Monkey with no cigar, as nature intended (7). 

That is a fairly cryptic start to the post this week. My grandma is mad on cryptic crosswords. She absolutely loves them. In fact, she enters competitions and has won a few cash prizes over the years, so it is fair to say she is pretty good at them. 

For me though, I have always struggled to understand them. Across two different periods of my life I lived with my grandparents, and at breakfast each morning the newspaper would come out. The order was always the same: the five-minute quiz, then the daily crossword, followed by the nine-letter word wheel. I would happily pull my weight with anything that related to the 2000s onwards. Once we hit the cryptic crossword, though, that was generally my cue to leave the table. 

Lately I have started to get into cryptic clues and crosswords myself, and I have been really enjoying them. Trying to become good at something while coming from a very low base has been a learning journey, that is for sure. 

At the same time as being a complete novice at cryptics, I have been having a number of conversations with coaches about how they can become better at reading the game on game day. I find it such an intriguing question. 

Over the last four seasons I have been lucky enough to sit in two to four coaches’ boxes most weekends. It has given me an amazing opportunity to watch a wide range of coaches and coaching groups work on game day. 

After spending that much time watching coaches, you start to notice that some seem to have a deep understanding of the game. They have an amazing knack for identifying issues quickly, sometimes intervening before it becomes obvious to everyone else what is happening. 

Others who work with them see it as well and want to develop a similar ability. Yet the coaches themselves can struggle to articulate how they developed it, often referring vaguely to intuition, gut feel, instinct or experience. 

It is obvious these coaches are experts in their understanding of the game. If you want to learn to be like them, what you are really asking is: how do you develop expertise? 

Experts make complex environments look simple, while novices can feel overwhelmed by them. As I have battled away at my cryptic clues each day, the process has helped solidify my thinking on how a coach might begin developing expertise in reading the game. 

It might seem like stating the obvious, but when experts and novices look at the same thing, they do not see it in the same way. Novices tend to see separate pieces of information, while experts see relationships between them. They recognise familiar configurations and meaningful patterns, which allows them to make sense of what they are looking at much more quickly. 

This pattern-recognition ability matters because working memory capacity is limited. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham describes working memory as the “fundamental bottleneck of human cognition.” 

Psychologist Nelson Cowan’s research has put that capacity at around three to five units of information at any one time. Not much at all. 

When a novice sees a collection of separate bits of information, working memory can quickly become overwhelmed, making it difficult to understand what is happening. Experts have a workaround. They can chunk information together, which means each of those three to five units can hold a meaningful pattern rather than one disconnected detail. 

In 1965, Adriaan de Groot showed that chess masters could recreate mid-game chessboards almost flawlessly after seeing them for only a few seconds. When the pieces were placed randomly, with no relationship to a real game, the masters performed no better than novices. The difference was not memory, it was pattern recognition. 

Another advantage experts develop is the ability to automate processes within their area of expertise. Once a process no longer demands the same level of conscious thought, working memory is freed up to notice and respond to other information. 

Think about learning to drive a car. One thing the tester checks is whether you regularly look in your wing (side) mirrors and rear-view mirror. When you are starting out, you have to consciously remind yourself to check each one. That is difficult because other tasks are competing for your attention at the same time. Steering, checking your speed, braking smoothly and staying in your lane all require conscious thought. Over time, the process of checking the mirrors becomes more automatic. You still do it, but you no longer need to talk yourself through every glance. That frees up attention for the mother with the pram looking to cross the road, the roadworks 200 metres ahead, or the shortcut you might take during peak hour to avoid the traffic. 

As I’ve been learning cryptic clues, I’ve been a complete novice again. I have looked at clues and felt overwhelmed, mainly because I’ve had no ability to spot the patterns within them. It all just washed over me. The clues aren’t impossible, I just haven’t known what deserved my attention. My learning has therefore focused on intentionally building up my pattern-recognition ability. 

This is a deliberately simple explanation of cryptics. There are layers and nuance far beyond what I can cover here, but at its core I have learnt to break a clue into three parts: 

The definition is fairly self-explanatory. It is the meaning of the answer you are trying to find and usually sits at either the beginning or the end of the clue. 

The indicator and fodder make up the wordplay. The indicator gives a coded instruction about how to manipulate letters or words, while the fodder is the exact material you manipulate. They are usually found beside each other. 

Now that I know what I am looking for, I can approach a clue in much the same way as I use the mirrors in a car. I flick between those three elements, trying to identify where each one sits and whether I recognise a familiar pattern. 

