The game should be an opportunity to learn, to experiment, to challenge, and to teach. Just letting them get on with it can sometimes be counter productive. If you've been working on short passing all evening and all your team is doing is smashing it long, clearly there is a disconnect between your topic and your scrimmage. We should be imposing rules, challenges, and parting advice and suggestions.
It should also feel like a match. With a match, something is at stake. Points, pride, trophies etc. Someone wants to beat someone. Someone wants to prove something. Something has to be earned or avoided. Here are some tips.
Scenarios. Much like Community Chest in Monopoly, these cards can throw a spanner in the works. Print these off, and stick them on the back of the cards below. Randomly assign one to a team at the end of the game.
There you go, lads. You're about to win the league. Don't screw it up. Yes, it's make believe, and yes it requires imagination, but are you suggesting kids lack that? Just look at the way they all started flipping bottles like brainless morons.
Give them a challenge. Get them to figure it out. Whether you are losing or winning may affect how you need to play. What's at stake my affect the risks you take. Let them have a team talk, give them a half time, and see if they can figure it out themselves. This shows a technical and tactical understanding, but it is also massively working the muscles in the psychological and social corners. We have ownership, leadership, decision making, communication, motivation, delegation, probably even some Californication, there's so much going on.
Don't under estimate the hidden curriculum. You may have been working on counter-attack. Great. Your team is losing in the Champions League. How can these teams factor that into their approach? Will it work? Will they try it? Will they choose it? All questions they have to be analysing. And through that, they will understand it far better. Knowledge is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting or a fire.
Next up, we have infliction. How you dish these out may depend on you as a coach and the group you work with. It could be an incentive for players to work hard, behave, and display the right attitude in training, Do that, and you get your reward by sabotaging your opponent to some degree. You may give one to either team. If you have an odd number, instead of a magic man or comodin, you let the inferior team pick one of these.
Firstly, we see how this may affect the style of play of the opposition. If the goalkeeper can only hold the ball for two seconds, is the keeper likely to distribute quickly or slowly? How about if they cannot score from outside the box, or are limited to numbers or touches in certain areas of the field?
Then we look at the cards that affect an individual. Choose two opponents to be limited to only two touches. Who would you choose? Perhaps the best dribblers. Perhaps the kid that has a dreadful first touch and usually takes a correction touch before passing. Choose one opponent to not be allowed in their team's defending half. Who would you choose? Obviously their best defender.
What affect does this have? Well picture this. You're so good that the opposition has limited you to what you can do. Perhaps you take it as a compliment. You're also so good at defending that the guys around you can work less because you always come to their rescue. Now those weaker players are becoming more involved in the game. You may be good at defending, but the coach would like it if you could carry the ball into midfield more and begin some attacks. And now here you are, not allowed to defend in your own half. All you can do is start attacks, recycle possession, maybe even press from the front. A different part of your game begins to be worked upon rather than neglected. There's also the mental aspect of proving them wrong. You think I can't do this? Watch me.
Rule is a word with negative connotations. I can already feel the fun leaking out of some readers just by seeing that word. Rules save lives. They also destroy them. A rule itself is intangible, and neither morally good nor bad. In this sense, what we're looking at is to nudge certain outcomes. A full game at the end is complete random practice. Just how often does our topic and the ideas we want to work on occur in a proper match? If it's building play from the back, you may only get three attempts to do that in a twenty minute game. So let's include a few nudges here and there to make that happen a bit more frequently.
Some of these are flat out rules. Like silence or overhead. Others are not even restrictions at all, more challenges, or bonuses. If the goalkeeper assists a goal, the goal is worth triple. That's extra bacon. It doesn't mean you can't score a goal without the keeper, it just incentivises a team to try it. Imagine if that was a restriction? Teams can only score if it's within two passes of goalkeeper possession, What we might think is counter-attack suddenly becomes shelling it against a team that has parked the bus. Try not to force limits, but rather challenges.
