Plan, do, review.

Plan, do, review is one of the cornerstones of the English FA’s coaching frameworks. The rough outline of plan, do, review is that you take a fixture and break it down the match week into 3 parts.

1. Plan: Analyze the opponent and plan a tactical strategy of how to beat the opponent, this strategy should inform some of the weekly training.
2. Do: This is the game itself, the game plan and strategy is reinforced before the game and during half time with the aim of getting the three points.
3. Review: Here the performance is reviewed and whether key aims and targets within the game were hit.

Plan, do, review is a pretty snappy phrase. It rolls off the tongue, and you can hear coaches up and down the land mentioning it some way or another.

Personally, I have some problems with this moniker.

First, is it that realistic, as coaches, we are taught to develop our game models and playing styles, but plan, do, review, suggests that strategy should be adapted for each match. Naturally, I agree that the personnel and style change slightly from game to game, but if you can get really good at Plan A, you should continue to do plan A and impose your game on the other team.

Secondly, in our periodisation, where would this go? If we stick broadly to a coaching syllabus, we will often take one or two sessions a week to prepare for a game. In our situation, it is harder to train specifically for each game without foregoing sessions dedicated to our game model.

Having spent some time on my game model that I would like to bring to life in the game, I have found that as a semi-professional team in Taiwan, we do not quite have the buy-in to build this model up from the ground. The commitment and willingness to train is lacking and having one or two sessions a week was not really enough to get the learning in that the players need.

We started the season poorly. From our first round of fixtures, we suffered, played 7, drew 2, lost 5. We were second bottom going into the second round of fixtures and our first game was against the best team in the league. We were turned over 11-0. I sat the players down at the end of the game. I explained that if they don’t train, don’t adhere to the team norms, and don’t show any desire to compete, it shouldn’t be shocking they lose games 11-0. Of course, I can conduct myself better, and the disparity in opportunities here in Taiwan is stark. The three teams at the top of the league train full time and have curated squads full of local talent. We are a slap-dash Sunday league team who train once a week – the barriers in Taiwan are plentiful…But if we set a meet team, that is when we aim to meet, players waltzing into the ground 30 minutes before kick-off is frankly unacceptable.

The next game was the biggest game for us. We needed a win. I decided to go down a more, review, plan do route.

First, I watched their video of the last two games, a win and a loss. In both games, they played the same system, a 3-5-2. In the second game, which they won, they played a team we outplayed (but unfortunately lost). I decided to cut this game up and highlight areas I thought we could hurt them.

With the 3-5-2 they played, I noticed they had a lot of space around either wide player, one of them I knew from coaching and was aware he wasn’t really a wing-back. Having watched the video and seen where they got joy, I ummed and ahhed over changing the shape to a 3-4-3. After much deliberation, I decided this was the best thing to do.

I’m not going to pretend I am a tactical genius by any stretch of the imagination, but the reason we moved to the 3-4-3 presented themselves pretty clearly.

1. We had 3 CB’s against their two FWD’s, leaving us always with an extra man.
2. Our two 6’s can occupy their 10 and play between their midfiled lines (in the video the space seemed big enough for our two best passers to play in).
3. Our front three could play 1v1 against their front 3, and asking our wing backs to push on would give us an overload.
4. If we had quick ball we could potentially have 3v1 down the side (outside centre back, wing back and free 10).

Having decided this was the best way to play against them, I set about organising a training session to try and practice this. Having only one session a week makes it difficult to fully embed principles, but before training, I sent all the players the above video with a few questions to make them think a little about how we would go about playing. The whole session was based on getting the ball wide quickly and then moving it diagonally quickly. We did this in two main ways.

First, we set up a 7v7 possession game. We functioned this as a warm-up and also as the main possession theme for the session. One thing I have taken from my full-time teaching job into my coaching is scaffolding and how slower can be better than rushing through things quickly.

We started this game as a warm-up. Teams worked against each other to play the ball into the end zone to a teammate. We initially started playing as a handball game (unable to move your feet if you have the ball in your hands). After a 5-minute game and some dynamic stretching, we moved to the next progression.

If a player pulled into either of the wide boxes and provided an assist the goal was worth 3. We kept the ball in the hands for 5 more minutes for players to fully understand the tasks. Here I gave a lot of positive reinforcement to players who recognised a teammate moving towards a box and then providing a run-in behind.

