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Hi Gary
Happy for you to use the content. I’ll copy it over to the new forum..
Aman
Hi Danny
Thanks for your comments!
Your suggestion about making sure the training sessions are played at full intensity is a good one. I really like the idea of having a set number of balls in the rondos and seeing who “wins” more.
Your post also got me thinking about what exactly this tipping point is and what can we address over what timeframes. I ended up drawing a couple of charts to get it clear. This might be over-sciencing it – but I thought I’d share what I came up with.
First – here is what I mean by a tipping point. Basically as the pressure on the player in possession gets more intense (i.e. giving each player less time) they start taking fewer touches UP TO A POINT. Once you go beyond that it falls apart and players rapidly want a lot more touches as they get panicky:
Then I thought about where the improvements can come from to allow players to deal with the pressure. It seemed like there were three ways to improve:
- Give players more time on the ball (spacing/ weight of pass/ lose your man)
- Make them comfortable with having less time (awareness/ patterns/ communication)
- Train them to play off fewer touches (technical ability/ rondos)
Which I put on the chart like this:
Clearly you have to work on all these elements to develop the team correctly. But if I’m looking for shorter term gains I think its going to come from spacing/ weight of pass/ lose your man to allow players more time on the ball – before they develop the longer terms skills of getting comfortable with having less time and having the technique to play off fewer touches.
Not sure if that’s helpful, but it helped me get clear on what I’m trying to achieve!
Aman
Gary and Luis
Thanks for your responses and support! The team worked really hard in training this evening – feeling the pain of the loss at the weekend. Lots of focus on transitions (based on the 5v5v5 possession game) and how to quickly regain and keep possession when we’ve been muscled off it. We then worked hard on getting compact when we lose the ball in the scrimmage. It’s going to take some time, but we’re working on it!
Luis – really enjoyed your u13B videos. Great to see them controlling the game and playing intelligently.
Aman
Hello Michael
I wanted to reinforce some of the points that Walter made.
You looked like the stronger team in the video, and, from the stats, had more of the possession. Yet I noticed that you didn’t put together a 6+ pass sequence. That’s crucial to developing a possession team, and also affects how your team pressures the ball. If you play with average pass strings of 3 to 4, then you end up with a huge number of transitions in a game. Your players are going to struggle to maintain the level of intensity and concentration required to press each transition.
A few suggestions for you based on my experience of arriving at a similar place:
- You need a goalie who can distribute from feet. There were a number of goal kicks where your goalie was struggling to play a simple pass to the centre backs. Do you include your goalie in the rondos? It’s also important that your defence know that they can go back to the goalie if they need to.
- There seems to be a preference to kick the ball forwards randomly rather than playing a controlled pass backwards. Changing this is tricky as it will go wrong sometimes and give away a goal. But your players need confidence that it is better to retain possession by moving the ball backwards than kicking forward aimlessly.
- This is all built around confidence in the passing ability of the back 5 and goalie. We moved many of our best players into our defensive line to give a foundation to our possession. E.g. I noticed your left wing seems a strong player – would he consider playing left back for a bit? He’d get more of the ball that way and would be encouraged to overlap
Overall this all comes down to philosophy. Players feel the pressure to win every game and not make any mistakes. It takes a lot of playing out of the back practice and rondos to encourage them to not play the 50/50 ball. And, even then, players are going to make mistakes initially
I think if you can increase the number of 6+ pass plays, then your defensive pressure will function much better. The intensity will increase and opponents will panic more when they win the ball.
Hope that helps – thanks for sharing your progress!
Aman
Hans
I think there are two different questions here:
1. Should coaches provide a lot of instruction during matches? My personal sense is that they shouldn’t. There’s a good section on this in Dan Abrahams’ book “Soccer Brain” – young players struggle to absorb instructions on top of all the other stimuli they are dealing with. What they most need are messages to maintain their self-belief. Personally I try to avoid sending messages to a player on the ball but will communicate positional instructions to players not on the ball (usually “lose your man”, “overlap” or “get wide”). We have found it is more powerful to video the match and provide instruction by sharing match highlights/ issues.
