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Guys-
One of the biggest things that I struggle with is being the only person that watches game footage and evaluates my teams performance. I’m a coaching staff of just one for the most part and I know that I don’t have all of the answers. I also know that many of you are in the same boat. The intention of this thread is to help each other. To lend an extra set of eyes. To get more opinions. To come up with new ideas. To solve problems.
I’ll start it off by submitting an unedited clip from a recent game. You don’t know the score, minute, time of day, temperature, or anything about either team (unless you already follow me on YouTube).
Critique the fuck out of this for me please! Feel free to use what we’ve learned here (losing your marker, pattern play, etc) as your criteria or just give me your brutally honest opinions. Anything is appreciated.
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This topic was modified 10 years, 10 months ago by
Gary.
The team in white is definitely controlling the game with possession. Good work with back 4 and the keeper to maintain possession and change/ switch the field.
John
Firstly, I have admired your passion for the beautiful game for some time now, I have enjoyed your passionate tweets and comments. Secondly, kudos to you for putting your “product” out there front and center. I think it is fantastic that you are willing to put the videos up for critique.
I have watched the video a few times through. I think your play from the back and into the middle third of the field is solid and your team moves the ball around very well. I think the play into the final third is where you are having issues. In the video there is the lack of quality and poise around the box that you have everywhere else on the pitch. At times it looked rushed. Perhaps a little more patience from the midfield as the forwards work to shake their markers, or the strikers “showing more” for a bounce pass or a turn off the defender. My U13 boys team has the same issues, we have worked hard the past few months on being more clinical and having more purpose in the final third. Worked on alot of “up, back, and throughs” interchanges to unlock the defense.
I think Gary posted on the blog once about a quality player just putting their foot on the ball and dictating the tempo of the game. I think that little extra quality and patience would make a huge difference. There were a few occasions in the video when two touches would have been better than one to assure a better final, penetrating pass…..
Something I am also working on with my team is being more explosive off the ball, getting into passing channels quicker, losing markers and checking with greater speed.
The girls are playing great – keep up the excellent work !
Cheers
Brian
Brian-
Thank you for the feedback. That is exactly what I want from this forum.
I agree with what you’ve said. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told the girls “we’re okay with keeping the ball in our back line in our own half, now lets move all of that up up about 30 yards.” It just hasn’t clicked for us, yet. In the back we don’t get as much pressure and the passes are easier to make and the space is easier to find. And no one knows how to shut down our holding mid. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a baller and deserves a lot of credit. She is great at playing between the first two lines of defense. Other teams are just clueless when it comes to denying her the ball.
Every 10 yards we go up the field, we encounter a new set of challenges. We struggle when we’re surrounded. We do rush, like you said. We get overwhelmed. At halftime yesterday I told the girls “I can see the wheels turning!” Because at field level… you can see their eyes looking around and I know they see the right options.
What we didn’t do much of in the clip was get the ball wide in final third. That was the case the entire game.
John – good stuff. Similar sentiments to Brian’s for the attacking 1/3 and well done in the back and mid 1/3s. One thing I wanted to add was speed of play – the opposing team in several of your videos seems to recover quickly on ball switches or the attacking 1/3 due to speed of passes. It’s hard for me to measure speed of girl’s playing both with and without the ball (since I coach boys), so I may be off. The foundation is obviously there and I have seen your 7v4 rectangle drill (very fast paced) so now speeding up the process might be a good idea.
Well done.
Here’s a 13 minute clip from my BU14 team’s first game last spring season.
Some context: My town is 13,000 people and about 10,000 more within a 45 minute drive. So we don’t have much option for recruitment. We have to combine U13/U14 just to get enough kids to field a travel team. We are playing against the team coached by their boys’ high school coach who has won our conference for the last 10 years.
There’s some other videos of this team on my youtube account, feel free to watch any of those. I edited this one to be in the same format as a lot of Barca USA’s, focusing on the 5-pass sequences. We’ve come a long way since I picked them up the year prior, but I know we still have a long way to go.
Sorry for the low quality videos, but it’s what I have (no parents were willing to tape for me this past fall season). Also, beware of the wind running across the mic on most of the videos, we played in 20+ mph winds almost that entire season except for the game in the first video linked.
Any and all critique is welcome.