Finally, we dropped the ball to the feet and played two versions of this game for 10 minutes each. In the first version, players could be passed directly in the end zone and in the second version the end zone functioned as an offside line, getting players to time their run and pass to get in behind.

The session design of this did a lot of the coaching for me here and the players seemed to enjoy the challenges that were set; prefacing everything with the video, I cut answered the players “Why?” before they had the chance to ask it and intensity was good throughout.

Next, we entered a 40 minute period where we first set up a 3 man defence and two holders to play against an attack. My intention was to work with the attackers here. But the defence got an opportunity to play as a back 3 with a sitting 2 in front.

I took the attackers through 2 x 8 minute period where we played our normal shape and asked players for feedback after each 8-minute block. Playing our narrow 4-3-1-2, the players said it was challenging to play forward quickly and the spaces were too cramped for third man runs. Playing our 4-3-3, the striker said he felt too isolated, and the two 8’s found it hard to attack the half-spaces.

This fed nicely into trying a 4-3, the instructions were to try and make a 2v1 against either outside centre back. We immediately had joy with the wing-backs having space to pick out crosses and the opposite wing-back attacking the back post (a bit Reece James/Ben Chilwell). We also found that the two 6’s could move the ball side to side quickly. The two free 10’s could attack diagonally off the back of the centre-halves and we created more chances this way.

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When we broke into the game training, we set the defence up in the 3-2 block that the opposition had played the last two matches. The intention was to lead the players to understand that our regular 4-3-1-2 or 4-3-3 would be ineffective against the central block.

So far, I had reviewed our performance, reviewed the opposition’s performance and had planned how to overcome the opposition, the last phase of the process is to implement it in the game. Honestly, I was quite nervous sticking to my guns here, we had played with a back four and midfield three all season. This game was a must-win, if we lost we would be consigned to relegation play-offs which we wanted to avoid at all cost. Prior to the game I explained the plan to the team, and put in a contingency, explained to the players we were starting in 3-4-3 but would be able to switch to 4-3-3 if things weren’t working out.

The game was pretty attritional in truth. In the first half we were probably a little bit off it, but at the drinks break, I felt that we were starting to find more spaces around their back 3. It seemed that we had more individual quality to win the one vs ones on the pitch and our front 3 were starting to rotate a little more. We had a few problems building out from the back in the first half so in the second half we asked the players to play directly into the spaces we identified.

This came off and we got two goals in the second half, they scored late to make it a bit nervous in the last few minutes but we held on to get our first win of the season.

Since then we won our second game and things looked rosy. However this weekend things took a turn again, and it is looking like we are going to need two more wins before the end of the season to guarantee our place in the division again next season.

Reflection

1. I really enjoyed analysing the opposition and cutting the video for my team to watch. Realistcally cutting fifteen minutes of footage is too long. I would like to cut the video and send it to the relevant players.
2. Moving away from our game model from time to time is okay and in the current situation of the team it may be more beneficial being more pragmatic.
3. I would like to do this for every game but time constraints with a full time job can make this quite hard!
4. Players like to learn from a vareity of methods, some players really appreciated the video and some couldn’t care less.

Coaching through COVID/Individual Learning Plans

Living in Taiwan we have been lucky over the past year. We haven’t suffered from the pandemic and have been able to work, coach and play without any changes to our lives, we got a whole competitive season in last year when the world was heading into full lockdown, and we briefly became the only country with competitive football, something that even made it into the mainstream media.

Unfortunately that all came to a head 9 weeks ago. We had our first cluster of local infections and in the space of a week we went from having our first U15 National game to having all games cancelled indefinitely. This was frustrating for everyone, considering that the rest of the world was opening up and football by and large had been restored to have the game taken away from us felt cruel.

Initially I implored players to stay fit and practice at home on their own, but with the Euros on the horizon I felt that the men in particular would benefit from a break. I put trust in them to stay on top of themselves, being stuck inside all day is dull and boring, so boring that inactive people often exercised more over the break merely as something to do, I felt that the mens team would exercise at home alone, any by and large that has been the case.

