If you read my previous post you'll know that I had a woeful session last week, with discipline problems and a distinct lack of attitude. After the talking to I gave the boys I was hoping for a vast improvement on Saturday morning. Most of them turned up on time, but you can't really blame being late on a 10 year old when there's 15 miles to travel.
We were scheduled an 11am kick-off so we started our warm-up around 10:30. I normally start with some gentle jogging and dynamic stretching and throw a couple of balls into the marked area to give the boys a focus. We move on to some side skipping and a few other "normal" movements to get the muscles moving. After about 2 minutes one of the boys says "Tim, I need the toilet". "Me too", "and me". Before you know it 7 of my 10 players were trotting across the field to the changing rooms!!! By the time they all got back our opponents were well and truly into their warm-up and we'd barely started. I was frustrated to say the least but tried not to show it.
The game itself started well and we quickly went 1-0 up, but then I can only think the team got complacent, expecting a comfortable win, and before you know it we were 1-2 down. A stolen equaliser left the score at 2-2 at half time. My half time talk was basically that the other team were pretty poor and if we put our minds to it we could beat them comfortably. We played some decent football for the first 15 minutes of the second half and both teams created a few chances but no goals came. What happened next was straight from the training ground. The move started with a short goal-kick, a couple of short passes through the defence and holding midfielder saw the ball moved to the left midfielder. He pulled off a great trick and crossed from the byline. The ball was then laid off by the centre-forward and followed up with a precise side-footed finish from the edge of the area into the bottom corner from the attacking midfielder. Brilliant! Both sets of supporters applauded the goal and it was the talking point of the game by everyone after the final whistle. The game itself was then fairly even after that and saw an equaliser after a defensive mistake. We then somehow managed to sneak the winner in injury time. It was a win in the end but I can't help thinking that if the boys had a different mentality towards the game that we could have and should have walked this game. I just don't understand it?
How can I get them to change their attitude? It feels at the moment like they treat it as just somewhere to come and meet their mates and have a bit of a kick-around. Maybe that's all it is and I'm not the right man to run the team...
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