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Is anyone else experiencing a “tipping point” in their possession play. Basically a point at which the speed of opposition pressing causes possession play to totally collapse?
My u13 team are group of midgets. Two weeks ago they completely dominated the best team in the league – we went through many long chains in our passing with all the elements of good possession play (receive across body/ scanning/ spacing/ talking). But this last weekend we got the worst hiding of my coaching career from a team that isn’t, on paper, as good as the team the week before.
The difference? They pressed us more aggressively all over the pitch. We still had some nice passages of play – but it didn’t last.
What I am finding is that we either destroy teams or get crushed – nothing in the middle. And the difference is entirely down to the speed and ferocity with which the opposition press. Stand off us and we’ll kill you.
If this “tipping point” does exist – what’s the solution? My guess is that I need to work on speed of play so the tipping point is harder to get to. The other option is to switch positions so I have my physically stronger (but less technical) players in the midfield slots so they cope with the assault better. But I feel that runs counter to the possession philosophy.
Hi Aman,
Good observation(s).
Yes, in my experience there are 2 big “tipping points” in the youth game.The first happens around 13/14 when kids enter puberty, and the 2nd happens at 17/18 when the game enters the man’s game.
Both are related to speed of play. The game takes a jump.
And both those jumps in speed of play can [artificially] manifest themselves at other ages if the opposition does a good job at pressing you (or you, them).
Your solutions are good ones.
Your first one is the solution of course (outside of recruiting), but it is going to take a long time for your players to develop the technical & tactical to cope with the added pressure. Awareness, spacing, and talking … have to get better. PLAYER DECISIONS ON AND OFF THE BALL HAVE TO GET FASTER. That’s inescapable. But again, it takes time, and you will lose games – even get run over at times – in the process.Your second solution is good too. Yes, it’s not in the pure spirit of possession, but I look at it as how often one shifts away from the purist view. If it’s one out of 10 games, no big deal – if it’s “managed” well. 5 out of 10 games, that’s different.
Hope that helps a bit.
Aman, I’m the same situation as you. I have a team and I have to develop them, we are also very small u11/u12 playing up.
We played a deluxe jungle ball team last weekend. They had 9 kids of at least 6′ in height, they were faster, stronger and rougher than us by far, very clear that coach has a plan on how he wants to succeed. After the 1st half I had to shuffle my players around and moved all my MFs to backline so we could play out of the back and control their punting, their coach only had one directive throughout the game “kick it up!”. We turned the game around in the second half and pretty much owned the ball, we still lost but stayed as close to our philosophy as possible. We won’t face many teams like these. Going forward I am rotating my MFs to help out in the backline until the FBs can improve, its only our 3rd game and there is room for improvement.
Gary and Luis
Thanks for your responses and support! The team worked really hard in training this evening – feeling the pain of the loss at the weekend. Lots of focus on transitions (based on the 5v5v5 possession game) and how to quickly regain and keep possession when we’ve been muscled off it. We then worked hard on getting compact when we lose the ball in the scrimmage. It’s going to take some time, but we’re working on it!
Luis – really enjoyed your u13B videos. Great to see them controlling the game and playing intelligently.
Aman
Aman, one of the reason I switched all my teams to a 3-4-3 was to protect my smaller backline and slow up the other team in their own half by us controlling more of the midfield. It has worked extremely well and we don’t allow many shots on goals. I have a Rondo I call the ‘defenders under pressure’ Rondo and it involves the defensive units (GK, FBs and holding mids) playing keep away at first and then stringing passes together up the chain against 3 pressing Attackers, I eventually add another attacker once they consistently beat their opponents.
Hi Aman,
Great post! Not only were you clearly able to identify your teams deficiency but also creative enough to come up with a couple solutions. Good ideas to get the conversation started.
Your short term solution of tactically making changes to adapt to the other teams pressure, is a great strategy within the game to solve the problem. Every game is unique and because not every team will pressure you with that same intensity, it is an ideal band-aid until your team improves their speed of play.