The U12s and U15s were more of a problem. There was some expectation from parents that sessions were to continue online as school had gone that way. I was initially very reluctant to coach online but after a week trying to work out how to structure an hour coaching through Skype I found a formulae that worked and has been effective over the past 6 weeks.

An hour is a long time to fill with ball mastery, so I split the session into 3 parts. The first two were 10 minutes each and then ball mastery for 35-40 minutes. The first two sections were filled with two of the following themes; core strength, explosive power, balance, co-ordination, agility, cardio. These sections functioned as an introduction to football specific fitness and were generally really well received by players.

I had stumbled across this podcast a previous week:

The podcast made me think of all the receiving moves and skills to get out of small spaces we could practice at home. From this each session we focused on one part of the foot, generally the sole, inside or outside and would spend time looking at players who use these parts of the foot regularly and try to recreate these moves and skills at home. I found there was a lot of engagement when we looked at specific players and then tried to bring these skills alive in our living rooms. We used Sergio Busquets when we looked at our sole.

And Iniesta when we used our inside.

Coaching online isn’t anywhere near as realistic as coaching on a field, but over the past 6 weeks I have found that there are some benefits of it. Players who started later in the game were able to improve really quickly and experience success on their own, whereas occasionally at training these players can hide from the game, but to see them improve so quickly at home and for me to able to focus solely on them has definitely had its benefits, different learning styles need different styles of coaching and coaching online is certainly a different style of coaching.

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Cases have been falling in the past week, we are down to less than 20 cases a day and it seems that early next week our semi-lockdown will be lifted. Having missed 8 weeks of fixtures, and knowing CTFA’s frankly unreliable management structure, there is a feeling that we may be back playing in a few weeks. Pre-season will be short (or non-existant) and we will be straight back into the throws of competition.

My concerns with the men came back to the fore, particularly as our social chat had been quite quiet. I reached out to the men and offered my services, if players wanted a specific fitness plan to contact me with what they wanted to work on and I would devise a plan. I would have liked to have sat down with each player, done some performance profiling and goal setting but due to lockdown that felt impossible.

I had a player reach out to me and ask to help him develop his football specific cardio, agility and strength and power. I like to ground my coaching in science so entered my university headspace and set about creating a PPT that the player could follow.

I have tried to reference all the materials I have researched, there is a lot of blanket coaching stuff on YouTube now-a-days, and some of it is really good, but some of it seems almost tokenistic, I tried to find scientific research that shows benefits from different exercises and then find videos that bring these out.

In an ideal world I would love to take baseline measurements and re-test every 4-6 weeks, but due to the pandemic it isn’t possible, but if players have specific individual learning plans and goals to hit, I am hoping they are intrinsically motivated enough to work at the plans. I will check in with players who have asked for guidance and hopefully be able to analyse some of the agility work if players need to make corrections.

My hope is for players to follow these plans in their own time, so when we get back to playing they well be in decent enough physical condition to play in the Taiwanese heat!

FCBase Athletic: Game Model

Below I have started a PowerPoint that depicts the team I coach’s game model, this game model is a living document that will be added to over the season. The idea of the game model is to marry up the principles and philosophy that I hold as a coach with the qualities of the players in the squad. 

The aim of this is to ground my coaching in logic and theory, to make sure that each session is working towards some common themes and principles of how we play. I intend to analyse our games from the second half of the season when we have had an opportunity to bring the principles to life in training and games, as evidence of player and team learning. 

I have based this game model on the coach education I received in Australia (tactical periodisation) and also what I learnt in the UK on my FA Level 1 and Level 2 courses.

Coaching theory and logic is a fluid field where there are constantly new advances and best practice, the idea behind this document is to cement our principles, they can be adapted as things change but the concept of having a way to play, aspects we train and non-negotiables sets the standards within the club.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Division 2: FCBase Athletic vs SFI: The beast I helped create

I feel in football sometimes we tend to take a result and work backwards to create the story of the game. As a coach I try to look for more of a consistent level of performance, in the elite game you can look at advanced metrics such as XG, or ball progression stats. At our level, it can be much harder to find those indicators of consistent performance.

