Our 2018-19 season: 7 learnings
Our team has pretty much reached the end of its season, so now is a great time for me to reflect about how it went from a coaching perspective. Well, here are 7 things I learnt over the last 9 months:
1. Work on goal kicks
Our main tactical struggle as we made the transition from 7-a-side to 9-a-side has been with goal kicks. The goal area on a 9-a-side pitch is so wide that it makes it very easy for opponents to put pressure on defenders and get possession of the ball.
Our solution: work on kicking long goal kicks, practice pressuring our opponents’ goal kicks, and gradually, once confidence and ability are increasing, go back to building from the back.
Note football rules are changing next year, meaning the ball can be played from goal kicks (and free kicks) inside the goal area. But I’m not sure that will help at our level - it might make it even easier for opponents to pressure the ball.
2. Don’t specialise your stronger players
Even from a very young age, it is tempting to look for these special, talented players in a squad and to give them key roles: ‘He is our striker’, ‘She is our creative midfielder’. While we’ve all heard of the benefits of rotating players around several positions, it’s easy to make such exceptions for the stars of the team.
What we ended up doing this year is more like the opposite. We looked at our less developed players, and realised they would benefit from focusing on 1 or 2 positions only, to build up their confidence and fluency in these specific positions. While for more developed players, we realised they could equally well play in 3 or 4 positions, giving them more exposure to different situations. Hence doing what is best for each player on a case-by-case basis.
3. How to balance equal play time
For this season, we decided that playing equal play time was the fair thing to do. We’re not a top-division team, much more of a development team - and all our players deserved an equal chance to enjoy playing in matches, learn from every minute of play time and impress their parents, coaches and themselves.
Putting this into practice is both simple (keep a record of time played by each player, and balance it out over the course of the season) and difficult (the temptation to give stronger players more minutes in order to secure good results on a regular basis). One potential solution to this is to arrange friendly games against teams of a similar level - and use these easier, less competitive games to give extra play time to less developed players.
4. How to pick your team
For any given match, where would you play your stronger players?
We play a 3-4-1 formation and eventually settled on having a strong spine of players in the following key positions: the goalkeeper, a central defender, one wide (left or right) defender, and both centre midfield players. Sticking to this formula really worked for us.
One important aspect of this was to realise that playing a talented player as striker was a bit of a waste: such players can use their ability and energy with greater overall impact in midfield, and actually score as many goals from that position!
5. Creating a synergy between training and matches
While training and matches are the two main components of a football team’s season, common wisdom encourages linking the two. But how?
We recently started using this formula:
Pick a topic that the team could benefit from working on (eg playing into space)
Create a session plan with, for example, a couple of small sided games focused on that topic, and focus our coaching interventions on that topic
On match day, give the players specific goals (‘things we want to do particularly well today’) which relate to their position and to the topic
Review the goals with the team at half time, and after the match
Repeat the above for another week if needed
We’ve only done this a few times so far, but it seemed to work well. And our players showed good maturity in understanding the goals and trying to achieve them!
6. Pick the best times to train
With every passing season, the regular schedule of English football baffles me more and more. There seems to be a keenness to play in freezing, muddy, rainy conditions -which are hardly fun for players- followed by an abrupt end of the season just when the weather becomes nice and evenings are longer!
I understand the history behind this, but going forwards I’m pretty keen to get closer to the continental way of doing things - even if it means skipping some sessions or matches on bad winter days, and doing more come May and June when it is a lot more enjoyable for the players. Yet still giving proper breaks to the players and their families during school holidays.
7. Writing about coaching is fun, and I can run 40 miles!
Although I haven’t blogged often this season, I’m still enjoying it. So much so that I started a newsletter on youth football coaching - really to share some of the interesting stuff I find on the web, related to football coaching, and that can be of interest to other youth football coaches. And the best thing is: it’s free, it’s quick to read (5 minutes each week), so if you haven’t already, do have a look, subscribe and share it with anybody who might be interested!
And on a final, non-football related note, I managed to run a 40-mile ultramarathon, which turned out to be much more enjoyable than one would expect!
