Today’s session’s aim

Make session game related
Progress session
Guided discovery

From Sunday’s performance, some coaches may presume there is not much more they can work on, there few negatives to choose from, so why not work on the positives? One of the main responsibilities of the coach is to ensure that the participant has to be cared for and not experience negative rapport from their coach as this is the result of a form of anxiety in the athlete (Baker et al, 2000). The emphasis on today’s was on creating space and making as much game related situations as possible allowing the players to become inhabitant with the components of creating and exploiting space.

The efficacy of warm ups are questioned by Noaska (Nosaka et al, 2004) so I alternatively decided not to use the usual dynamic and ballistic stretching in a 30x30 grid, alternatively I gave each player a ball and gave them the opportunity to use as much as the space given to them as possible, challenging them to cover as much blades of grass as they could individually this motivated the players to create a realistic tempo, there was a cognitive element to this session however to raise the stimulus of the squad, dribbling techniques were installed in order to make the warm up game related, finding their own space with their head up looking for a space to move into. Here a number of motor and cognitive skills are developed as the players are maximally controlling their motor skills whilst cognitively initiating which technique and what speed to approach the skill co-operatively arguing the case that football is situated in the middle of the continuum, however this varies depending on position of the players which is an element I have to be aware of when introducing techniques (Reep et al, 1968).

The session was progressed to complement the sessions objective (Harrison, 2002) to a keep ball drill where two teams where put into a 20x20 grid, the concept of this drill was to encourage the players to use the most of the space given and make the picture for the player on the ball big and allow options for a pass, as in football there is not always going to be space given to you as defenders are closing the space down and challenging for the ball creating space is a player’s ability to create space on the pitch and exploit it cognitively and effectively (Bangsbo et al, 2003). They were encouraged to use 2 touches of the ball maximum as this makes the team who are defending ‘team’s workload heavier as they do not have as much time to adjust to the ball. Basic elements were introduced such as communication, first touch, movement. This drill could predominantly be stated as displaying open skills, as the players were performing in a moving dynamic environment (Poulton, 1957). However this drill may have displayed closed skills as the players were able to consistently reproduce a defined movement pattern (Ericsson, 1991).

A 6v6 in a 60x40 grid was progressed from the small compact space to encourage the players to exploit a bigger space given to them where the objective was to create space, to create scoring opportunities. The players were inhibited with the situations of the first drill and this allowed the players to identify the key roles of certain situations that may occur in the progressed drill. I allowed the players to find multiple answers to the problem, this was created through guided discovery, I could have just used a direct approach to this drill where the aim was to learn a specific component and the specific outcome which was a scoring opportunity occur. I wanted the players to think independently, as new approaches to creating scoring opportunities may occur. We linked back to last weeks training session referring to cohesion as communication and an objective was developed (Gadson, 2001; Schneider et al 2005), this allowed the players to become autonomous in order for the drill to become fast and error free (Anderson, 1982), however the players did have to go through the three stages of learning in order to make the drill successful, I intervened and added some procedural knowledge so that the cognitive stage could be understood (Anderson, 1982). We discussed after the cool down in the debrief that if more strategies became autonomous the consistency of results would keep coming our way.

This Sunday’s game was a very early kick off at half past ten in the morning meaning that the meeting time was going to be quarter past nine in order to get to the venue where we were playing as it was away, i strictly advised the players to get a early night as rest is just as important as performing as sleep aids in the players BMI rates increasing and prevents fatigue from occurring resulting in a lack of concentration (Cardinali, 2002).
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