The away trip is a training day nobody plans

Squads rehearse set pieces for months and improvise the eighteen hours that decide how they arrive.

Six hours on a coach, a service station, a hotel with a kitchen that closes at nine, and a group of young men who have been left to sort themselves out since half past two. That day gets no coaching input at all in most clubs, and then the performance the following afternoon gets analysed in forensic detail.

Travel is a repeatable, predictable event that happens maybe twenty times a season, which makes it exactly the kind of thing coaching is good at. You can script it. What goes in the bag, what gets eaten and when, what the stop is for, who is responsible for ordering ahead so the hotel does not serve the meal at half nine, what the phone rule is after eleven. None of that is complicated. It is just tedious, and tedious things fall off the end of a coach's week.

The reason it gets skipped is the same reason most off pitch work gets skipped. It is not visible as coaching. Nobody watches a well organised coach trip and thinks about the staff. They notice the badly organised one, once, when the team plays badly and somebody blames the beds.

The part I would drill hardest is food ownership. Send eighteen athletes into a service station with no plan and they will each solve the problem alone, badly, in four minutes. Send them in with a short list of acceptable options and one person carrying a bag of things from the club, and you have removed a decision from people who are tired and bored, which is when their decisions are worst.

Juniors need it more, not less, because their trips are cheaper and looser and there is no chef anywhere in the story. A schools team on a long day out is the single most nutritionally chaotic environment in the sport, and it is also where the habits get set.

There is a limit to this. Squads that are micromanaged from door to door lose the ability to organise themselves at all, and there is a real argument for teaching independence rather than issuing instructions. Fine. Teach it, review it, hand it over gradually.

But hand it over deliberately. What most clubs do is not delegation. It is just an unclaimed day.