How do you train someone for situations they’ve never seen before?

Sometimes it feels like modern sport is obsessed with control. We try to control the load, control the game plan, control the variables. But the problem is you can’t control everything - sport is complex.

Take a standard deck of 52 playing cards. There are 52 factorial possible combinations that’s about 8 × 10⁶⁷ or 8 followed by 67 zeros!

There are more possible arrangements of a deck of cards than atoms on Earth. Which means every properly shuffled deck in history has almost certainly been unique (that hurts my head to think about!).

Now think about AFL.

Eighteen players on the field. Five on the bench. Against another eighteen and five. Four umpires. A 150m ground. Wind. Rain. Crowd noise. Momentum shifts. Fatigue. Analysts feeding information to coaches making decisions in real time. The number of interacting variables is staggering. You cannot prepare players for everything that will happen.

But there is something you can do. It’s something that both Marcelo Bielsa and my Gran leaned into.

Marcelo Bielsa, nicknamed “El Loco,” is considered one of the most influential football coaches of the modern era. Pep Guardiola has described him as “the greatest coach in the world.” My Gran was considered the most influential Speech and Drama teacher in the northern suburbs of Wellington. She was a Queen’s Service Medal recipient for services to Speech and Drama. They worked in different contexts, but were faced with the same problem - How do you prepare someone for what they haven’t seen before?

For Bielsa, it was preparing footballers for unpredictable, chaotic game moments. For my Gran, it was preparing students for sight reading in exams - being handed a piece of prose they’d never seen and being expected to perform it instantly.

Both landed on the same idea. In Bielsa’s language, it became one of his core principles: repentización. It’s a concept borrowed from music. At its core, it’s sight reading - the capacity to respond intelligently to something unrehearsed.

In football terms, repentización is the ability to solve unpredictable, game-specific problems in real time, under pressure, with limited space and time. This isn’t robotic execution or recall, but the ability to adapt to whatever the situation demands. Bielsa believed great players could generate multiple solutions to similar situations.

To train this Bielsa constantly put players in different game situations. Altered constraints, different shapes, new problems to solve. The goal wasn’t memorisation, it was expanding their library of responses.

My Gran did the same. Sight unseen she would hand us poems, novels, children’s books, Shakespeare and his iambic pentameter - we train for moments yet to come unseen.* Her goal was to challenge us with different rhythms, tones, emotional demands. Over time you learned to scan ahead, pick up cues, emphasise the right words, know when to pause, and when to look up. You built the confidence to respond to whatever was placed in front of you.

Bielsa and my Gran weren’t the only coaches to have success with this concept. Danny Kerry, who coached both England’s men and women Field Hockey teams, and led Team GB to Olympic gold in 2016, applied a similar principle. He introduced sessions called “Thinking Thursdays.”

He would challenge players by creating games in different formats. As England international Alex Danson described:

“We would have to perform under fatigue, with changing rules and come up with a plan that would give our team the best chance of success.”

By providing different stimuli and manipulating constraints — changing rules, altering field sizes, adjusting player numbers, umpiring with different interpretations — players had to find ways to win in situations that were never quite the same. It wasn’t about rehearsing everything that would happen in the Olympic final. It was about building players who could adapt when the Olympic final demanded it.

Sport is complex. As much as we wish we could, we can’t prepare players for everything that they will face. So instead of our preparation being based on control, it should be based on adaptability.

My Gran knew she couldn’t have me read every possible exam piece I might face. But by exposing me to high variability and constantly stretching my ability to adapt, she was building something deeper than recall.

Repentización. Sight reading. Thinking Thursdays.

However you frame it, it’s less about us as coaches having the answer - and more about helping our players find one when the moment demands it.

*My attempt at writing in iambic pentameter

At the back-end of this 30 minute podcast, Former England and Team GB Hockey Head Coach, Danny Kerry discusses his “Thinking Thursday” training sessions to help prepare players for what an Olympic or World Championship campaign might bring.

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