Plan, Do, Review - The 24 Hour Rule and Why Monday Mornings Are Never Easy
- Gabriel Heidler
- Mar 16
- 7 min read
We all know the feeling. As coaches, players, fans, it is perhaps subtly different but effectively the same. You finish a game and feel elated, relieved, frustrated, perhaps even angry at the 90 minutes you’ve just witnessed. Monday morning then becomes a very important time to navigate as we look to head into the week ready to get to work again.
As a Brentford fan (I know, that record is still broken - Brentford this, Brentford that, but…) when we entered the Premier League it could have been easy to become overawed at the occasion. With wins against Arsenal and West Ham early into our top flight return, and a thrilling 3-3 against Liverpool under the lights it could have been easy to think “ride this wave of positive energy every week”.
But of course with all peaks come troughs, and if we focus too heavily on one when they happen we inevitably focus too heavily on the other as well. It is human nature that when we feel emotional about something it naturally comes with both extremes - Yin and Yang, light and shade, high and low.
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Kahlil Gibran
Part of Thomas Frank’s methods for keeping consistency and eliminating these emotional troughs is his “24 Hour Rule”. For anyone who knows him, Thomas is by no means an emotionless stoic - as Connor Roberts, Roberto De Zerbi and plenty of post-match journalists have found out. Rather than trying to eliminate the extremes of emotion, he and his team embrace them in the immediate aftermath of a game; happy, sad, angry or disappointed, they are all embraced and processed for 24 hours and then it’s back to business.
This 24 Hour Rule is something that I have adopted in the last few seasons. Whilst I encourage it in my players after every game, I can’t make them, so I make sure that at least I can practice what I preach. But it isn’t always easy.
It has taken a while but I’ve improved at letting go of things that are out of my control; bigger moments tend to be a bit more difficult, but I don’t think I’ve had an incident yet on a football pitch that has been big enough to care about the next day. Ultimately, things happen. Players, officials, god forbid even us coaches all have bad days, make mistakes and get decisions wrong.
But for all the universal hatred of the Monday morning it’s often not the result or the decisions that make getting out of bed difficult.
With the U18s there have only been two occasions where the next 24 hours have been difficult to process and both were after disappointing performances. Not the scoreline or the official, the performance. When we set standards for how we conduct ourselves and the positivity we want to encourage, it is difficult when we fall below these. However by the time training rolls around on a Wednesday we’ve had so much time since the game on Saturday morning that it is out of everyone’s system and we can go again, focusing on what went wrong and what was successful with clear minds.
I appreciate that when all you see on TV and social media are pundits and fans analysing decisions and incidents rather than performances there is more of an expectation to challenge these sorts of things in our own games, but realistically what can we do about it?
The beauty of the 24 Hour Rule is that it allows you to focus on what is truly important, to return to your base and remember your fundamentals and foundations. Performances can return to the front of your mind rather than single moments of games that don’t show the whole picture. Slaven Bilić summed up this thought better than most when he was a pundit during a World Cup game between Brazil and Switzerland: “I don’t care”.
Over time we’ve somehow made a switch to focusing on the wrong thing. We forget the main aspect of the football: the performances! It is easy to say “we didn’t deserve to lose a game”. It is even easier to say “the referee has cost us”. But a game is 90 minutes long and if we neither create nor convert chances then can we really claim that we deserved anything?
As Thomas Frank said more recently when talking about his 24 Hour Rule, football is emotional but he also understands that he expects to win a certain amount of games so you have to get used to the range of emotions. But one thing that is certain about him, he is always respectful and honest with them.
This is where things can get difficult. Recently I had the first time where I felt that my players lost themselves in their emotions, or at least that we didn't see eye to eye on them. And I found it difficult to deal with as a coach. If you have a hard battle with a counterpart all game you are by all means allowed to be frustrated if you don’t come out on top at full time. I wouldn’t expect you to seek out that player, shake their hand and give a hearty congratulations; I appreciate that in the immediate aftermath, players don’t always work like that. But if someone offers a handshake and you refuse it, then I have a problem.