Our fourth game of the season which we played on Saturday is an example of that, we lost the game 3-0 and to use an old football cliche, we weren’t good enough in either box. We conceded two goals from set pieces, and one in a transition moment. We missed our fair share of chances as well, but the game itself wasn’t a 3-0 game. We competed for most of the game and if we were more clinical it would have been a different game entirely.

From a rational coaching perspective we stuck to the team tasks well throughout the game and our performance was good, from a more emotional perspective we lost the game 3-0 and have nothing to show from our performance.

This was also the team that I worked for last year, and it was a nice moment to see the players I worked with so much last year.

In particular, there was a player last year who didn’t speak much English, but football being a universal language ensured that we bonded, he’s also a youth coach here in Taipei so we do regularly cross paths. Last year when we first met he played mainly as a left back, he has a wand of a left foot but was carrying a little extra weight and would often get exploited due to his lack of acceleration.

The management team decided to move him into a more central role, where he could use his footballing brain and also hide his physical defects, he thrived in this more central role, and seemed to enjoy his football a lot more.

Unfortunately this beast I helped create came back to haunt me on Saturday; two goals and an assist. As I have said the community in football here is small so to maintain these relationships, be magnanimous in defeat and congratulating a player on his performance are important things to me.

The COVID situation here is slightly ramping up, and our next two league games have been postponed, hopefully this means we will have more time to work on our game, but if we enter the next lockdown phase training and all football will stop in its entirety.

Having had four games with the team now, I feel more comfortable knowing what attributes players have, I hope to release my game model over the next few weeks, any feedback would be appreciated.

Division 2: FCBase Athletic vs FC Kaohsiung

Our third game of the season came off a pretty bad week in terms of our preparation. Following the success we had in the second half in our previous game, our intention to train how to defend with a diamond midfield days before the game was scuppered. Unfortunately Taiwan is a tropical climate, and our regular Thursday 6am session had to be cancelled last week due to a waterlogged pitch. 

Our game was also away in Kaohsiung, a city 5/6 hours away from our base here in Taipei, due to budget constraints we couldn’t afford a hotel, nor HSR tickets so the team assembled at 6am on Saturday morning for the bus journey south.

Unfortunately I was unable to travel with the team as our first U15 game in the Taiwan national league was scheduled for the same time and date. 

Our game ended 2-2, having been 2-0 up, we suffered in the wide areas either side of the diamond, and this will have to be addressed in future weeks and training sessions. The positives we saw during this game were directly related to the system, we blitzed them in the first 30 minutes and won a lot of ball in the middle third, from our diamond collapsing onto the ball, this allowed us to counter quickly and we were deservedly 2-0 up after half an hour. 

We conceded late in both halves to draw 2-2. 

From our three league games this year, we have conceded 5 out of 6 goals in the last 15 minutes of each half. It is hot here and players clearly aren’t conditioned to maintain our intensity to the end of each half and this will be factored into our periodisation.

Having now had 3 play off games, and 3 games in the second division I am starting to understand more the qualities of each player and am in the process of creating a game model for the team. When that is ready I will publish it here as well. 

Our next 4 games are going to be more difficult, we are playing teams with more resource and training time than us, having had two winnable games and only getting two points hurts at the moment, but we have to take this as a learning experience and move forward. 

Division 2: FCB Athletic vs PlayOne. The return of an old friend

Our video for last weeks game was released towards the end of last week, it was released after our last training session, so the footballing problems identified last week couldn’t be worked on this week, unfortunately that is the way the cookie crumbles in Taiwan football sometimes.

This week we had our second game of the season against PlayOne, this is one of the teams we will be competing with more closely this year, as opposed to the game the previous week this team have a similar budget and training schedule to ours.

During our last training session prior to the game we worked on combination play in the midfield and how we move the ball forward using a diamond midfield and 2 strikers. We did this by focusing on unopposed passing patterns and then slowly adding more defenders and recovering midfielders.

We started the game well and should have scored in the first fifteen minutes or so. After this we started to tire and some tell tell signs started to come out; players not tracking runners, not facing the ball on set pieces and distances between our players getting too big. We then conceded right on the stroke of half time, from a situation where we just switched off.

At half time we changed the shape from a 4-3-3 to a 4-diamond-2. In terms of how we play with the ball, the build up was relatively similar, the thinking behind the shift was two fold.

