Summer Saturday Coaching Sessions – Developing our Team Culture, Positional Play & Formation

Over the spring and summer we are going to be concentrating on a few areas. Please try and attend the coaching sessions. Attendance was a bit hit and miss last summer and meant we didn’t play anything like the number of games as the previous year. To improve we need to practice at training and we will try and organize lots of games.

Please let us know your availability in advance so we can plan the sessions. It’s hard when we plan for something and only half the people show up without us knowing. We like to arrange lots of games which is vital to develop and we can do this as we are lucky to have our own ground. However we can’t arrange games with other teams at a few days notice or if we don’t know how many players we have. We will put our dates well in advance and if we get enough confirmed will try and fix games.

Team Culture

We want people committed to the team , who care about the team and who will do anything for the team so we can develop , improve and learn together. We can only improve as a group if everyone of us thinks like this. Good team spirit is easy when things are going well , the real test of character comes when we have to pull together in tough games.

Positional Play

Football games are won by scoring more goals than the other team it’s that simple. We want to improve our Positional Play because its been harder than we thought scoring goals this season so we need to be cleverer than ever.

Most teams we play are using at least 3 defenders and many play with 4 at the back with 2 CDMS. That means we have to get by 6 players plus the goalkeeper so we need to come up with a solution to get an advantage. The Other teams only tend to use 2 central strikers so if we stop these entering Zone 14 we can stop danger.

We definitely won’t be compromising on our attacking Philosophy it’s how we want to play and believe the game should be played . What we will do to develop different variations of our 2-3-2-3 formation we can adapt in games both defensive and Ultra Attacking versions.

We have a plan with just a few positional changes to do this plus so we can quickly change from 2-3-2-3, to 2-3-5, 4-3-3, or 3-3-1-3 if needed in the game without much trouble. Whats important is all players understand how the positions movement work. It’s complicated but nothing we can’t handle .

Pep Guardiola at Bayern used this type of system in the Bundesliga last year with devastating effect & it’s something also that Jorge Sampaio of Sevilla and Chile used when they won the Copa America last year
How are we going to do this ?

We will need to improve our positional understanding, vision of where teammates are, movements, to understand space, know when and where to play to when in possession, be confident to bring the ball out from the back, understand pressing rules. We all will need to understand our responsibilities. Our goalkeeper, defence and CDMs are vital to help the build up play and we need fast decisions and quick play.

If everyone is in position we can play forward fast vertically up the pitch to the attackers , wingers then support. If we have just won the ball or are playing from defence we need to make some passing combinations at the back , wait for our team to regain shape and then play forward to the wings.

Drills

We are going back to some old drills which worked last year

Rondos – to perfect fast passing, we will use lots of different versions
Find a Friend – this is our square game and is great for forward passing and switches
Defence v Attack – lots of different scenarios
Counter attacks – score in 10 seconds from winning the ball
Pressing – Why, how, when we press , who takes responsibility.

Who is doing what
We will keep it flexible to give people opportunities to try different things but our initial ideas are :
Zac, Louis M & Ashley will work on wing play
Mark, Fil, Jake & Asher will work on attack movements
James, Sam, Orlando , Rohan, Kiran, Ramy, Lewis B & Sean will work of pressing and winning the ball.
Maxi will work on goalkeeping & Sweeper Keeper

Enjoy the sessions we will mix the drill up with some fun warm up activities as well.

James, Adam & Luke