Losing your man – Timing and inter-player understanding

[Ryan RichParticipant]

Hi All,

I wanted to reach out to see how others were teaching the timing of how and when to lose your man and the visual cues.

For example, do you teach a different timing of movement when your CF/LW/RW is checking central to receive from a CB/DCM vs. when the LW is losing their man as ball is traveling to LB? For me, I think there needs to be eye contact to trigger certain movements vs. simply as the ball is traveling, especially for determining when to play a through ball or playing into feet. A saying that has been stuck in my mind has been “it is better to move late and fast, than too early”, which makes me think about how I’m teaching players to time their movements…

Which brings me to my next question…do you teach your players a standard way of playing (ex. having a team understanding that your teammate in certain patterns is going to always going to perform a counter movement before going to the location where they actually want it?) or do you teach players to reach to visual cues (ex. if the ACM receives and has head up looking forward, LW should check central and if RB follows, make the run behind -or- if the RB doesn’t follow, receive at feet with space to turn forward).

Interested to hearing your thoughts!

[Paul HicksParticipant]

Ryan, not sure I can help much as we are just stepping into this with our U11’s. We’re at the stage where we are teaching the players to time their movement as the ball moves in anticipation of the play as it circulates from one touchline to the other in our playing out of the back STT. We’ve gotten some decent progress but smart teams are adjusting pretty well on the fly, particularly athletic and reactive teams, so we insert the notion of deception/disguise into our training. So far so good, but you are ahead of us. I like the ideas though, and I think we will eventually introduce reading which defensive players are attracted to the play and hence out of position, which should lead to triggers for movement, combining and attacking the inevitable space and gaps that open up. We just aren’t quite there yet, but I’d like to hear more about what you are seeing at the higher age groups.

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