1. In the first half we moved the ball wide alot, but then ran out of ideas and lost the ball. Our play getting the ball wide was good, but our support to the wide players was sometimes lacking.
2. We also suffered a lot when we lost the ball, occasionally our two box to box midfielders were caught too high, and our CDM was left with two or sometimes 3 men. Changing to a diamond congested the middle of the pitch more and simply by having more players there we forced more turnovers.

The second half we were much better and probably deserved to win the game, we scored early and pushed for the winner but it didn’t come. 1-1 as the final result.

Again I was happy with the second half performance, and our main problem was a lack of concentration and fitness when we lost the ball, these are things that improve with more training, something we will be aiming for.

I learnt two things about myself this week:

1. If I am going to train passing patterns in the week it is important to bring these out on game day, I saw some in the second half but starting 4-3-3 didn’t allow this.
2. Watch your language Luke. When we were denied a penalty I swore, “FUCK SAKE,” in fact. I was warned by the officials and an AFC delegate, after the game upon speaking with the AFC delegate and trying to explain that I wasn’t swearing at the ref, but more in frustration, he told me of a story of a coach in Saudi who was fined $10,000 for swearing at no one in particular. I am much better at handling my emotions in a kids game, but this is still something to work on.

Our next game is away in the national stadium and unfortunately I am on U15 duty, so will be leaving it in the hands of my capable assistant who will also be leading our training session preparing for the game.

Below you can find my post game review.

I was also up against my assistant coach from last year, and I’d like to take a second to talk about him. Last year, after a pretty poor start with our old club, Mr. Fung was asked to come down to training with us and help translate. It was my first time working closely with another coach. He was based in Hong Kong and worked with Kichee whilst completing his B licence, since then he was coincidentally in China when I was in China and has since been in Taiwan.

Last year we worked closely together and built an amazing professional relationship, he was educated at the FCB academy in Hong Kong and having done my B licence in Australia we had similar ideas about coaching philosophy, game models, and delivering sessions. I learnt a lot during our months together and we were more co-coaches than assistants, he pushed me to be a better coach and I am grateful for that.

Coaching can often be a lonely profession, but my experiences with Mr. Fung make me appreciate coaching in teams together, it allowed one of us to work with individuals and the other with the whole unit. I wholly trusted him and I hope he trusted me too. I am really happy for him that he is coaching in his own team and I do wish him the best.

Football is fundamentally a competitive industry but it is also a community, I enjoy having good relationships with coaches in Taiwan, it’s a small industry and better to work together than to treat each other as the enemy.

Division 2: FCBase Athletic vs ACA

In preparation for my A licence, I am analysing each game that we play. When I am looking back at the game, I am particularly looking for system issues. I am not overly concerned with individual player quality at this point, further to this I am also looking for specific things we have spoken about.

Much like a teacher, there is no point assessing players and a team on something we have not spoken about, our first training session we looked at staying compact in defence, and during the game there were good examples of this, however there were also bad examples, in particular for the first goal we concede.

Below you can find my slideshow recapping the game.

Overall I am pretty pleased with how the team played, as we were up against a team that trains multiple times a week we equipped ourselves well and although we lost 3-1 there were many positives that we can draw upon. 

This week we are playing a team that has a similar training schedule and budget to ours, and we should have more of the ball.

Stay tuned for next weeks recap. 

Taiwan Football League Div 2 (2020)

It has been a long time since I have written anything on this particular website. Last year was my first year working in the Taiwan second division, and whilst I was coaching the team I also was working full time at a school.

The team I was working for held two training sessions a week, on Monday and on Wednesday with games on Saturdays. The aim of the two training sessions were different; on Monday the focus was general on small sided games (SSG) and transition work, as we were new to this league we found our players were less fit than the opposition and having a high intensity session on a Monday was the best way to prepare ourselves for the week ahead. SSG’s have been shown to provide higher heart rates amongst players and an increased number of actions compared to 11v11 football.

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Various studies on SSG’s

The Wednesday session was based around what I saw from the previous game. Each game I tried to analyse from the footage provided (not the greatest quality and sometimes unavailable) and find two things that we didn’t do well in the game, creating a session to work on these footballing problems. The slides were then shared with the team manager, after discussing them we decided which football problem to train for that week.

Below you can find my work from each game chronologically.