Hi John,
You’ve clearly worked a ton on how you want to build up from the back and into the middle third. Your players generally receive across their body and have decent enough spacing. Your holding mid does a great job of finding space, receiving the ball, and moving it along quickly. She’s clearly got some of the best understanding of how you want to play.
As others stated (and I’m sure you already know) your final third leaves something to be desired. I really don’t think it’s a lack of composure on your team’s part, rather a lack of penetrative movement. Their back line is clearly content to keep the game in front of them and not take many risks. Unfortunately, your front line is also okay with playing the game like that, based on this clip anyway.
Your center forward is dropping to collect the ball usually when appropriate, but there’s absolutely no movement elsewhere when she does that. Your wingers are already wide-ish and they stay wide-ish. You can see several times when you’re in possession that there is a gap of 5-10 yards between their backline and anyone from your team. There needs to be some kind of push to penetrate that you guys are lacking, that is most likely solved by your wingers trying to get in behind like in attacking pattern 3. At 2:10 your wingers are pinched in but make jogging half-runs instead of demanding a through ball with a penetrating run. At 3:23 there’s a huge amount of space behind their right back that your left winger could run into but doesn’t recognize the opportunity for the dangerous 1-2.
There were a couple times your wingers were isolated 1v1 and were afraid to go at the defender, most notable at 1:00 and 1:16. Outside of your blonde attacking mid, none of your players really seem to have the will to go 1v1. Maybe your center forward a bit. If that continues to be the case, I’d consider moving your left back to holding mid, holding mid to attacking mid, attacking mid to left wing and find someone else to play left back.
John, great product. I worked a lot on the girls side for several years and I appreciate the awareness and confidence you’ve developed. Those are big hurdles on the girls side even for players with talent.
I was wondering if you have any cues or rotations for the wide forward to come inside and create overloads, which would give you the chance to spring players behind centrally and also let you bring the outside backs all the way to their back line. This keeps a lot of pressure on the back line, as they have to either…
A: get compact to prevent combination play in the middle of the field – this allows outside backs to receive and attack in space out wide.
OR
B: stretch a little to respect the threat of the wide outside back – this creates bigger gaps centrally for your 1/2s, slipped passes in behind, etc.I think there are a couple rotations that you could add in this part of the field that could create more fluidity and interchange, and with a little choreography they would be really effective at getting your players in behind.
First off, I must offer credit for posting a video to critique. Thank you for sharing. I think your team is very well coached and the girls are fun to watch. They definitely control the game! Part of my education begins with me being comfortable enough to share. Here’s my first go at it.
The ability of your girls to orchestrate space and transition the ball from the back to middle third of the field is a strength. The girls are aware of their teammates who are both in front and back of them in these portions of the field. They are patient in possession and can move the ball from one player to the next to the next with little need to apply one-two combinations or splitting through passes from the back to middle third of the field with only a couple of players involved. What I mean by the aforementioned statement is that, for example, player 1 will move the ball to player 2 who will move the ball to player 3, as opposed to player 1 moving the ball to player 2 who then combines to advance the ball back to player 1. Having said that, the nature of this particular clip was not conducive to the need to move the ball in that fashion in the back and middle thirds of the field as spreading the ball with single passes across several players proved effective in advancing the ball to the top of the final third of the field.
As the ball enters the final third of the field (inside 20 yard football field mark), the defending team has retreated in a horizontal line across the field. Now that your girls have no front line ahead of them in which to comfortably move the ball and the defending back line has established defensive compactness and the ability to cover the wide offensive players, the girls on the offensive were stuck in breaking the back line. In addition, I got the impression that they displayed a similar degree of patience in the attacking third, but were at a loss when they no longer had visible players in front of them to receive the pass. Several of the opportunities inside the 20 yd line ended after only one pass. In the attacking third, as one girl would pass, she would not necessarily move with any intent after the pass to break the back line. In addition, the recipient of the pass usually did not come back to the ball to receive it. In some of these instances they had a window of time where they were numbers up (e.g., 3v2) if you were to set a 10 by 10 yd. grid around where the ball was located.
