Little bit of a Jekyll and Hyde performance yesterday so it is hard to talk about the whole hour as one! Here are main points though:
Despite emphasis before game we began with too many players over complicating possession and trying to force play or individually run forward with ball regardless of the numerical situation. We corrected this quickly and in both games there were many many passages of quality football based on simplicity and unselfishness borne from good awareness and positions off the ball. Having said that we still had periods where we regressed.
Following the above point-Given kids at this age can still be up and down a bit even within the one day/game, if I were to take the last 4 weeks as a block and compare it to the previous 4 weeks then the team I have been mostly coaching is showing improvement in playing our system. There are far more times where I am able to praise or callout an individual or team action that demonstrates awareness, playing away from congestion and good ball movement in general.
On Sunday, we didn’t handle a few situations defensively. What a shame their main tactic was high booted long balls-(every one of their defenders and midfielders missed opportunities to develop technique and skill in solving “playing-out” problems)-anyway we didn’t deal with these tactics too well meaning we found ourselves in 50/50 situations as a last line far too often and the game was reduced to general messiness a lot. In hindsight, after speaking with Darren, I probably should have intervened and helped our boys to solve this problem earlier with a structural/ positioning cue. There was also a bizarre patch in the first game where after gradually dominating and scoring quite freely we suddenly conceded a run of goals in quick succession. Our heads and body language totally dropped and we suddenly became utterly silent. We changed again but we need to keep encouraging the “process” so that we avoid emotional ups and downs.
As a last positive there were some boys who had their strongest games yet (in my opinion) and there were also boys who were able to adjust their game/mentality within the mornings games to rectify a slow or less than ideal start.