The season ended very well and our team came in fourth, we managed to iron out many of the mistakes that we suffered in the first half of the season through good recruitment and relevant training.

Unfortunately my contract was not renewed with S.F.I and since then I have been working with a U12 and U15 team in Taipei. The team decided to enter it’s men’s team into the play-offs for the second season of the second division having seen an opportunity to continue the clubs structure. The club now has youth teams from U8-U15 as well as men’s team competing in the national leagues.

The team since qualified and have now entered the second division. We are aiming to train twice a week and follow a similar scheme as last season, with one session early in the week at a higher intensity and the second preparing for the game at the weekend.

This season I have more time to focus on my football coaching in preparation for an A licence before the end of the year. I have outlined some personal goals for this upcoming season.

1. Review the game in a timely manner, before our session looking forward to the game ahead. Last year I was rushed for time (partly due to external influences), hopefully this year is more efficient.
2. Learn about new software that can help annotate game videos, last year I used windows movie maker, and it did a job, but wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as some of the work on coaching twitter.
3. Continue trying to justify work with science, data or analysis.

If you have any feedback please let me know, and I hope you enjoy following.

Emotional Control and avoiding knee jerk reactions

Last I left this, my team had just come through a 2-0 win in our quarter final and were due to play a semi-final a few days later, I have already written about this in my brother blog (https://lukestravelling.wordpress.com/) but thought I would recap some of the points and explain how we decided to move forward as a team. During my below average non-descript playing career I was a relatively vocal player, normally in the referees ear during the game and trying to psych out opposition by telling them I liked their boots or something to that effect. As a coach it is significantly more important to control your emotions. If you are losing your shit on the side-lines, it gives your team an excuse to lose their shit on the pitch. One of my major character flaws both within football and away from the pitch, is my trademark over emotional knee jerk reactions to a situation that hasn’t quite gone how I expected, I can become petulant, nasty, childish and lose the ability to reason, these are all traits that need to be worked on and are traits that are not conducive to succeeding as a youth football coach. We went into the Semi-final as underdogs, we were playing at the opponent’s home ground and it seemed they had brought the majority of the school to cheer them on. During the game we had a game plan, and within 5-10 minutes the game plan had gone out the window, I had lost emotional control and was shouting at every single player, trying to control them like PlayStation players. I think this was probably a mixture of the cauldron like atmosphere and the emotion got the better of me early on, luckily, I caught myself and calmed down for the duration of the half. However, as the old adage goes, you need to play to the whistle, and right on the stroke of half time we conceded, which was a real sickener, we had recovered well from our poor start in the first half and to switch off moments before the break is real school boy stuff. Players came into the break devastated, and I was devastated too. My role within the group dictates that I cannot let the boys see how the goal had affected me and I had to G them up for the second period, I think I handled this quite well. I made one large tactical shift in the second half, we abandoned the 4-2-3-1 formation the team has used throughout the season and on a whim, we change to 4-3-1-2, the idea behind this being to control possession centrally higher up the pitch as neither teams were really making full use of the pitch. This is a change I thought of on the fly, and one we hadn’t trained, it made me slightly apprehensive to ask the players to change to a completely new system on such short notice. The players took to the changes quickly and we dominated the second half. Again I was impressed by how quickly and independently the players took on board my messages, which is a good sign moving forward. With a few minutes to go there was an interesting refereeing decision where he sent off the opposition goalkeeper (fast forward to 1:17:00 to see the madness.)

the opposition coach truly lost his shit at this point, pulling all of the players off the pitch and staging a seated protest, for some unbeknownst reason to me, I maintained a calm demeanour and kept the boys out on the pitch focused. We went on to lose 1-0 and were dumped out of the competition, obviously I was again heartbroken.

The temptation in this situation was for me to overreact and ring wholesale changes before our I-league season kicks off in little over a weeks time, instead I gave myself the day to be negative about the defeat. In reality, we switched off for a minute before half time, and we were duly punished, we dominated the second half and were unlucky to not get anything from the game in the end, the positives must be focused on, and certain tangible trainable element must also be identified. I told the players before we travelled back to the academy to each thing about one thing we did well, and one thing we could improve on to bring to the following days training session. I made the following notes off the back of the tournament;

• Our 4-2-3-1 formation wasn’t working, we were not effective enough in transitions to get our front 4 playing 4v4 against the defence. Often we found our front man isolated.
• Our better ball players were playing too deep which meant we often had to attack from deep, leading to us not ever really controlling possession in the attacking half.
• Defensively we looked solid throughout, our back 4 were hardly ever penetrated and we kept the opposition playing in front of us, they rarely threatened to get in behind.