So we've been working on possession, short passes, changing the point of the attack, patient build-up, whatever. A goal is a goal whether there were no passes or a hundred passes. A goal is a goal whether it was bum or foot. A goal is a goal whether it was from six yards or thirty yards. You're still going to smash the ball in the net if you are six yards out with an open goal. A restriction says you can't score this obvious goal scoring opportunity, you have to make another three passes first. That's unrealistic and pointless. If you incentivise every four passes during build-up as being worth an extra point when the goal is scored, you will have teams trying the patient passing build-up, but at the same time won't deny them the tap-in, the screamer, the dribble etc.
Have a look at the one to the right of that. A goal is worth triple, if within the same sequence of possession, the player who wins the ball also scores the goal. What's that encouraging? Perhaps counter-attack. Perhaps high pressure. Perhaps attacking wing backs. These can be interpreted in many different ways, which makes them relevant for so many different scenarios and ideas. If you as a coach can see three different ideas from one card, how many can the kids see?
WHAT ARE THESE, WILL???!?!!
These are brilliant. There will be plenty of players kids have heard of. There will be someone on there that looks like them. There will be names or even colours they like. Some kids will want to be like their heroes and will pick a famous card. Others will want an appropriate challenge and will pick one regardless of who is on it.
Some are questions, like Steph Houghton's "Try to be an example of a good teammate. What might this look like?" Others are commands like Mike Grella's "Cut inside and successfully produce an inswinging cross." Houghton's requires you to do that all game. Grella's may be just once. You can be a good example for ninety minutes, but how often can you cut inside for an inswinging cross? So here we are looking at football, the challenges and demands of the game, from all four corners; technically, physically, psychologically, and socially.
The annoying thing is that with transfers, they go out of date pretty quickly. All depends on just how much time and effort you want or need to spend on designing, printing, and laminating.
There's literally something here for everyone. All positions are covered. There's a wide range of technical and tactical ideas. Coaches can decide if they want to be strict on positions. Players can decide if you want to give them ownership. Then the players can assess, evaluate, give and receive feedback.
Now what else can we give out to create more autonomy?
COACHES!!!!!
Young players are more likely to try something if Alex Ferguson or Jurgen Klopp tells them to do it, rather than Coach Willy. "Coach Willy says try to win the ball back as high up the field as possible... boring! He's just trying to be another Guardiola with all this high press stuff."
But wait...
"Mauricio Pochettino says we need to try to win the ball back as high up the field as possible? COOL!"
It clearly does have an effect. Maybe not a massive one, but one that can help them relate it to the real game. What does high press look like? It's pretty vague when you explain it. But the kids may have all seen Spurs. You may even have some Spurs fans. Lets do the high press like Spurs! Some kids may not be so sure, whereas others will be, and they will take over. Leadership, ownership, delegation, responsibility. That's before we have even kicked a ball and applied this new tactical understanding.
This make believe stuff really does make a difference. If you don't, go down to your local five-a-side centre and see grown men, well out of fitness, and never with any hope of ever having played at a higher level, wearing the shirts of their heroes, living out their failed dreams. I don't wear a Rovers shirt at the gym because the blue and white halves are badass (although they most certainly are), I do it because I want to be one of them. And those ten minutes of huffing and puffing on the treadmill, I ignore the red face, the buckets of sweat, and the jiggly bits, and see myself in the mirror strutting along steadily, representing the team that I love.
Just look at the scenarios that can come into play here. You could be playing for local side Aldershot Town and be managed by Jose Mourinho. You could be Barcelona managed by Alex Ferguson. You could be one of the WSL Allstars managed by Jurgen Klopp. Kids love this kind of mix and match. If they can't agree on a team, they just choose their favourite player and make a new team.
This is a viable combination for an 8v8 game
Team One
Coach: Pep Guardiola
1. Manuel Neuer
2. Zlatan Ibrahimovic
3. Cristiano Ronaldo
4. Gareth Bale
5. Neymar
6. Lionel Messi
7. Vincent Kompany
8. Bobby Moore
How cool is that?
No one telling you that you can't. You being who you want to be. Choosing your own challenges and your own coach.
Lastly, there's this thing. It's double sided. One face has the pitch lines, the second face has the four corner box. It's laminated, and you can write on there with water based pens.
The box is self-explanatory. The pitch also, apart from two things; the red box and the blue box. The red box is literally The Red Zone. It's a scary area that we won't want the opposition to enter. The blue box is our Second Six, the area that we should be whipping crosses into. Glad that's now cleared up.
