Truly talented people rarely rest on their laurels. It's the old maxim first grinningly expressed by Gary Player on the golf course. "Sure I'm a lucky golfer, and the more I practice the luckier I get."

Haven't we all at times expressed a wish to play piano with the assured touch of a classical maestro. Or longed to coax from a guitar emotional soundscapes a la Clapton that define a generation? Lest we forget, such mastery has been achieved through countless solitary hours of repetition, study and dedicated practice. Genius is often a too casually applied tag for a decade of industrial head-down application, unseen by the public.

David Beckham is a fine example of a pro who has looked after his body and striven constantly to improve. He's always trained hard, some achievement when you consider the trappings and temptations surrounding 'brand Beckham.' Even Capello was forced into a u-turn at Real Madrid, having to eat crow and reinstate Beckham into his title-winning side in 2007.

It may be late in the season to pose the question, is there more to be drawn from our own current first team alumni, but a good topic to consider now ahead of the summer pre-season programme. In fact, it was the Liverpool fixture that got me thinking over the subject. I shall explain. When Liverpool carried all before them in the 1960's it all stemmed from the methods of the great Bill Shankley. Some terrific goalscorers went through the coaches hands in that golden era - Hunt, St. John, Toshack, Keegan, Rush, Fowler. All of them spent time in the dreaded 'Sweatbox.'

In essence, Bill's rasp commanded all his strikers to take their turn inside the box. Depending on his mood players would endure up to 10 minutes having balls pinged constantly at them from all four sides of what was a tight parallelogram. There was one 'nominal' goal but no keeper. The discipline, where 5 minutes often left players on their knees, called for instinctive reaction of swivel, hit, shoot, spin, trap, shoot...again and again. There was no time to look up or think. The players held the mental image of where the target area was, and they were drilled to hit the ball instinctively as it came into their feet from all directions.

If there's a better discipline out there today to sharpen up your forwards finishing, I've yet to hear of it. OK, have a stab at who from our current forwards mght benefit from a dose of the 'Sweatbox?' Step forward Moussa Dembele. Now in his first season we've all seen the potential in our Belgian import to sparkle like a long tall glass of ice-cold Leffe. But when the ball comes fizzing across the box, well Moussa goes a bit flat. He's clearly not a natural finisher. Can it be taught? Here's my first candidate for a summer improvement programme.

Candidate number 2 - and I love this guy so much, not least for being just a regular ordinary guy who poses for photos in Sainsbury's, that it even hurts to criticise him. But whether he senses it himself or not, Brede Hangeland is nowhere near as dangerous as he should be in the opposition box. To be fair to our blond bomber, the club coaches do need a whole new dossier of set-piece routines for next season, from which Hangeland should easily be netting 10-12 goals over the stretch. Let's have more short corners, a target man on the first post to head balls on, and a reversion to the Bullard-Davies trick where with all the big men hogging the back stick the ball gets drilled on the deck into the apex of the box for someone to hit a rasper inside the near post.

And talking of raspers, Chris Baird only has to rid himself of the mental thing telling him he's well, 'only a defender, so I'll just have a hit and hope.' He's got more skill than he realises. Nobody's suggesting Bairdinho morphes into Roberto Carlos, but a summer setting him up for clean on-target hits from both set and open play situations would be time well spent.

So there you have it. Food for thought. You do the hard miles and come Saturday reap your reward. This season's seen us blown off course from early on. We've lost ground baling water, and in truth I'm pretty happy now to see where we sit in the league. But our recent run of form suggests there's so much more to come from this current Fulham team. Here's to the future.

COYW

Twitter@fulhamphil

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