the real football

That soccer coaches forum over at www.and-again.com really does have some gems to offer.  At times, you might have to weed through some crap, but there is always good stuff there.  If you are a soccer coach, I highly suggest you stop by and take a look.

Here is another offering by my coaching friend in Hong Kong.  This is guidance that coaches at all levels should consider.

All coaches need to use conditions (rules that we put into training games, i.e. two touch or less) , as you say Jim, the skill I think is judging what you are potentially gaining and developing from the specific conditions, how long to deploy them and where and how you go from where they have taken you.

Coaches should read this weekly, or maybe before every session they go to.

We had a local coach come out to our club to do a demo session for our club’s coaches.  Team is the top U14B team in the state.  His topic was meant to be possession and speed of play.  He is really pretty good, and I do not mean this to knock his overall abilities.  Hoever, he had a bit of a tough night.

Why?  Too many of the conditions he was putting on the game gave him more and less than he was looking for.  He played a possession game to targets (something like 5v5 in the middle, played in a roughly square space, two targets for blue on the north and two on the south side, two whites on the east and two on the west), with the rule that when you play to the target, the target rotates in and you go out to take the target’s spot.  I like it; I use similar conditions regularly.

It started OK, but the clinician was not content with the pace at which the ball was being played.  He wanted the ball to be pinged around a little better, and I agree with him that it was something that could be improved.  However, here is when we part ways.

He stopped play, and told the targets that they had to wait until the ball crossed the line they were standing just outside before coming to get it.  Makes sense, right?  Well, it might on its face, but let’s think about what we have just encouraged our players to do.

Now, we had a possession game that was meant to encourage the central players to find the outside players, and play them into the game.  The player who played out would then be an outside player, remaking the team’s shape.  The player coming in from the outside was meant to find central teammates, and keep the ball circulating.  The ball was meant to begin moving rapidly from player to player, and one of the ideas is to find the best available player on the outside who can come into the game with energy.

Now, what did the condition do?  Well, first, it told the players on the outside to stand and wait for a ball that was underhit.  When players were close, they were tending to overhit the ball to the outside targets – I don’t know, maybe hoping that they could average out the underhit balls?!?!?

There were two results of this.  The targets became either very static in the demeanor, because they did have to wait for a number of underhit balls; or, the targets were sometimes played an overhit ball that they had to kill the pace off before coming onto the field, which actually slowed down their entry to the field.  These two things made the speed of play in the session slower rather than faster.

Of course, there was also a third problem.  Since the condition of the ball having to cross the line before targets could play the ball was put it, we no longer had those perfectly weighted balls – the pass that was played with enough pace, but also was just soft enough that it led the target onto the field a couple of steps, in the direction that the player playing the ball intended to play him.  No, the team is not so good that this was happening with a high degree of consistency, but they understand the idea (I know their coach and I have worked with the team many times in training and matches over the past year or so).

Once again, the clinician did identify something he wanted to be better, and I agree with him that sometimes balls were being underhit.  However, what he got all wrong, in my eyes, was what he chose to emphasize, how he chose to emphasize it (targets may not enter until ball crosses line), and when he chose to do this (the condition made a little sense when the targets were not entering the field when the ball was played to them, but instead were simply playing it back to a teammate).

The funny thing, this is a case when no condition was needed.  All that was necessary was to remind (players in this group understand why and when to ping a ball) the players of why it is important to weight their passes well, and how that often means to hit the ball with more pace than they had been.  I would have even demonstrated when to hit it hard, and when to play the more leading ball into the targets.  The message sent would have been the weight of the pass is important, and often sends a message to the receiver.

This is why I like so much the sentence above that was written by my friend from Hong Kong.  There is great skill in choosing wisely the conditions and rules one puts into training games.  An even greater skill, though, is recognizing and understanding what your conditions ask of your players.  Just as important as training good habits and ideas is to make sure that we are not training bad ones, either by design or not.