On Saturday I Tweeted that Mark Hughes had no real choice but to leave Kian Harratt out of the match-day squad after the outburst on social media by his dad. I had already addressed some of the points raised in the comments to my Tweet in this article already, so I hope some of those who made the comments read it as it will clear up some of the finer details that are too long to include in a Tweet.
What lead us to the situation of the absence from the Harrogate Town fixture of Kian Harratt will have began after the final whistle of the first match of the season, a frustrating 0-0 draw with Doncaster Rovers. A match that was frustrating for forwards and whereas Vadaine Oliver would get another bite at the cherry against Barrow unfortunately Kian would be unavailable for selection having been red carded. Without realising it, Kian Harratt had allowed the control of his place in the starting line-up to be taken out of his control. All he could now do was watch as other players like Jake Young, Lee Angol and Andy Cook had their chance, whilst there was nothing he could do about it.
How Harratt Missed The Bus
Putting my initial concerns about a Huddersfield Town player stepping off of a bus and immediately kissing the badge of the rival team he had joined on loan to one side (if this had happened the other way around I’m certain it would have alienated a lot of Bradford City supporters). I want to draw your attention to the age of Kian Harratt (20) and compare and contrast that to Vadaine Oliver (30), and even if you like Andy Cook (31) and demonstrate how age probably plays a role in the different reactions to adversity in their careers at Valley Parade.
First we have to rewind to pre-season as we now have an idea that Mark Hughes wasn’t planning his attack around Andy Cook. In fact we know that Stephen Gent and Mark Hughes had been tracking Kian Harratt for quite some time before the end of the 2021/22 season and this gives us some indication they felt by signing him, he would be a player that is going to play an integral role in their plans and this involved starting most matches if all went according to plan. The very fact he started the opener against Doncaster Rovers would lend extra credibility to this thought baring in mind Matty Platt, Romoney Crichlow, Harry Lewis and Richie Smallwood to name a few also started and are still regulars. Put simply, that line-up wasn’t the result of an experiment, he didn’t pluck their names out of a hat, there was a reason for it, up front was Vadaine Oliver and on the bench was Andy Cook.
The upshot is that anyone starting against Doncaster Rovers had been given their place in the starting line-up and it was theirs to lose. Whether the referee was right to send off Kian Harratt or not is irrelevant, it happened and this took away the control he had of his future as a regular starter and allowed other circumstances to develop that were outside of his control. And with goals from Jake Young and Andy Cook and the subsequent changing of plans that included an attack lead by Vadaine Oliver, things escalated fast, all of which making the role of Kian Harratt that bit more complicated for the manager.
If Kian Harratt isn’t being started there are reasons for this, some of the reasons are due to re-organising a new front line that now contains Andy Cook, if his plans were to play Kian Harratt along side Vadaine Oliver because he felt that he was the best player to be at the side of him, and now Andy Cook is the main striker, it is understandable that this might have a negative impact on the selection chances for Harratt.
It looks like there has been an early change of plans up-front and that costly sending-off prevented Harratt from showing that he is indispensable. In fact, everybody else who would otherwise have been behind him have stepped up. Add to that the recruitment of a million wingers and almost overnight the landscape for Kian Harratt had completely changed. The right thing to do is to knuckle down, dig in deeper and work harder, stay positive and focused and most of all stay patient, but as hinted at by Mark Hughes recently, that hasn’t happened. So it is all Kian Harratt’s own fault, he is the master of his own downfall? Not so fast.
Selling The Dream
Looking at the Bradford City careers of Kian Harratt and Vadaine Oliver, both have a reason to feel that things haven’t gone as well as they had hoped, but both have had different ways of dealing with those setbacks and both will have had different ways of interpreting the disappointment of things not panning out the way they feel they should have. Age and experience are a very important factor in this. Both will likely have been told similar things before they signed for Bradford City by a manager who at that moment was selling Bradford City to them. Mark Hughes’s job was to convince them to join Bradford City rather than any other club. So naturally he will have talked up the positives to them, his own ambitions and expectations, and I believe it is safe to say at that moment in both cases, Mark Hughes will have felt both players would lead the line for the Bantams and told them exactly that.
But these things come with unspoken terms and conditions that when you are 30 years old you are likely to take as read, so don’t need saying, but when you are only 20 years old aren’t things that really cross your mind. And this is why it is unfair to just write Kian Harratt off as someone who seems to be unprofessional or getting too big for his boots. Because his reaction, albeit the wrong reaction, is understandable when viewed through the lens of world experience.