2. Should players be encouraged to pass rather than dribble? One of my biggest learnings from 3four3 has been that possession comes from what players do before receiving the ball. If a coach is shouting “pass” at a player it is already way too late – and normally the sign of a bad coach. The player should have already scanned for options and received to the back foot. They should have been trained to understand the pattern on the pitch. If at that point the player sees an opportunity to dribble then that is their call – provided they have scanned and received correctly. But many young players dribble because they haven’t scanned and can’t see the patterns, and that needs to be worked on in training.
That’s my take on it anyway…
Aman
Thanks for your support Porter!
Thanks Ryan – that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m moving to another club where we are pulling together a new U13 team – we’ll train twice a week and set the culture from day one (I’ve watched Brian’s day one video a few times now!). The standard is a little lower – but I’m confident we’ll see results with a stronger team ethic.
The season starts in September – and I’ll be sharing much more video to track our progress. Wow this stuff is addictive!
I saw the U9 video you put on your twitter feed. Looks like you guys are making good progress
Hello Kit
I wanted to second what Simon is saying – you’re on the right track. We also experienced parental issues that arose from taking over a team from another coach and changing the philosophy. Here are some thoughts for you:
Do you know what the unhappy parents are looking for? Is your results record better than last year? From my experience they quieten down quickly if you keep winning. The bigger issue is when they disrupt your training and match play BEFORE you’ve put a run of wins together.
If you get issues before you have a winning record, then it becomes tricky. We found that discussions and meetings with parents didn’t really help – its difficult to change people’s minds irrespective of how many videos you show them and can have the side effect of making some of the parents make public statements about why they think you are wrong (we had a couple of vocal parents who were convinced we didn’t have players with the technical ability to play possession). This quickly gets reflected in a loss of focus by their children.
We found the only way out of this was to stick to our guns and accept that some players may leave. Poor engagement in training/ matches has to mean they sit out. This becomes particularly difficult if the complainers are parents of better players. But if they don’t buy in based on your team’s performances they will disrupt your progress (and pattern play!) as long as they are around. Eventually one of you will end up moving on
Hope that helps…
Good that it shows the difference between academy pitches and grassroots mud patches.
I think the approach we have in England of taking good players away from their local clubs into academies, raising their hopes then rejecting many can’t be right. I’ve seen a number of young players have their confidence broken and then be sent back to grassroots. Personally I much prefer the German approach where academies work with local clubs and help raise the standard of coaching rather than just regarding the local clubs as a pond to fish in.
Tolya
That’s great to see. I’m impressed by how your team are looking for passes as a first preference. With that age group we found it difficult to coax them out of attempting to dribble past everyone on the pitch.
I’d be interested to know how you are dealing with the more physical U10 teams and those that apply high pressure (there was some of that in the U9 final in your video). When you lost 0-7 to the best U10 team, what did that look like? Were you losing the ball playing out of the back, or did you get countered fast when you were in the opposing half?
Are you working on some tactical pattern play to deal with these cases (e.g. goal kicks straight to wide mid/ striker who lays the ball off?)
We are a really small U12 team and are coming up against much bigger, stronger sides. We tend to dominate play for about 20 minutes – before the opposition get wise and press us aggressively high up the pitch.
Aman
Hello David
I’m based in England and have just joined 3four3. I coach U12 in Surrey.
I saw a number of your posts and wanted to say how they sound familiar:
- Poor quality pitches
- Behavioural issues
- Little quality support at the grassroots level
There’s one other element that I think affects us here too I think – parental expectations. Too often I hear “clear it!” or “get rid of it!” shout from parents from the touchlines (mostly not ours thankfully). But the quality of the surface does mean that you will make more errors playing possession and the opponent will likely counter by kicking long over the top and getting results.
The long ball path is undoubtedly less effective for development – but try telling that to parents and boys who are eager to win.
Aman
Hello Everyone
My name is Aman Grewal and I coach a U12 local boys team in Surrey, England. We have a group of skillful but small boys that are just not suited to jungle ball, so I am really working on a possession style.
This isn’t easy in English “grassroots” football. The academies and English FA have changed their focus to become much more possession oriented but grassroots remains entrenched in ugly, physical, long-ball battles. Partly because our pitches get so muddy and partly because that’s what parents demand.
So we’re going against the madding crowd. I’ve already introduced rondos and playing out of the back based on the 3four3 available materials – so I’m excited to add in the rest of the methodology.
If there are any other south east England based coaches it would be great to hear from you – it would be nice to have some moral support against the masses!
Aman
