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In regards to receiving the ball across your body, what additional info do you give? By that I mean dead vs live touch? While ‘losing your man’ to create space is key, there are times simply settling the ball at your feet with a defender in your shit immediately still happens. At times, a ‘live touch’ quickly to the side into space alleviates the high pressure defender immediately. Do you review this with the kids and if so how do you teach (drills) them when to and not to use the dead touch?
I think I understand what you mean by ‘dead’ and ‘live’ touch, but I’m not toooooo sure.
What your player should be doing is creating space by checking away, and then to, and then taking their touch into the space IF they have time and little to no pressure. What is more helpful is instead of taking a ‘dead’ or ‘live’ touch, the players should make a pass after checking back into the space, especially if they are under pressure, and then immediately use a different space.
Phil and John,
I talk to my kids about taking an “intentional 1st touch”, which is your 1st touch should take you towards your next pass or get you out of pressure. Under low pressure – make your 1st touch towards where you are going next. Under high pressure (the defender is flying in on you, ) your 1st touch might have to beat him. The challenge is when the defender times it perfectly and you can’t beat him on the 1st touch AND he is all up on you. This probably when you make a super tight 1st touch and get off of it.
If this is what you are asking, it’s something I very interesting in too. What is a good drill to teach this? Squares does it to some extent, but it might not be the complete drill for it. Loosing your man is helpful too, but there is no pressure, so not sure if it is the complete drill to teach it either. Then again I’m not sure if there is any drill that will perfectly teach any concept, it might just be something you talk about across lots of drills, practices and games. Bleed into full possession games, sessions and real games.
If anyone has some other ideas on teaching a smarter 1st touch I’d love to hear it.
Not quite sure what you mean by dead vs live touch, but if I’m understanding correctly, I’m taking it to mean basically stopping the ball dead as you receive it versus taking the touch into space. I look at it this way – the player who will be receiving positions his body to be able to receive across and that enables him to see what is going on in the direction where he wants to go after receiving. So a winger would be heels on the touchline, able to receive across the body and continue toward opposing goal. If there is open space there, then he receives across body into space. If an opponent is there, he’s taking his touch either to beat the opponent into the space behind opponent, going inside into space, or back away from the opponent (toward the direction where ball came from). In any case, his touch is always going a yard or two into space in some direction.
The only time I can think of the ball being stopped relatively dead is for a player to draw in the opponent before beating him/combining around him or drawing a foul. Maybe if you have space and are going to serve a long ball/cross with your second touch. Maybe to stop the game for a second and reset the tempo.
As for training it, I think there’s always two components – training the actual technique (as in the players don’t understand or aren’t consistently pretty good at purely executing it) and training the decision making of when to do it. The first they probably get pretty quickly and there are a lot of activities to do it, even as simple as partners passing and receiving in various ways. As for the decision making, I think it’s about when you would want to see it happen. What would be the advantage of stopping it dead versus going in space and when would you want your players to do it? That would be how I would approach figuring out how to train it. When you know where/why you want the players to do it, then it’s just about recreating those scenarios to get repetitions of that situation.
Hope I understood the question correctly.
Good question Phil:
In regards to receiving the ball across your body, what additional info do you give? By that I mean dead vs live touch? While ‘losing your man’ to create space is key, there are times simply settling the ball at your feet with a defender in your shit immediately still happens. At times, a ‘live touch’ quickly to the side into space alleviates the high pressure defender immediately. Do you review this with the kids and if so how do you teach (drills) them when to and not to use the dead touch?
And some good responses too.
In regards to your question, we give no additional info.
The golden rule of our methodology. Our guiding principle if you will, is this:
Do less, not more.There’s a million different skills a player can learn or be taught. But if we try to teach too many of them, nothing gets mastered, and any hope for a consistent well structured possession team goes out the window.
What we do is give them a rock solid foundation with this curriculum, upon which details like you suggest can be layered in later in time with us, or it is to be done independently outside the team environment.
Now, that’s not to say you can’t try and teach them your detail concurrently with this possession framework, but I suggest you be very careful how many things you work on. Because you run a high risk of curriculum overload.
I totally identify with the idea of “teaching less but at deeper level rather than teach many things at a superficial level.” In my classroom experience, just like the Kleibans emphasize with being able to teach this styls of play to either gender at various skill levels, I’ve been able to make great academic strides even with the most impacted special education students on my caseload. Much of it comes down to identifying the most important skills and planning their introduction so students can see how they build on each other and relate to each other and their lives. That last part I think is crucial because the players must see a benefit in the activities you do and how it helps them and the team on match day.
I put responsibility on the player making the pass as well. He should know how the player he’s passing it to needs the ball depending on the situation. It’s very hard to receive a ball across your body and away from pressure if the person passing you the ball sets up you to fail.
Passing with some zip is important too. We took a big leap forward when we started to make the boys really sting the ball and put the onus on the receiving player to learn how to kill it.
I totally agree that a large part of the responsibilities is on the passer to put the ball where it is needed. However, I think players need to get accustomed to receiving across their body to set up for their next pass prior to that next detail. I think it requires quite a bit of forethought and insight by a player to pass the ball on a particular side of the receiving player to “tell” them the direction they should play the ball away from pressure.
