The UK press is building up to the Champions League final tomorrow, and one BBC article I found interesting was about Pep Guardiola being the greatest coach ever and - more importantly - why. It struck me, as I read the article, that there were lessons for go players there.
The crux part of the article was as follows:
Quote:
Guardiola is the most advanced coach in the game. His ideas work on the four phases of attack and developing them.
The first - the build-up - is the one Valdes has explained. From that opening phase, much depends of having one more player than your opponents in a particular area of the pitch.
The second phase - constructing the play - is based on numerical superiority attained by moving players into different positions and lines of attack. Who else would have thought of achieving this by converting John Stones, a centre-back, into one of City's most effective midfielders?
The third stage is all about creating the final pass, the assist. This is the one Guardiola believes is still a work in progress.
That phase is one he has worked harder on in the last couple of years - the movements of full-backs, centre midfielders and forwards before the last pass. He uses the last 10 minutes of training to do that, instead of letting players do shooting or crossing.
He knows, despite City's success, he is not yet there with that third stage, nor with the establishing of the fourth stage, the 'finalising' - the technical coaching term for finishing.
Some of the reasons I thought this may be appliable to go are as follows:
1. It puts a lot of stress on fuseki - the build up. But thinking of it as 'building up' as opposed to spreading stones round the board actually makes quite a difference.
2. The reason for the different insight can be found in thinking of the next stage as 'constructing' the play. NOT the middle game. My hypothesis is that we amateurs actually omit this stage and go straight from fuseki to middle game, but only in the sense that we have run out of fuseki moves to play. I say "we amateurs" because I don't think pros omit this stage. The Japanese even have a word for it: "kamae" (construction - not used in texts for amateurs but used in pro talk), and I think this is what lies behind Huang Longshi's concept of the Five Lands. He assigns various areas attributes based on "numerical (or other) superiority" and so uses this information to determine his "lines of attack". Rather like the way the Ukranians are planning their new offensive!
3. Pep's third phase can correspond to go's middle game but with the caveat that we need to think about the ultimate goal. Pep's idea is to "create" the final pass, or the assist. NB 'create' and not 'make'. This phase is in my view, is not properly marked in Japanese go, but is very well marked in old Chinese go theory. It does exist in Japanese if you use the term oyose properly, that is remembering that yose refers to making boundary plays. The Chinese called this phase 'shu' which you might conveniently think of as 'harvesting' (its base meaning), though in practice it refers to the process of beginning to seal off territories. Oyose is not as good a term because it gets conflated too much with yose, i.e. the final phase of boundary plays during the endgame, when you are stacking up your sheaves of corn nearly as opposed to scything it and collecting it.
4. The final stages of yose, i.e. the endgame boundary plays, represent Pep's "finalising." I think the important point there is to remember that all the previous stages should have been designed to lead up to this final stage. The final plays on the go board are not just a tidying-up process. They are the expression of the purpose of the moves made earlier. If you make even small final endgame moves without being totally aware of how you came to get those moves - meaning they were unplanned - you have somehow failed in your earlier moves.
My first thoughts on all this extend to other fields. I am inclined to think that the difference between great composers or great artists is that they PLAN the final notes or final strokes at the beginning. I'd even be tempted to say that it extends to genres. A classical piece of music has a complex structure that leads to a satisfying and analysable end. Folk music, in contrast, typically just goes on and on, with as many verses being added as you like, or until the beer runs out. I personally can't discern any satisfying link between beginning and end in pop music. It just ends when its three minutes is up.
Of course, we can all enjoy folk music and pop music, or cartoons and comics, but they are the equivalent of playing go the amateur way just to enjoy fighting or killing groups. The go equivalent of producing a Beethoven symphony or a Rembrandt portrait is surely pro play the Huang Longshi way - or the Pep way.