If you’re old enough, first cast your mind back to being Kian’s age. Perhaps you are his age or younger, so imagine you are chatting to Mark Hughes about the prospect of joining Bradford City. You’ve already made a bit of a name of yourself on loan at Port Vale, scoring at Wembley in a Play-Off Final. Your career appears to be taking off and you might feel like this is the season when things are finally going to happen, all perfectly natural feelings to have, and the younger we are, the more likely we are to think that everything will go to plan. Why? Because up until now we haven’t experienced those setbacks that are just life and always seem to happen.
Put yourself in the position of Mark Hughes, who probably genuinely expects you to be joining the club as a regular starter, and he tells you that. Based on what he has said, and the standing he has in the world of football, it is easy to confuse it with a cast iron guarantee that you’re going to be the main man and finally all of that hard work over the years has paid off. But the reality is, the hard work has just begun.
By the time you’re in your late 20’s you’ve been in these situations before, and you know how it works. You might even be a bit fed up of optimism because things never quite pan out that way. It becomes something people say, and they may have memories of experiences of being dropped like a stone the minute something better came along. In short, they have a history of real life experience that never quite matches up with early expectation. Sometimes it was their own fault, sometimes it wasn’t, it’s just life, and the more experience you have of it, the more cynical you become when you hear people tell you how great they think you are. For many it serves more as an opportunity where they would ask themselves “right, what am I going to do to make sure it stays this way”. But when it’s the first time you’ve heard it, you’re most likely thinking “great!”.
The unspoken terms and conditions that come with what Mark Hughes has likely said will be understood by Vadaine Oliver without any need to explain them, in fact, there’s not even a need for Mark Hughes to explain them to anyone. If a player breaks his leg, he knows he isn’t going to start, and the same applies if he isn’t performing to the level he expected or isn’t putting in the work that is expected in training, or if their general attitude is negative.
For someone of Kian Harratt’s age the sudden discovery that this isn’t going the way you expected can feel like a massive betrayal. And even though it isn’t the case, from his point of view, it is understandable to think he has been mislead. And when people feel they have been mislead or lied to, they don’t react in a positive manner, would you?
As a result of those feelings, and as hinted at by Mark Hughes, his performance in training may have dropped. Are you going to work harder than you need to when you think your boss has mislead you into thinking you were getting a promotion and instead given it to someone else? It won’t be too dissimilar to what Kian might have been feeling. And although this may not be the case in reality, it is where a vital word comes into play that has a major role in all of our decision making in life, furthermore, it is a big part of why, from the outset I stated that Kian’s dads post on social media will have cost him his place in the squad away to Harrogate Town. The word is “perceptions”.
The Reality and Importance of Perceptions
Unlike Kian Harratt, Mark Hughes has to consider the impact of picking a player that is not training as he should be and is not behaving in a manner expected as a part of a team pulling in the same direction. He has to consider the perceptions of other players in the squad patiently waiting for their chance and working hard to prove they should be in the first team. If Harratt isn’t doing that and gets picked ahead of those that are, what message does that send out to the rest of the team? Why did Andy Cook bother going to all of the effort of getting into shape and working harder when he could have still got picked by throwing his toys out of the pram?
Finally on to Wayne Harratt, Kian’s dad, and “perceptions”. Let’s first look at our perceptions of his post on social media. He said ”Get Kian Harratt home get him home to a place where he belongs”. If you want to aren’t important, what did you perceive this to mean? For all we know Kian had been living on his own for too long and his dad wanted him to move back home. Yet most of us understood what it really meant, or at least what we perceived it to mean. So it isn’t unreasonable for Mark Hughes to perceive it in the same way, and have another perception because of it. If Kian Harratt hasn’t been acting himself around the club recently, and his performance in training has dropped among other things. It is reasonable to conclude that the post on social media by Kian’s dad hasn’t come out of thin air. He might not have told his dad to post on social media on his behalf, and he cannot control what his dad does, but Mark Hughes doesn’t need to be a genius (or even right) to think Kian Harratt has been complaining to his dad about him being unhappy (or put simply, slagging Mark Hughes off behind his back).
Mark Hughes stated “Everybody wants to play. At the moment, it’s sometimes not possible to give opportunities to good players that we have in the group. And said about Harratt “Kian isn’t an exception to that. He’s one of many players who would want to play more often”.