Coaching, in simple terms is trying to get ideas from your head into the heads of the players, but what would be better than this, would be if the coaches ideas could be “inceptioned,” into the heads of the players. This way the players can think that the ideas were actually theirs and then are more likely to take ownership and commit to the messages. I did this by subtly suggesting positional changes to players and even gave them a few trial shapes to discuss.

The following day, I made the decision to cancel training and host a team meeting, which would serve as a debrief from the previous days game and how we got on in Kochi as a whole. I made a PowerPoint presentation that suggested to the players we should change team shape. Then players were split into groups and were asked to come up with their own ideas, once players had their own ideas we would discuss them as a group, and then as a team come up with a new shape we would train and try out in our two friendlies prior to the game.

The focus is now on getting our heads down and preparing properly for our I-league campaign that starts next week, we have 4 league games, with only a days rest in between so recovery and training need to managed effectively to avoid players sustaining injuries, my next post will hopefully outline what we have changed the shape and system to and how we are training specifically for these changes!

 

Cyclones, tropical bugs and my dugout debut

My last entry outlined the process I undertook  when planning my coaching cycles and how I saw each week running, this weeks will be almost the polar opposite and how I have found the coaching, and particular the different coaching styles needed to thrive in this sort of setting.

This week in theory was my first full week with the players, and the aim was to coach one session for each group for each day (1 x U13 and 1 x U15) and as it was week 1 of the first cycle we would be working mostly in possession of the ball, with the overarching theme of the week being to improve our ability to play out from the back. After a few meetings behind closed doors with a few of the senior players I have gathered that they do play a possession based game, and from most set pieces and goal kicks they play short, in order to build up from the back. The original plan for this week ran something along these lines;

Monday; Passing and Support (BP)

Tuesday; Playing out from the back (BP)

Wednesday; Conditioning session, small sized games (BP)

Thursday; Individual defending (BPO)

Friday; Game training, getting a defender into the middle third

However, as with the best plans, it all fell through on Sunday night, there were a few lads missing from both age groups. Both age groups had 10 players now instead of 12, this didn’t seem like an issue to me at all, modifying all the planned sessions from 12 to 10 players didn’t really phase me. However, the other bit of news, that the other coach wouldn’t be available all week, was a bit of a blow. Being in Kerala we are quite equatorial, and when the sun goes down at 6pm each night it gets dark incredibly quickly, and with the boys finishing each day at school at 4:30, this would only give an hour and a half before darkness to run two sessions.

I bit the bullet and decided on training all 20 together for the full hour and a half, being my second week, this wasn’t a bad idea as it gave me a chance to survey the whole group and work out whose who within it, my plans had to go out the window and a lot of thinking on my feet was needed which I think is going to be a key skill if I am to succeed out here. The draw backs were that it was hard to do any individual coaching, and at the end of each session having to play three team rotations instead of a straight two team game is never ideal.

The next challenge we faced this week was the weather, normally a balmy thirty degrees, a tropical cyclone hit the coast on the Wednesday and we were battered with rains and high winds from Wednesday through Friday, the pitch we normally train on was completely flooded so we attempted to train on the space that will become a 7’s pitch at the academy against my better judgement. After a few slips and half an hour of incessant rain I pulled the plug on the session. The rains didn’t stop and we had to cancel Thursday and Fridays sessions.

Our training ground pre-cyclone

This wasn’t ideal preparation for the regions quarter final that we were due to play on Monday, we decided to travel as a group to Kochi (where the quarter final would be played) on the Friday night and have a Game Training session on the Saturday morning, and a light session on the Sunday, just to get a bit more movement into the legs.