Conceptually, I wondered about the converse to how the girls feel and act in reference to comfort, time, and space in the final third when comparing that to the middle and back thirds of the field. I guess for lack of a better term I would define it as urgency in possession with intent to score. I liken it to a visual of an upside down triangle where your back and middle thirds are the wider ends of the base of the triangle, and as you progress to the steep vertex near the skinny part of the triangle a different mindset goes into effect regarding how they feel and act in the flow of the final third facet of the game when space and time are compressed. Thus, deployment of small numbers of players quickly moving in confined space with a sense of urgency and uniform intent to move the ball forward (sounds like Rondos with a momentary directional transition when the opportunity presents itself) goes into effect.
In the final third, urgency to expedite is initiated. In the video, the opportunities would usually occur with 2 or 3 of your players working in combination as “one” to attack a segment of their back line to vertically advance the ball in the line “yet to be created.” Thus taking defenders on outright or making them believe the dribbler is headed to goal, only then to distribute the ball in the available space to the offensive player to her immediate right or left, and moving off the ball to yet again receive a quick pass behind the back line. I also agree with Brian Mitchell in breaking the back line with an up, back, and through. There was an instance where this looked to be on, but was not recognized initially by the right forward until it was too late (as Brian Kleiban says, “Timing is everything.”). Also, dribbling horizontally to make a through pass as well as diagonally slanting across the face of a defender to receive a cutting through ball.
In the video one of your players showed instances of playing with possessive intentional urgency. I believe it may have been your holding mid maybe named Taylor (heard someone on the video mention her name). Late in the video she involves herself in the middle third, plays the ball, and immediately advances vertically to quickly receive the ball again. She eventually ends up in the attacking third (almost splitting the back line herself) where the ball eventually goes out wide left (can’t see the girl with the ball). During that time, Taylor is showing for the ball to be played behind (expressing communicative intent) the defender so she can make a splitting run. What I like that she did that made the back line vulnerable was ability to possess, but with an attacking mentality backed by speed and aggressiveness.
I think of Rondos in tight space when I think of front third compression with the need for unity among team members. This is an awesome group of which to be a part.
Take care,
James Brodie
Speed of play is a huge problem. We play a lot of small rondos (3v1, 4v1, 5v2, 8v2) and they move the ball lightening fast. When we train at practice they move the ball pretty quick. Then during the game its like the field has glue on it or something. We did work on that tonight because that was a problem in our last game. When switching it across the back, the passes have been too slow, so by the time it gets from left to right, we no longer have an advantage because defenders are meeting/beating us there.
Hey Paul-
We actually do have several cues that spark movement from our wingers and outside backs as well as our center forward. (I’m not sure if any members are opposing coaches so I won’t reveal those cues just yet!) haha
We failed to get our outside backs high up the field and failed to get them support when we did get the ball wide to them. They had no options in the box and no one as an outlet. We basically left them on an island. At halftime I told the girls if we got the ball wide and high and were able to send in just a couple of crosses, I thought we would score. Second half came and went without any of those opportunities happening. Our wingers didn’t much for our width either. We made a change about 30 minutes in and put in a girl who’s job was to stay wide and high… and she air balled, too.
So we spent tonights practice working on our cues, as a program, inviting the JV team to train with us so they can begin to understand them as well. I’ve really scaled back the focus the last couple of weeks to just one or two things because I tend to get overzealous and cover 30 topics in 30 minutes. I can see their heads slowly starting to explode. 3 months just isn’t enough time to teach everything that is needed 🙁
Damn Andrew… that was pretty good feedback.
We have been experimenting with a CF that drops deeper to help us maintain possession in the attacking half of the field. Like I’ve said before (and most have commented here) we’re good at keeping possession in the back line, but these girls have always struggled moving that possession 30 yards up the field. Part of it is that our center backs don’t join us fast enough and we get way too disconnected through the different thirds of the field and they are also too content with dropping waaaaay deeper than they need too. Our GK also plays waaaaay too far back so when we turn to her for an outlet we’re consistently playing back to our own 6 yard box instead of the 18 or even higher where she should probably be playing. That’s sort of an automatic safety she has built in because she’s been beaten from a long shot before. But we get waaaay to stretched out when that happens and then it just repeats over and over again. We’re working on that.
