Lazy...or just playing a different way?

Apologies for the lack of activity, it's been an incredibly busy week and my girlfriend was over to visit last weekend, so this has been inadvertently relegated to secondary status. 

After some despondence following confrontation about effort, there wasn't much to grumble about in the following session, I don't think! I was introduced to two new drills involving both running and a football. The first involves three players and three cones, with one player doing the work, one dictating and one feeding. The set-up is a ‘T’ shape with the working player starting at the tip – the cones are stationed at each point of the T. The dictator (for want of a better word) then calls out either 1 (sprint to the left cone), 2 (sprint to the right cone) or 3 (run backwards to the rear cone) – obviously not in order, and the player has to get to the correct cone and back to the middle before being fed the ball and setting off again – players work for I think 45 seconds to one minute. Methods of feeding included ground passing, volley passing, chest and volley, sit-ups with headers and press-ups with headers. The second was a lot more complicated for the brain. It involved groups of six, sometimes eight (with two players working) – the feeders would stand in a sort of square and the workers would be at the bottom on each side, facing one of the feeders. Players run round the square doing ground passes, volley passes, (sit-ups and press-ups) headers etc.; on the first go they must cross over and go to the other feeder at the bottom of the square before running up to the top to be fed by one, and crossing over again at the top before arriving back at the opposite feeder at the bottom. If in a group of eight, the players would cross over again in what would become the middle before running to the top and crossing over again before arriving back at the bottom. Players bumping into each other and veering off in completely the wrong direction was not an uncommon occurrence.

So, onto Saturday morning’s session and numbers were vastly reduced as a number of players had gone on the club's tour. The first drill was not quite as intense as others have been as it involved working primarily on the spot for about a minute but it did still require being switched on. In groups of either three or four, with one player working, the player working will be fed the ball in turns by the other players through means of volley passes, chest and volleys, headers, sit-ups plus headers etc. – in a group of three, the player working returns the ball to the player who has fed it him, whereas in a four he gives it to the feeder without a ball (the exercise always involves two balls, so with three feeders one is always without a ball). I enjoyed this exercise as it really does seem to refine your technique if practised enough, making a simple firm side-footed volley or header come naturally. After that was the 12 laps in 12 minutes again, though the manager did challenge us to do 13 if we could manage it – I did. There was also the sprinting and passing etc. for 45 seconds sandwiched in between a 6-a-side game.

In the second part of this six-a-side game, something started to bug me and I left feeling puzzled at it. I hadn’t played my best and had been sloppy with the ball way too often for my liking, but it wasn’t that. Several on my team, myself included, were feeling pretty tired (once again) after all the running we had done. Clearly to recover some energy, we tried playing a slow, patient build-up when in possession, and without the ball, allowing the other team possession in their own half whilst carefully altering our positions accordingly in order to shut out channels for ‘damaging’ passes. If they did manage to breach a line, we would quicken our pace and attempt to shut them out. The manager instructed the team which didn’t have the ball to adopt a high-tempo pressing approach with lots of closing down, stating that “anyone just marking space isn’t helping their team.” I realised about a couple of hours after I’d got home from training that it was the manager’s words which had annoyed me. Ordering us to switch from a containment defensive style to high-tempo pressing is fine in itself, and it’s very beneficial for teams to learn and master various styles of defence in order to gain flexibility and adaptability (although perhaps this should be practised more with better organised training at this level – admittedly may be difficult to implement). His motive for demanding a change in our approach, however, seemed to be because he thought we were being lazy and not working hard enough – indeed he said we were “lazy” if we weren’t closing down, and of course football isn’t quite so simple, and even when trying to organise something quickly it upsets me to see the game spoken of in a way that reduces tactics and systems to a very simplistic form. Having expended a great deal of energy running earlier, high-energy pressing to regain possession is even more energy-sapping. If not done properly, which is likely when energy levels are low, it is a very risky strategy – if you press high up the pitch and commit yourself, once the ball has passed you, you are pretty much taken out of the game, giving the team in possession a massive advantage. I get that pre-season is also about fitness and the manager would want to push us so we can compete in matches, but you don’t just have to keep running at full pelt for the sake of it, not to mention that a containment game requires high levels of sustained concentration, and the knowledge of subtle positional nuances. The ‘lazy’ excuse is just pretty poor, in all honesty. Pre-season is about fitness and several other things too.