Let’s return to the clue from the start: 

Monkey with no cigar, as nature intended (7). 

At first it is overwhelming. Where do you even start with monkeys and cigars? But once you intentionally look for the patterns, the structure begins to appear. 

Let’s start with a possible indicator. To monkey with something means to meddle with it or play around with it, so ‘monkey with’ could be an instruction to create an anagram. The answer has seven letters, and the words beside the indicator, ‘no cigar’, also contain seven letters. That gives us some promising fodder. 

If we are going to ‘monkey with’ ‘no cigar’, the remaining phrase, ‘as nature intended’, becomes our likely definition. We now have a possible role for all three elements. Rearrange the letters in ‘no cigar’ and we get organic, which fits the definition. 

As I do more of these, I am beginning to recognise words and patterns that suggest certain operations. Anything that means mixing or disruption might be an anagram indicator. Words such as ‘initially’ or ‘first’ might ask you to take the first letters of the fodder. I am slowly building a bank of these patterns, and my flicking between the mirrors is becoming more automatic. Sometimes an answer now seems to jump out at me, even when I cannot immediately explain every step that got me there. 

Reading the game develops through much the same process. Coaches often talk about trying to watch everything, but that is usually a recipe for becoming overwhelmed. A game contains far too much information for working memory to process in any meaningful way. The starting point is not to broaden your attention. It is to narrow it towards the things you have decided matter most. 

Take an assistant coach responsible for the midfield. As a simple example, they might enter the game with three focus areas: 

Those areas become the coach’s chunks. Within each one, they have a picture of what good looks like and a set of meaningful patterns they are trying to recognise. Rather than watching the whole game and hoping something important stands out, they can deliberately cycle their attention between contest, defence and offence. 

At first, that process will probably feel clunky. Like a learner driver checking the mirrors, the coach might need to remind themselves to move from one focus area to the next. There may also be a nagging feeling that narrowing attention means missing something important. Intuitively, it feels as though paying attention to fewer things will lead to seeing less. In practice, it often does the opposite. But those focus areas were chosen because they are believed to have the greatest influence on how the team wants to play. Keeping you focus on those chosen cues cuts through the noise and makes the most important information easier to recognise. Remember - if everything is important, nothing is important.

With repetition, the cycling becomes more automatic. At the same time, the coach builds a richer bank of patterns within each area. They become quicker at recognising when the midfield is balanced, when pressure is arriving too late, or when the team has stopped changing angles with the ball. What once looked like a collection of isolated moments begins to form a clearer picture.

This does not mean the three focus areas remain fixed forever, or that an expert coach only watches three things. The point is to create an entry point into the complexity. As patterns become familiar and some observations become more automatic, the coach has more capacity to notice other information and add greater nuance to what they are seeing. 

If this sounds like a stretch, it is worth remembering that every expert was once a novice. They did not begin by reading the game as a slightly less experienced expert. They saw the game as novices and gradually learnt what deserved their attention, what different patterns meant and how those patterns connected.

As Daniel Willingham writes, “as far as anyone knows, the only way to develop mental facility is to repeat the target process again and again and again.” 

Coaches don’t often have opportunities to practice coaching on game day. That is why becoming a better reader of the game begins with intentionally narrowing your focus rather than broadening it and repeatedly directing your attention towards those areas. Over time you’ll build up your bank of experience and some of what once required real effort starts to feel intuitive. 

That feeling is not magic, and it is not something reserved for a select group of coaches. It is the result of repeatedly paying attention to the right things, learning what the patterns mean, and slowly building the expertise to recognise them more quickly. 

For anyone who fancies themselves as a cryptic clue solver, I asked my grandma to create one around one of the themes of this post. Remember, she is good at this, so we are definitely moving towards expert level now.

Design a wooden shoe incorporating last bit of leather (7)

Test yourself against my grandma below!

Design a wooden shoe incorporating last bit of leather (7)

What levels this clue up from what we’ve discussed so far is that in this clue, you have to do some substitution of one part of the clue as well.

Breaking up the clue you can see an indicator in “incorporating last bit of.” This is telling us to take the last letter of leather (the ‘r’) and put it into ‘a wooden shoe’. This would leave us with a definition of ‘design.’ But the word we are looking for is 7 letters and wooden shoe is too long. This means we’ll need to find a 6 letter word to substitute for a wooden shoe, to then put the r in.

Deep diving into 6 letter words for shoe we can find that ‘patten’ is a type of wooden overshoe (my grandma loves a deep cut!). If we then take the ‘r’ from ‘leather’ we can make pattern which is another word for ‘design.’

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