Aidan Smith: Nothing gets the crowd going like a good scribble

IF YOU don’t support a money-drenched club like Manchester City then it’s only natural to want to see them fall out (over starting places, parking spaces, moisturiser contracts, everything).

And we love it, absolutely love it, when they forget the first rule: about football being a team game and how, relatively-speaking, modestly-assembled but expertly-organised teams can triumph over a bunch of mercenaries, would-be galacticos, primadonnas and refuseniks.

Carlos Tevez has been ridiculed for changing his story of what happened in that Munich dugout and how there was a “misunderstanding” between himself and Roberto Mancini over the coach’s desire for England’s best-paid player to pull the finger out, get on the park and rescue the game. But, after I’d stopped laughing, this thought occurred: would the outcome have been different if Mancini had – and I mean this quite literally – taken a leaf out of Paulo Sergio’s book?

At Perth last Sunday, with Hearts losing by the same scoreline as Man City were against Bayern, Sergio summoned Jamie Hamill to the touchline and passed him a note which the full-back then passed to Ian Black. The still pictures of this interlude were comical, especially of Black squinting at the paper, presumably while the game was in full flow.

Black does not seem to be saying to himself, as someone once did to a fearful world: “I hold in my hand a piece of paper.” He looks confused, as most players would be, because has a coach ever tried to relay a message this way before? But if an instruction is right there in black and white, players can no longer claim, as they’re prone to do, that they didn’t understand or hear it properly.

You wonder why managers bother shouting orders from the touchline. The words must get lost on the wind or the roar of the crowd (OK, there were only 2,770 hardy souls at McDiarmid Park but you know what I mean). And the reaction from the players at such moments is usually to look irritated or cup a hand to an ear or pretend they’re far too busy to take the advice/bollocking. They don’t like being singled out in front of the fans.

With a note, though, they cannot claim not to understand and the message can be relayed without the crowd noticing.

I know Sergio was spotted in the act but managers and players will get better at the procedure – more sleekit – with practice.

All of this presupposes, however, that coaches can find the right words for the occasion, and jot them down in a succinct fashion. The Gettysburg Address is only 246 words long but War and Peace runs to 565,146. Managers shouldn’t over-complicate. “Quit arseing about” might be sufficient.

Of course, all of this also presupposes that Sergio’s note last week was an actual instruction relating to the match and the breakthrough in manager-player communication we all hope it was. But what if it was just Black’s missus wondering what he wanted for his tea? Or a game of hangman continued from the bus up the M90?

Or maybe there had been a pop quiz on the journey, and the note contained an elusive lyric such as “I lost my heart to a starship trooper” or “Yes sir, I can boogie” or “You can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal, you can do whatever you feel . . . (Why am I thinking this Hearts side has a fondness for camp 1970s disco? Answers on a postcard, please).

No, I reckon Sergio has the right idea. The system requires refinement so I suggest he looks at the work of the pioneer technical-area scribblers to see where they went wrong. Gordon Strachan’s jumbo notepad accidentally revealed his signing targets, while a Match Of The Day peek at Jose Mourinho’s threw up the less-than-special observation: “Two subs used, one sub left”.

Once he’s done his homework, the Hearts man will be able to demonstrate how, in getting your point across to an underperforming team, the pen is mightier than the hairdryer.

If the instructions do the job – spectacularly – the pieces of paper will become great football artifacts. Just imagine what Celtic fans, celebrity ones like Billy Connolly or Rod Stewart, might pay for “Get up the bloody park, Tam!” if it was dated 25 May, 1967 and written on Lisbon hotel notepaper.