Steve Round has revealed how Paul McGrath was still defying medical science even after leaving Aston Villa.
McGrath is renowned as a club legend at Villa Park for producing imperious performances on the pitch despite his dodgy knees preventing him from training.
And Villa’s former director of football Steve Round has pointed out that the man known as ‘God’ to the claret and blue faithful was exactly the same at Derby County.
McGrath joined the Rams after leaving Villa in the summer of 1996 and helped Jim Smith’s team finish 12th in the Premier League.
Round was a youth team coach at Derby at the time and remembers McGrath well – because he flew in the face of everything he was trying to teach the young players!
At the forefront of sports science and statistics, Round was all about helping emerging footballers improve by focusing on marginal gains.
But it all happened while McGrath was starring for the first team without ever setting foot on the training field.
“When I first started out as a youth coach we had a player called Paul McGrath who we’d signed and never trained a day,” recalled Roung.
“He didn’t set one foot on the training ground.
“The only time he did was to walk round the pitch and watch training, so he might walk round two laps.
“But he played every single game and singlehandedly, near enough, kept us in the league that year. He was absolutely magnificent.
“So that bucked the trend of what we were trying to do in terms of creating a sports science background to our professionals.”
Fortunately for Round back then – and since – most players acknowledge that they are not bionic men like McGrath and embrace the methods the coaching guru has built a career upon.
“On the other side of the coin you’ve got young vibrant professionals who are looking for the edge, who want to improve, who want to get better,” he added.
“If you put in front of them a tool or a system or something they recognise can help them improve as a player and as a team, help them win more games on Saturday… when they saw that they embraced it.”
This is taken from an in-depth interview Round gave with Catapultsports.com, High Performance Practitioners.
The Steve Stride Column
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