Coaches Blog

UEFA Coaching - Become a compact defensive team . This is the first in a number of functional UEFA Coaching sessions on defending. In this session, we are looking at how the defensive unit in a functional game, get organised, work together as unit and keep their compactness and defensive shape.

UEFA B Coaching. This game is from the series of functional games, designed to develop improve units within the team. In this functional game the focus is  on developing and improving attacking central play.

How do the opposition influence the decisions and the execution of the technique required of the attacking team making forward runs for forward passing. In this rotating, fast moving, conditioned game, the attacking team have to constantly make good decisions about whether to keep possession or to look to play positive passes for forward runners and get behind the defenders.

Keeping possession of the ball is all well and good, but at some point players have to look to be positive, to hurt the opposition. To achieve this, they will have to look to play forward. This will require accurate, well timed and weighted forward passing and runners to make well timed and positive forward runs. This technical practice is designed to improve forward passing for forward runs.

Coaching Defending when outnumbered in a SSG.  In a game, one of the biggest dangers is on the turnover of the ball that happens when the attacking team lose the ball and have committed players forward. They are open to a quick counter attack and many goals are scored from this transition of attacking to then having to defend a counter attack. The problem for the defending team is that they are now outnumbered, disorganised and have lots of space behind them, which is difficult to defend.

FA Level 2 game on creating space. The series on the FA level 2 on coaching creating space now moves onto how to coach creating space in a small sided game.  The key coaching priority is to ensure that as soon as your team gain possession, the players quickly spread out, wide and long, to create space as a team and to make the pitch as big as possible.

In this session on the skill of creating space, we add defenders to the session so the players are tested, not only on their technique of creating space, but with their awareness of how the defenders influence their decision making - the skill of creating space.

A key aspect of developing intelligent players is to work on their spatial awareness, playing with their heads up and improving their ability to turn out of tight areas and away from defenders.