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The Football Show · 19 October 2026
Peter Martin discusses how managers can use a rope-a-dope style game plan, citing Muhammad Ali against George Foreman in 1974. Gordon Parks recalls a Scottish Cup win over Celtic where the week was spent identifying Celtic's weaknesses and not letting them play.
Transcript:
Here's a question then. Have you played with a manager who said, "Listen, by the way, man for man, we're coming up against a team who will absolutely batter us. We're going into the ring. We need to play to our strengths to negate their strengths so that we can pull off what is called, and I know you're young and you might not remember this, but Roughie remembers it. So do I. This is a rope-a-dope. This is 1974 when you're walking into the ring in Kinshasa and Zaire and George Foreman has got a record of battering the living daylights out of everybody and Muhammad Ali looks and goes, "Well, I'm not going to play him at his tactics. I'm going to work out a way to dupe him and then I'm going to floor him."
I think that's a thing with football now. I think everyone wants to play the same way. Like you were saying, everyone wants to take the ball down at the back and but like sometimes you have to play to your strengths and I don't know if everyone always does that. I was in the Clyde dressing room the season that beat Celtic in the Scottish Cup, Roy Keane and all, and the whole week was strategy to go and identify Celtic's weaknesses don't let them play and we had a system and it worked an absolute treat and anybody that was in that team will tell you the same thing these things you can overcome a lot by good tactical plays and carrying it out executing it perfectly you'll have been in wrestling that's done the same and pulled all shocks in fact I know you have so again there's a lot of merit and good management and giving teams belief that they can overcome the odds. I didn't think Celtic would go against Benfica and get hammered and get dismantled as quickly.
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