The boss (brought it up). He hated that kit, but there’s a bit of science behind this.
People to this day always joke that ‘it was because we were losing, because of this, because of that’, but Sir Alex had employed a professor from Liverpool University around sight – a vision specialist called Gail Stevenson.
She would come in twice a week. And you know how people talk about being ‘match fit’ or he’s ‘not got his sharpness back’ – he and she never believed that it was anything to do with physical capabilities. Physically, you always worked hard to come back from injury, you tried your best and were physically fit anyway.
Sharpness was the alertness, and your vision. It was about how quickly you could pick up your teammates. So when the ball arrives into you and you’re playing well, you know where your next pass is before you’ve started. That’s not a physical failing – it’s an awareness thing.
She brought in a lot of eye exercises, and alertness exercises – about eye muscles. She said you stop using your eye muscles when you’re injured, in a football sense. You wouldn’t be looking around you all the time, you wouldn’t always have that ‘picture’ when you receive the ball.
She actually said to Sir Alex – this was the detail that he would go into – ‘imagine you’ve got this crowd behind you – there are colours that you can see quicker than others, that stand out more than others’. It’s obvious. The reason people wear bright yellow on a motorway is so people can see them. People don’t wear grey on a motorway!
She’d said to him ‘this is not right. the players will not pick it up, in a crowded atmosphere, the shirt, as quickly as the other ones’. This is something that had been going on for months. He’d rejected this kit a couple of months before – he was not having it at all.
The vision specialist then started to work with our kit manufacturers on how our kits stand out the most. There was a bit more science behind it than ‘the gaffer didn’t like the kit and that’s the reason why we were losing’.
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