What these are for is to get players to plan, assess, and evaluate what they are going to do, how they are going to do it, and why it worked or it didn't. It's part of the Plan-Do-Review process. What did you do well? What do you need to improve upon? What are the opposition doing well? What are their weaknesses? What changes might you need to make?
The pitch works because it's essentially a tactics board that doesn't cost tons of money and won't lose you any counters. It also has a lot of the areas and terms that I use in my explanations. It helps the players relate the game to what I say about the game. If I'm talking about defensive thirds, halfspaces, and second sixes, the players can clearly see where they are, and how they relate to certain phases of the game. It's also worth noting the yellow line in the attacking box is the shooting line. Not sure whether to cross or shoot? That line will give you an idea of which one is more favourable.
These are great for debriefs and group discussions. Give them a task, a challenge, a match. Get them to analyse it. In a group of sixteen, it can be one coach talks and sixteen players listen. Or it could be four players talk and twelve players listen, as they are split into four groups of four. In a ration of 1:3, each one of them can give their input and feel their ideas are being heard. That doesn't always happen in a larger group environment. It also helps with the vital skill of giving feedback, but more importantly, receiving feedback. Humans are terrible at receiving specifically negative criticism. By creating an open, honest, learning environment, players become more receptive. There's a clear idea, and something by which we are measuring your performance, it wasn't quite good enough, here's what you can do better. Simple. But done in a way that players are far less protective over their own egos, because they understand reflection is part of the process, and it's coming in a measured, reserved way, from a teammate they trust and respect. It's not done shouting or with aggression, or from a position of inferiority, like from a parent or a coach, but from a teammate, a peer, and an equal. If we can improve our teammates, our teammates will improve us.
Lastly, I'll include this goal scoring challenge.
If a goal scored in a training match can be characterised by ONE of the above boxes, then that team has a mark in that box. Just one, because it's conceivable that a goal could be a one-two and a cross, or a cross with a volley inside the six yard box. The team that scores chooses the box they feel is most relevant to the goal they just scored. Also, it becomes strategic. Teams are supposed to compete to make a line either vertically, diagonally, or horizontally across the sheet. The first team to go from one edge to the opposite side is the winner. So from score in the six yard box to score from a rebound. Your rules can vary. If a box is ticked, it can be owned by that team, and if it obstructs a pathway, then the opposition must go around that path to complete their line. Or you could do it so that you can smash through the opposition's line, and turn that box into your own. It might mean, starting from the bottom, your goals look like half volley goal, score a 1v1 with the GK, header goal, toe punt. It may be that the team has to deviate depending on the types of goals they can score, but as long as they can connect a chain, either from top to bottom, or from left to right, then they have completed the task. It's a lot of fun and players take it very seriously.
So these are just some of the things I do. I don't do it all the time. It can get samey and boring. I go in phases, and link it to what we are working on. There's no way you could or should do a session that combines all of the elements discussed in this piece. A few work together very well, but if you do too many, you begin to distract from the actual importance of playing football. Use it to enhance the learning. Don't block it.
Especially the scenarios, rules, and inflictions, we should be doing these anyway, but it's sometimes hard to think of one in the spur of the moment of training (if the session goes slightly off on a tangent), or if we are trying to plan one, we may feel that are creative juices have perhaps evaporated, and we're left with repetitive ideas. There are twenty four scenarios there. At one session per week, that's almost half a year, providing you don't take a week off. Some are similar, but life can be similar at times. It's a way of automating the process. A little thinking now, with some time and effort, and you take out a lot of the thinking for many weeks going forward. It's session planning time, I can't think of a challenge. Do I work my brain, or do I just look at a card? Better yet, why not give the kids a chance to decide? Pick a card, any card.
Sure, I would have loved this stuff when I was a kid. I am envious of the coaching, facilities, and 24/7 football kids get these days. But they are fast becoming an inside generation that lacks creativity. There's quick fixes, next day delivery, instant gratification, and even fame accelerating abhorrent celebrity love fests like X Factor that take away the work, pain, sacrifice, dedication, and talent required to be a successful musician. Let's do our best to make training a tad more challenging, a bit more inventive, and even more realistic.
