tremendous resilience, yes, but also many more human strings to your bow.
In my early years at Stoke, we were always the underdogs, and the atmosphere was off the charts, never mind who we played.
As time went by and we became established, teams coming to Stoke were much more prepared for the experience, and our supporters became less reliant on our underdog status and rightly so.
To make up for this I began to use more psychological methods to generate the atmosphere in the dressing room that would help motivate the players.
That might mean mentioning recent comments or coverage that was negative towards us, or even bringing up stuff I had remembered from our early days at the club – anything that criticised us in any shape of form, that I knew would generate a positive response from the lads.
This method helped us greatly going into games we were expected to win.