Lets Define dead touch and live touch-
Dead touch- Your stopping the movement of the ball. Games like pepper etc. are designed to teach dead touch skills
Live touch- Your touch is in a direction to buy time and or to set up your next pass, so the ball is moving where you want it to go on the fist touch
Sound about right Phil?
Question Gary-
Do you work 1 v 1’s, 2 v 1’s, 2 v 2 etc. into your training sessions?
My boys were excellent dead touch players, but the problem with that is more often than not dead touch also means not taking the ball across your body. Huge technical issue that I created with my current group ( I had several since they were U6 recc. players). Touching the ball across the body really is the key to doing everything else well. Ive always incorporated 1st touch into every practice but not with the explicit purpose as described in this arena. That is a major problem. Kids know not to “crack the egg”. That the touch needs to be at their feet not a hard touch that turns into a 50/50 ball, but at the U9/U10 age the training of opening the field really is the key to success and moving toward possession soccer.
Its so important to teach things correctly at an early age because the more ingrained incorrect techniques get the more difficult they are to break.
Making it competitive
Im going to make the rondo’s a game- how many two touch passes can each group get in 1 minute. For every wrong footed touch they will lose a touch. My kids need to have some motivation to play at a high speed. I love the “you score you jog, you miss you sprint” piece too (from the passing patterns)
Cheers!
Its so important to teach things correctly at an early age because the more ingrained incorrect techniques get the more difficult they are to break.
Correct on the Live vs Dead touch.
A dead touch to me is fundamentally flawed in many ways. Granted I see its usefulness, especially in futsal where the sole of the foot is used a lot in moving the ball to get by a defender. The flaw is more evident in the passing game as often the dead ball is caught under the player. To be able to pass the ball, the player is forced to touch it forward as a preparation touch before they are able to effectively make a crisp pass. Or worse, the player takes a step backward in order to step forward into the ball for an effective pass. Either way, a ton of time is needed before the ball is sent to a teammate meaning there is less space for the subsequent player.
A live first touch is general depending on what the player is intending to do. Maybe a first touch is to immediately split two proximatity defenders and is larger as a result. However in my thinking, often the touch is within a step of said player so the next touch is a pass versus digging it out from underneath said player.
Two touch passing in everything I read, comprises 80% of all passes made in the premier league game. Same goes for receiving the ball across the body with the inside of the foot. My assumption in reading this was that two touch passing will be even more effective in lower level/younger games, which has been proven to be right in my experience. However, not all two touch passing is at the same tempo. As suggested in the 4v0 and 4v1 rondo games, the ball is received with one foot and passed with the other. This eliminates a step which quickens the tempo without having the ball being passed at a faster pace. A quicker tempo equals faster speed of play all while not resorting to one touch passing. The key skill here though is the player being able to receive and pass with either foot effectively while also developing an effective first touch back to the passing foot so said player can step into the pass immediately. An errant first touch that slips by the player receiving the ball slightly will mean he/she has to take an additional step and may be forced to pass using the same foot that received the ball which may be in a predictable/forced direction from defensive pressure.
Also, these rules are pretty strict, but they are not absolute as sometimes the defender will accelerate not to press the ball but to cut off the next pass. The player receiving the ball must recognize this and upon their first touch make a sharper cut of the ball back across their body so the play changes directions. This is demonstrated quite a bit in the videos of this rondo exercise and this is where the game itself can either teach the player to recognize the intent of the defender and defeat it or the coach steps in and makes a point of it.
Love the response-
I kick my self every time I look back at the way I trained my kids in the past. The time spent on the first touch going forward instead of learning to play it across the body was such a poor judgement call. I was following instruction from coaches that were considered solid in the area but this system just makes so much more sense from both a tactical and technical point of view.
I have also begun to incorporate the lofted ball as well with the Rondo. Just for a short time, but I think its important
Why does a dead touch have to be under the body? Most of the 4v0/4v1 is what I would consider ‘dead touch’…receive across the body and pass with oposite foot. Perhaps different definitions of dead touch vs live touch. Stepping on the ball is an extreme version of dead touch while live touch is pushing the ball immediately to space.
Teaching/drills for when you receive the ball with Blackfoot and pass with opposite in virtually the same space vs pushing the ball into space was te origination of the question. I believe Gary responded already.
It doesnt HAVE to be under the body and I dont teach it that way, BUT that is often what happens.
If you watch Barca, they often form triangles and basically play keep-away with a lot of one-touches and sheilding if necessary.
Also there are certainly times when you check-away and check-back and still have not cleared space, an opponent still all up in your grill, yet the ball is headed your way.
These are times when receiving across your body and playing it forward might not be able to occur and perhaps, shouldn’t even be attempted.
Recognizing when to take the ball across your body and play it forward vs. knowing when it’s just not going to happen and be willing to dump it off to a teammate who CAN play it forward seems important.
It seems to me that this needs to be addressed so the players can make the right decisions.
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