My integrity is everything to me. I hope people would say that I was honest and fair. And even more so I hope they would tell me if I wasn’t. We won’t get every decision, we’ll definitely have some go against us, but ultimately we can’t be angry at those if the rest of our performance doesn’t warrant anything from the game.
I say all this because during the aforementioned game, there were 0 yellow cards. There was no ill will. There were no flashpoints. But it ended 0-1 to a goal that by the law should not have counted. Bit of a niche law. The referee made a mistake, and we didn’t know. We didn’t challenge it, kicked off, and were told at half time a mistake had been made.
It’s frustrating. You hope that these things don’t happen, but when they do you just have to keep going. As far as I’m concerned we have to go out and make sure the game doesn’t finish 0-1, so when it does where is our focus? Is it on a single incident? Or the 89 minutes around it?
Now I understand the point that was raised: if the shoe was on the other foot, would we offer them the chance to equalise? Whilst I’d like to say I would always make that decision the point is it didn’t happen so we can but talk empty words. There is no money on the line to put where our mouth is. And what situations does it count for? At what point do we say “that’s not the same thing”? For example if an assistant misses an offside and we score, do we allow an equaliser or chalk it up to something that just happens? After all, they're all just referee errors... aren't they?
This is where I think the 24 Hour Rule comes into its own, because whatever you think of it in the moment we can probably all agree that we shouldn’t still be talking about it at training on Thursday. If that happens where is our focus; on our next game or still on last Sunday? How can we build through a season if we allow setbacks to dominate our thinking? It is telling also that we don’t dwell on these decisions when we win, only when we lose.
I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I’m “quiet” on the touchline. I know that when people say that to me what they really mean is “you don’t argue”. As if that would change anything. But this was again said to me after the game above. I think the phrase used was “boo to a goose”. I can’t lie, it hurt a bit. Not necessarily because it was obviously meant as a criticism, but more because they just didn’t understand why I’m quiet.
Way back when, during my Level 2, a coach developer explained a concept that has stuck with me ever since: the Johari Window (or for fans of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, "The Unknown Known"). In short there are 4 parts to any person:
Open Areas/Arena - Things you know about yourself that everyone else knows. The sharing zone
Blind Spots - Things others know about you that you don't know about yourself. The learning zone
Hidden Areas/Façade - Things you know about yourself that others don't know. The secret zone
Unknowns - Things neither you nor anyone else knows about you. The terrifying zone
It's funny how something very brief and universal, from an out of county coach developer who I had never met before and only spoken to on the odd occasion since, has forever been firmly planted in my mind. Only now, after having children do I really understand that terrifying zone - namely what I would do if something happened to my kids. The feelings that this zone stir up are uncomfortable, even in theory when asking "I wonder what I would do if X happened". They push you into places you don't want to go. The conscious effort to eliminate this zone as much as possible provides a mental and emotional balance, and naturally expands the remaining three zones. Where some people may think I wouldn't say "boo", others closer to me may know the extent of how far my morals can be pushed and just what is truly important to me (when drafting this, my partner called me being quiet "the lie paragraph").
I can curate a persona for my environment, I can control what I can control. My temperament is one of those things. The referee and the opposition aren’t. To an extent my own players too, they aren’t something I can joystick through the game. So I don’t see the use in shifting my focus to shout at an official when I can encourage; I don’t see the need to shout for the sake of filling silence. I’ll shake hands with an official and an opposition even if I disagree with them. Because the game demands that of me.
There is far too much else to think about to fill the football sections of my brain. I have to focus on the performances. Yes we need results but we don’t abandon our principles; we don’t get outworked and we don’t complain when we don’t get what we want. We dwell on it, the good and the bad, for 24 hours and we go again.
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