What you noticed about our wingers and outside backs is pretty spot on though. We have been working on the wingers pinching in a bit, and outside backs getting forward (when they notice certain cues), as well as the CF dropping in. We completely failed at it this game though. We’re going to continue to try to get our outside backs forward, but we’re making a personnel change which will make us a bit more dangerous on the right wing with a girl who is NOT afraid to take players on. We’re most likely making a change at right back as well.
Both right back and right center back were JV players last year. Right back used to play right winger on JV, but spends the entire year playing travel softball, which is her main sport. So she hasn’t played for almost a year and she’s learning a whole new position at a much higher level. Scary to think about it like that! But she’s doing okay. Our Sophomore right center back played holding mid on JV last year and plays holding mid on her club team as well. She started the year as our ‘second string’ holding mid on Varsity, but when I lost our starting center back to a pair of divorced parents (player had to go with the parent living in a different state) I was forced to teach someone to play center back. She’s actually picked up on it really well. She’s the most technically gifted player on the team. I’m hoping she starts getting some looks from colleges soon.
The left winger in the video has this weird ability to meg any player, at any time, no matter where she is on the field. I’ve even fallen victim to her voodoo. The only problem is that she is a turtle. She has pretty decent technical skills, a great left footed cross, but no speed. My second choice left winger is on the upside of her return from ACL surgery. She has to wear a bulky brace and isn’t much faster than the girl ahead of her on the roster. So my hands have been a little tied there. I like the idea of moving Megan (our attacking mid) to wing. I’ve actually experimented with it before during our club season. Having someone else mention it makes me feel okay about maybe trying it again. We’ll see how these next couple of games go.
Just so you know how spot on you were… our left back switches between LB and holding mid for her club team 😉 Not sure if I would make that move with this team though. She’s too one footed.
Thanks for the feedback! I’m looking forward to watching your videos when I have time. They’re kind of long so I want to make sure I set aside the appropriate time needed 🙂
Thank you for the in depth feedback, James! Be careful though! Taylor’s dad is also a 3four3 member haha
We failed to show any type of urgency during that clip. I’m debating showing another extended clip from this same game when things were much different. The game completely changed and we were on the attack… out for blood!!!!!
The soccer gods were against us that day, though. We just weren’t meant to score. Our left winger ripped a shot during a scramble on a corner kick and our center forward actually ended up blocking a FOR SURE goal with her hand as she tripped over the goalkeeper and stumbled towards the ground. I almost cried when I watched the clip and saw nothing but net behind our forwards hand… and our winger just put her hands on her head in disbelief. We also had an obvious PK that didn’t get called and that same center forward missed a 1v1 with the keeper in the last 30 seconds of the game.
Here is a short clip from the same game we’ve been discussing. We had A LOT of moments like this, none as pretty though. So the urgency did change at a certain point… but it was far too late in the game and things just weren’t going our way. http://youtu.be/XH9YX1b_yLQ
Here is an example that shows a little of what we’ve actually worked on in the attacking third: http://youtu.be/XH9YX1b_yLQ
Megan (blondie) is our attacking mid. She plays the first pass to our CF (Brooke) who is dropping deep to help. Brooke plays it back to Megan. Megan then plays to our left winger. Left winger plays final pass to right winger who is offside.
What goes unnoticed is that our right back just stood and watched. She KNOWS she should have been hauling ass up the line. Had she done that… maybe our left winger plays her through and we’re on side and we’re looking for a cross into the box with a shitload of girls waiting like ducks for bread at a pond full of old people. Another thing unnoticed is that our left back isn’t even in the frame. With our left winger pushed so far over… she KNOWS she has acres of space ahead of her and she too should have been hauling ass up the side line.
I guess it could come down to heat of the moment… they were excited. The game was crazy at that moment and we had chance after chance after chance to go forward. What we have worked on in the past is when we send both outside backs, which should have happened in this case, our holding mid just sits between our two CB’s who split out wide. It’s something we haven’t been able to work on recently though because we’ve had to back to square one with our new right back and new right center back 🙁
Love the way your girls play! As stated above you have a solid team in the back and middle third. The players look to execute middle third attack patterns in the final 1/3rd. Spend some time working on quick combinations at the top of the 18 and you’ll finish more. I think your doing an amazing job! Wish more HS teams played with this type of skill. It can often be a hack fest in the HS game.
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