18 Aug 2015

Improve the timing of those key forward runs in the box

Whilst pace is important as a striker, Chelsea’s Diego Costa demonstrates the timing and the angle of runs into the box are also vitally important skills for forwards, in particular, to work on and develop.

Forwards, like Costa spend countless hours working on the timing and angle of their runs. They work off the triggers of the passing player.

Triggers such as:

• Does the passing player need a touch?
• Can the passing player pass first time?

This is another example of Clock Coaching. In this session, it all about the third player timing their runs to receive a pass they run onto with pace, inside the clock.

Back in the day, when I was Youth Team manager at Bournemouth Football club, the Manager was Tony Pulis – what has become of him? and the Assistant manager was a guy called David Williams. The three of us used to also coach at what was then the school of excellence, which was the academy for the school boy players.

Tony and David introduced me to what we called clock coaching. Which was a very simple way of organising and focusing sessions on a variety of topics which were designed to improve young players techniques and skills. Clock coaching is very easy to organise, is very flexible and adaptable and is a great technical warm up prior to games and more intense practices.

This particular video looks at developing third man support runs, but at www.grassrootscioaching.com we have a whole section on clock coaching, with a range of topics, themes and ideas.