One thing that had become apparent during the sessions on Monday and Tuesday was the quality of touch and passing of each of the players, they play on such poor-quality pitches but this must really improve their touch, every ball fired into them was controlled instantaneously and all players were comfortable receiving the ball in tiny pockets of space. However, I did notice one real footballing problem, because all of the players were so comfortable in congestion, space was never properly managed and the game was mostly played in front of the opposition. I decided to tear up the original game training plan for Saturday and try and coach the players on the importance of stretching defences and occupying space.

The session ran really well, and the key points were brought out, however in hindsight, I shouldn’t have deviated from my cycle. The cycle is there for a reason and as a coach if I constantly try to put out fires instead of coaching the syllabus I fear I will breed a lot of reactive footballers, as opposed to the proactive players I wish to breed. Instead I have decided to designate week 6 in each cycle as a “troubleshooting week,” where problems that have been identified during the cycle can be worked on in isolation.

With the quarter final scheduled for Monday morning, we had a light session on Sunday where set pieces were practiced and the game plan established. Monday morning came around very quickly, our kick off was scheduled for 9:30am, and I instructed players to arrive at 8:30. When I arrived at 8:25, we were missing a few players, one of the older boys, and starting right back was standing in the car park, he had been waiting under a tree and had been biting by an insect and he was quickly coming out in a terrible rash. Not the best preparation considering we had two subs, someone scooted off to find some antihistamines and luckily he had recovered by kick off.

Prior to me coming into the fold the team have always played a 4-2-3-1, it’s not a shape I am a huge fan of, as I feel the striker can be left isolated, and relies on effective transitions, normally in this shape goals are scored quickly after the ball is turned over, where the front four find themselves 4v4 against a back four, and without a designated “6,” the double pivot needs to stay disciplined and well connected to each other. I’ve never had to give a team talk to a group of younger players on my own before and I was surprisingly nervous before hand, I decided to keep my message short, two attacking points, one defensive point and a point to help them manage the first half.

Attacking Points:

1. When we have the ball the number 9 needs to stretch the defence and affect their positioning even if he doesn’t receive the ball.
2. If we have controlled possession we are going to try to focus more attacking build up down our right side.

Defensive Points:

1. I do not want the front four to press the ball, we are defensively sound and our midfield double pivot is where we initiate the press.

Game management points:

1. In the first five minutes play an intense press, get in the oppositions faces, the same for the last five minutes of the half.

Due to the head (a minimum of 30 degrees), we have to carefully pick our moments to press, but I wanted to start the game on the front foot and also go into half time with our tails up.

The boys did exactly what was asked and we started the game very strongly, culminating with a goal from a set piece after being camped in the oppositions half for the first ten minutes. We then took our foot off the gas and cruised into half time, which annoyed me a little as 1-0 isn’t an overly safe score. From my FFA B licence I remember being coached that during half time, only have two or three main messages as the time will get away from you very quickly, with five minutes left of the half when the boys were starting to press more intensely I allowed myself time to note three key points to deliver at half time.

Half time key points:

1. Although we have been playing down our right, their right back is the weak link, can we see if we can create space for our left winger to beat him 1v1.
2. The only time they have threatened us is when the space between our double pivot is too large and they have gone straight through the middle, we need to reduce this space.
3. 1-0 is a dangerous score, we need to make sure we get the first goal this half, we need to start how we started the first half.

One of my key learnings from today, is that 10 minutes for half time is longer than you think, I had rattled through and explained my key points within 4 minutes and didn’t really know how to use the rest of my time. In the future, I will explain my points slower and then use the rest of my time to give more targeted individual feedback, but I think first game nerves got the better of me.

The second half started and again we were on the front foot, and what was nice to see was the messages I had given at half time had been absorbed and replicated on the pitch. We scored after 4 minutes of the second half, where our right back overlapped our right winger, delivered a ball to our left winger who beat his opponent 1v1 to score. We controlled the rest of the game and relaxed into some nice possession football until full time.

This week has been a difficult one, with cyclones, tropical insects and my own doubts creating trouble with preparation but it was brilliant to get the result that we were after in the end. I know that youth football isn’t about results, but to win, play the football that the coach has instructed and take on messages whilst playing to adapt your style and to keep a clean sheet are all big wins in my book. We have a day off tomorrow where players will see their families before the semi-final on Wednesday, hopefully I can iron out the creases in our preparation and we can be successful again on Wednesday!