The 5-Minute Football Coach - Issue #3
1v1, Dribbling or Passing, It's just a game
Welcome to the 3rd issue of the 5 Minute Coach - and a special hello if you joined in the last week! Here are this week’s top picks:
Practice of the Week
A simple and effective practice to work on either dribbling past a defender or using a wall pass. Repeat, repeat, repeat to give the players lots of touches on the ball and a chance to improve their finishing.
Topic of the Week
At what age should we get players to stop hogging the ball? Younger kids generally don’t tend to pass the ball much - and it’s easy as a coach to focus on trying to ‘fix’ that. As it turns out, this may not be such a great idea.
Glenn Hoddle recently explained that from 5 to 8 the focus should be on ball mastery - with passing coming later. And Peter Sturgess extended that to 5- to 11-year-olds.
This makes a lot of sense, although I would counter that we only get to ‘work’ with our team 1 or 2 hours per week, while they play another 5-10 hours at school, in the local park, at home - where the focus is very much on mastering the ball. So having a few training sessions focused on passing must be a good thing?
Video of the Week
A quick reminder that football is all about fun, via an old advert from Hockey Canada:
Nice to remind yourself what it’s all about, and worth sharing with other coaches and parents.
As always give me a shout if you have a link you’d like me to include in a future issue!
Have a great week
Fabrice