So I'm back from my course, I've got all this new info I've learned (anyone that coaches kids sport should really look into this stuff!) and I'm keen to put it into practice. Tuesday night is training night so an excellent opportunity to plan a session. I sit down with my pad and decide to do a session on defending. I'm going to do a whole-part-whole session starting with the idea of the second leg of a cup-tie meaning one team needs to score and one doesn't. Then I'll break it down and do some 1v1, 2v2 and maybe 3v3 defending and then back into the game.
I've got 13 in the squad so 6v7 is perfect for this as it gives us a natural overload, or I can stand in goal and possibly change the course of the game by good or "accidentally" bad goalkeeping. Out goes the teamer invite and almost immediately I get 3 declines. "Sorry, rugby practice is now on a Tuesday"...
Ok, that slightly changes things, but not much. Tuesday comes and we start training with a warm-up, gentle jogging, some dynamic stretches and I throw a couple of footballs into the square with the instruction of "don't pass to someone who's standing still". This makes sure all the boys keep moving. I found out at that point that the majority of the boys had just done a school football training for an hour so we kept the warm-up to a minimum. "Right, let's have a game" I said. That really threw them! Steve and I were going to go in goal to allow the boys to play 5v5 on pitch, giving them the chance to use different formations. I told them the scenario and we discussed separately how the teams should play and they came up with the formations straight away. The team leading on away goals said immediately "we don't need to score so we need to pass the ball about. Let's play 3-1-1". The team needing a goal said "we need to attack quickly so can we play 1-2-2?".
I let them just play, without really any interventions apart from reminding them of the score and whether the team in possession needed a goal or not. There were a couple of occasions when a striker rushed in to two defenders and was taken out the game with a simple wall pass and it gave me the perfect opportunity to set up the defending "part" of the session. We set up two mini pitches with offset target areas and played the 1v1 and 2v2 with the objective of dribbling the ball through the targets. After the defending "part" we went back into the game under the same conditions. The team in the lead scored a quick goal and then they relaxed and played really nice controlled football. The other team really stepped up their efforts as they would need to. A couple of dodgy bits of keeping on my part changed the game and at that point we stopped it, talked about what needed to happen and the boys changed their formations accordingly.
Perfect!
It was a fantastic session overall. I got a great piece of advice from a really good coach, Matt Smith. He said if I put the goals on the same side and get the boys to change ends half way through, they get to practice defending both the right back and left back positions instead of just one side. Simple and obvious when you think about it! Thanks Matt, you're a genius :-)
I've since found out that another lad has school rugby on a Tuesday and school football is now going to be every Tuesday too so I think we'll be training on Wednesdays from now on...
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