Decision-making under pressure

Eight minutes left in a World Cup match. A sold-out crowd. One goal down, and a tournament about to end. That's the moment where most teams stop being a team. Players start hunting the ball, the structure dissolves, somebody has a go from an impossible angle, and afterwards everyone agrees they tried everything.

Belgium didn't do that against Ireland. Charlotte Englebert equalised, then they scored again. And Adam Commens, head coach of the Red Panthers and high performance director at Hockey Belgium, doesn't put that down to something said in a huddle. His question for that moment was how the team could "remain cool and calm-headed at that moment and trust the process that we've put in place". The process came first. The eight minutes just tested it.

That's the uncomfortable part of this masterclass for the rest of us. Decision-making under pressure isn't a mental skills topic you bolt on in the last week before a big game. It's a training design topic, and it's mostly about what a coach chooses to reward.

Halfway through his video debrief, Adam stops a clip from Belgium's World Cup game against Germany. His team has won the ball low, found the free player and tried a pass through to the back post. It doesn't come off. The move is over.

Most of us would file that under lost the ball. He files it somewhere else.

A good miss. I think that phrase holds most of the hour together, and it comes from somewhere honest. Adam has always believed he gives players the freedom to play without fear of mistakes, and then admits: "the reality is there has been times within programs that I've led that players were not able to play freely, that they felt that there was maybe too much structure, too much black and white in the way that we played."

So over the years he has tried to hand the decision-making back to the players, and the tool he uses is a clear line between choosing and doing.

His example is one every coach can picture. A forward has a 1v1 on the edge of the circle with space behind the defender. Nobody watching wants that player to turn and recycle. We want them to go, to win a corner or create a shot. So what happens when they go and lose it?

"If that player then makes that decision to go 1 versus 1, loses the ball, then for me, that can be also considered a success."

Here's the catch, and it's what stops this being a feel-good slogan. The success is the decision. The failure still gets coached, just somewhere else. Adam's next step is to put elimination skills into training for that player, so the same decision comes off more often. Punish the decision instead of training the skill, and the player recycles next time. Get it right and, in his words, "it'll mean that they don't hesitate as much."

He applies the same logic to perception. To midfielders and defenders he says: "I have no issue if you don't play the ball to the open side or to the help side. I have no issue if you don't play it there. I only have an issue if you haven't seen it."

The accountability sits on what the player saw, not on which pass they picked. If they've seen the open side, weighed the options and gone another way, that's fine, as long as they can explain why afterwards. If they haven't seen it, that's the conversation.

And there's a team reason for all this. When he asks players to press aggressively or break quickly, he tells them to "embrace the chaos, go for it." Then he watches how they interpret it.

When a player hesitates, there's nothing to coach except the hesitation. When they commit and get it wrong, you finally have something to work with.

So the question for the rest of us is a slightly uncomfortable one. In your last session, when a player made a brave, correct choice and lost the ball, what did you say? And what did your face say?