The long term solution of continuing to improve the speed of play can be a tedious task and something that plagues my teams as well. What I have found that helps to expedite the process is trying to mimic that same intensity of those unique games. As a player, it is extremely uncomfortable when teams are aggressively hunting you down for every ball, especially when the week before, the previous team you played would stand back. If within your training sessions you are able to replicate that “balls to the walls”, “no time to breathe”, “I’m coming to destroy you” type of pressure, players may be better equipped to deal with those teams who show up ready to pounce.
Finding ways to tweak the exercises you probably already do everyday is an easy place to start. The 4v1 rondo is the perfect exercise to expose the quality or lack there of in relation to speed of play.
Ex. Play for 45 seconds with 5 balls. If defender wins all 5 balls within the allotted time, 4 offensive players have some sort of accountability i.e. sprints or burpees. If 4 attackers are able to retain possession without losing the ball 5 times, defender has accountability.
A couple things should happen. Hopefully the threat of having to do some extra fitness will get the defender to pressure the ball with that game intensity we’re trying to replicate. If that’s the case, the offensive group will find itself struggling to keep possession. This is where you can nurture those fundamentals of possession Gary addressed (awareness,spacing,communication). Loss of possession can almost always be attributed to those three concepts. Before the ball came to Johnny, did he know where he was going to play? Did Juan move early into a good passing lane to support Johnny at an appropriate angle? Did Johnny make sure he reassured Juan that switching to Alexis was the right decision? If not call them out!
Technical quality is also another huge reason for turnovers. The consideration of the pass is a massive component in playing out of high pressure. Pace and placement can both speed up and slow down possession of the ball. It could be that the placement of the pass wasn’t to a teammates opposite foot (too far in front or behind) and that player is forced to take an extra touch. Maybe the pass wasn’t hit hard enough to get to the player in time. Or maybe the pass was hit with so much pace that the receiving player didn’t have the quality to control it cleanly. Either way, by challenging teammates to play hard and accurate passes, it’s all preparation for that unique game when teams come to smother you with pressure.
Unfortunately there are no shortcuts when it comes to building those fundamentals of possession, but by increasing the speed at which players have to execute those fundamentals, players are now challenged and learn to become more comfortable dealing with those types of high octane pressure situations.
When the speed of play is inadequate at our training sessions, I try to remind my teams that we are not preparing to play the teams who give us time to play. We are preparing to play the ones who don’t. If we can consistently train at the speed of the most intense pressure we will face, we shouldn’t have a problem going up against anybody else.
Good luck and keep those other teams chasing the ball!!
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This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by
Danny Rogers.
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This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by
Gary.
Hi Danny
Thanks for your comments!
Your suggestion about making sure the training sessions are played at full intensity is a good one. I really like the idea of having a set number of balls in the rondos and seeing who “wins” more.
Your post also got me thinking about what exactly this tipping point is and what can we address over what timeframes. I ended up drawing a couple of charts to get it clear. This might be over-sciencing it – but I thought I’d share what I came up with.
First – here is what I mean by a tipping point. Basically as the pressure on the player in possession gets more intense (i.e. giving each player less time) they start taking fewer touches UP TO A POINT. Once you go beyond that it falls apart and players rapidly want a lot more touches as they get panicky:
Then I thought about where the improvements can come from to allow players to deal with the pressure. It seemed like there were three ways to improve:
- Give players more time on the ball (spacing/ weight of pass/ lose your man)
- Make them comfortable with having less time (awareness/ patterns/ communication)
- Train them to play off fewer touches (technical ability/ rondos)
Which I put on the chart like this:
Clearly you have to work on all these elements to develop the team correctly. But if I’m looking for shorter term gains I think its going to come from spacing/ weight of pass/ lose your man to allow players more time on the ball – before they develop the longer terms skills of getting comfortable with having less time and having the technique to play off fewer touches.
Not sure if that’s helpful, but it helped me get clear on what I’m trying to achieve!
Aman
Aman,
This is excellent!
Would you consider allowing us to publish an article using this publicly?
Also, we’ve moved the forums and the whole coaching program to a new site:
and so the forums have also moved:
Would be awesome if you copied and pasted your post over there! 🙂
Gary
Hi Gary
Happy for you to use the content. I’ll copy it over to the new forum..
Aman
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This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by
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