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I saw a video on youtube a year or so ago where a grassroots club from somewhere, I think it might have been Denmark, arrived in Barcelona to spend a weekend receiving training from Barca coaches. They didn’t speak Spanish or Catalan and the coaches didn’t speak their language so everyone was trying to communicate in English. There was one drill where the main coaching points were essentially pass to the back foot and check back to the ball, or as the Barca coach described it ” lie to the defender”. After a couple of minutes of misplaced passes and lazy running the coach stopped the drill and told them in no uncertain terms, ” If you do as I tell you to do and you make a mistake no problems that is why we practice but if you do what you want to do then we have problems, do as I tell you to do ! ” Just because these kid had paid their way out for a fun soccer trip was not going to stop the coaches from demanding effort, intensity and focus, the gold standard. I as a coach learned a lot from that video and I am finding that what I am getting most out of this coaching program is not the drills or the game footage. It is listening to Brian. His speech to the U 18’s ,his half time talk to the U 14’s and even how he spoke to the kids in Seattle. Always asking for accountability ,reminding the kids to stay focused. Allowing for mistakes but not allowing a drop in intensity. The team that I have just finished coaching was always inconsistent with poor training habits. I used to think it was their fault, I now realize that it was mine.
I really enjoyed listening to Brian’s comments during halftime. I loved how he got the kids to take ownership of their identity. Are we keeping the ball ? Are we winning the ball back high up the field ? On a couple of occasions the players sounded unsure if they were doing enough and Brian had to reassure them that they were, giving them the confidence to play. I found it interesting when at one point Brian got frustrated but mentioned to his assistant that they hadn’t rehearsed that particular pattern of play so that he was not going to say anything to them. At the end of the match, after a drop off in their play he still provided constructive points yet maintained that level of accountability, everything was calm and focused. I often find myself struggling to find the right words to say to the boys at these moments, this video has helped me enormously, thanks for posting it.
Andreas Iniesta once said ” It doesn’t matter how good a passer you are if your teammates are in the wrong position”. I don’t see pattern play as simply a series of sequential passes from player A to player B but more as an opportunity to train the entire team to be in the correct areas of the field with the right spacing so that the player on the ball has a number of different options. If you take as an example the video where Brian worked on the overlapping fullback. He wasn’t just focusing on the play on the flanks between the winger and the fullback but also the position of the defensive midfielder in relation to the two central defenders and the finishing positions of the attackers into the penalty box, making sure that each player had a specific location to attack. Guardiola wrote that ” whoever has the ball should focus on opposing players not teammates as he should always know where his teammates are”. I think that’s the advantage of working on patterns, to give everyone a familiarity of where their teammates are and the chance to look to exploit the poor positioning of their opponents.
For me there have been two main influences. The first was the late, great Brian Clough. A man who took over at a small 2nd division team in 1975 and in 5 years had won the European Cup twice. One of his many quotes was ” If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds he’d have put grass up there “. A complicated man who believed in good behavior on the pitch but he often found himself in trouble over some of the things he said and did . He could be a real sob but was kind enough to invite a young boy on holiday from Vancouver into his office to chat about football on a couple of occasions. Not known as a tactician, yet he was one of the few in England that he marked zonally on corners, and always insisted that you keep the game simple and pass on the floor to a player in the same color shirt. One of the best man managers of his era.
The second major influence for me has been Pep Guardiola for obvious reasons . He quite simply has inspired me to pursue this obsession of developing a team that can dominate games with the ball. I don’t know how many hours I have spent watching videos on Youtube, translating articles written in Spanish or Catalan in an attempt to discover the process of developing football perfection. He has altered my perception as to what is possible and that has excited me.
Hi Everyone, my name is Steve and I coach a U 18 boys team in Coquitlam British Columbia, a suburb just outside of Vancouver. I am really excited to be apart of this community as it seems that I have spent most of the last 5 or 6 years arguing with people that it is in fact possible to develop a possession based game similar to what we have seen from Barca, Villareal and other teams , it simply comes down to the correct coaching. Thanks to people like Gary and Brian, Jed Davies and others on here I hope I will be able to prove to the doubters wrong. Thanks for helping to raise the bar.