No Choice But To Leave Out Harratt
Hughes will be aware that other players in the squad will have heard the post on social media, and they will also have their own perceptions. Players like Andy Cook, Lee Angol, Jake Young, Vadaine Oliver all have exactly the same challenges as Kian Harratt, how will they perceive it if Mark Hughes starts Kian Harratt in the following match? You’d have to be naive or deliberately obtuse to think that they wouldn’t think anything about it. To appear to have rewarded this with selection in the starting 11 would be unthinkable. But he wasn’t in the starting 11 to begin with, and there is no way he could let him play in the next match, as again, it would still be perceived as him being rewarded with a substitute appearance. So the only sensible thing to do was to leave him out of the squad completely.
Just to drill in the reasons why, it comes down to controlling the things you can, and whilst Kian Harratt is on the bench, should two or three attacking players get injured, and Mark Hughes not intend on playing Kian, that would mean bringing on a defender when he’s already used everyone ahead of Harratt. This would be counter-productive for many more reasons than leaving him out. It would only serve as confirmation (perceptions again) that Mark Hughes is treating Kian Harratt unfairly, he would now have every justification in feeling that way, as would his dad, but other team mates would notice this, and so would the fans. So naming him among the substitutes, however unlikely, has a potential to massively blow up in the managers face and make the situation ten times worse than it was before.
So it is fair to say that all his dad achieved was to get his son left out of the squad entirely, and that’s exactly what I said on Twitter. And that’s all I said, and for those of you that have read this, you now have all of the context to the meaning of the Tweet.
Can’t Control Other People
To be fair to his dad, he was only doing something that shows he cares about his son. But hopefully he has had a bit of time to think about the negative impact his actions have had, and hopefully Kian will have said thank you for your support but never do that again. Kian has no control over what his dad does, but Kian does have control over what Kian does. So hindsight will teach him that perhaps it isn’t a good idea to share his footballing frustrations with his dad if he can’t be trusted to keep his thoughts to himself. But I hope that his dad will have learned the importance of showing his love for his son in a more productive way, and Kian won’t have to keep reminding him not to post about these things on social media, because the only sensible alternative is to not tell his dad about these things, which wouldn’t be healthy.
Of course Kian should be able to vent his frustrations to loved ones (we all need to be able to), because that is healthy. But maybe his dad could have tackled things differently, and instead of taking his side by making comments over social media, or even agreeing with him without question, which only serves to re-enforce the feeling that he is being unfairly treated, he has hopefully learned that it is more productive to use his age and experience to re-frame things for his son. Remind him how hard he has worked to get where he is now, and share experiences of how he has used set-backs as something he has learned from and used to make him stronger. Sometimes you’ve just got to suck it up, dig in and work harder. Even if it doesn’t get results at Bradford City, his time will come if he keeps doing the right the right way.
What has happened isn’t the end of the world for Kian, it’s just a setback that everyone can learn from and is an important part of character building. So let’s not vilify Kian or Wayne over this. I don’t know if they already have, but I’d perhaps suggest they sit down and wipe the slate clean with Mark Hughes, outlining exactly how they both will learn and double down in their efforts in a positive way and show they respect Mark Hughes’ decisions as a manager, and trust him to have Kian’s best interests at heart. Most importantly that they will stay patient and just get on doing the right thing until the chances come again, which they will.
Humility & Influence of Senior Pro’s
I hope in the meantime Kian has sat down with some of the senior pro’s in the team, especially Andy Cook and Vadaine Oliver to get some advice about how they’ve handled adversity and what is best to do. Hopefully that will help him get a bit of perspective back and now start handling things better.
Andy Cook is probably the best example of how to react when things aren’t going your way. It would have been easy for Cook to have gone the wrong way, but instead we have seen him work harder to prove he indispensable to the club. Just like with Andy Cook, I want to see Kian thrive, and we all should, he’s in the spotlight and it is easy to judge, but at the same time, none of us are perfect and get things right all of the time, and Kian and his dad are allowed their share of mistakes too. It’s just repeating them over and over again when it becomes a problem. That’s what we don’t want to see.
So yes, I do think he was left out of the squad because of what happened, yes Mark Hughes was right. And now he has done his time, hopefully from Monday morning everyone starts pulling in the same direction and we can all get to see the Kian Harratt we were hoping to see when he stepped off of that bus.