Dad, my boot laces keep coming undone!

As has often been said at Centre meetings “it is those little things that make all the difference at the very top level”. We have coaches who work on tactics, individual skills and fitness, physiotherapists who put you all back together when you have been injured, sports scientists who monitor nutrition, hydration and physical condition, the FA who apply the rules and create the pathways that allow you to progress from U10’s through to the England team, and then there are people like me.

I have decided that my role in the whole set-up is to provide you with access to the most useless and inconsequential research that may just make that 0.0001% improvement in your game. It is my duty to provide you with at least a thousand bits of utterly fascinating bits of information that, when added together, may just about make a very, very important 0.1% difference to your games.

So to begin with, believe it or not, there is a website that tells you how to lace up your boots properly as there is, apparently, a right and a wrong way to do it. One way encourages the laces to loosen as you play and one uses the tension created to tighten the knot.

The gentleman who created the site, Ian Fieggen, is quoted in the April 2009 edition of Runner’s World as saying that he left his full-time job in 2007 to devote his life to teaching people how to tie their shoes, and specifically to create a shoelace handbook, Laces, that he published later that year (and you thought I was bad!!).

His body of work is available on his website and I suggest that you all check out the “Slipping Laces” section immediately. The website can be accessed by clicking the title of this article "Dad, my boot laces keep coming undone" above.

The full Runner’s World article is available at http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/news/article.asp?uan=482 but you may need to subscribe to the site to access it.

Now then, is it right over left or left over right?