Today's topic is a short one but also an important one and deals with practicing your pre game warm up.
Most coaches realize that their teams pre game warm up will usually have a major affect on how the team starts the game and for that matter, how they play the entire game.
Since it's such an important part of how a team will play, wouldn't it make sense to practice the pre game warm up so everyone is on the same page?
If your pre game warm up takes 45 minutes, you could either do the entire 45 minute warm up in a practice or, you could spend 10-15 minutes to do an abbreviated warm up. The abbreviated warm up would be the entire warm up in 'fast forward". So if you would do a 6 minute keep away activity, you might only do the first minute of this. If you would spend 5 minutes on a crossing and finishing activity, you might only do this for a minute.
The advantage of the full practice warm up is you can find things that might not work. Recently I saw a team run a practice pre game warm up and realize that because of their numbers, they needed to change the size of the grid. If they had only done this for a minute, they might not have realized this but by doing the entire session, it gave them time to see the flaws.
The disadvantage of the full practice warm up is most teams have very limited practice time and might not want to spend a full 45 minutes on practicing a pre game warm up.
Either the full warm up or the abbreviated warm up is fine but if you are an older team (meaning, I wouldn't do this with a U6 team), I believe you will find it's worth your time to make sure everyone is on the same page to prepare for your games.
Some coaches seem to spend a great deal of time looking at the statistics of soccer. Things such as time of possession, number of bad passes, shots on goal etc.
If you are going to chart loss of possessions, I think you need to break it down even further into four categories.
* Forced loss of possessions (flop)
* Unforced loss of possession (ulop)
* Risked loss of possessions (rlop)
* Good loss of possessions (glop)
There is a big difference between the three and it's important for coaches and players to understand the differences, and to know when some are acceptable and others are not.
A flop occurs when the player is under pressure and loses the ball. This could be the result of receiving the ball while already under pressure, or having the situation change and finding yourself surrounded by opponents.
A Flop occurs when the player loses the ball even though there is no pressure on you at all. This could be from a square pass to a player who has already left that space or a mis hit pass that goes directly to an opponent.
A rlop occurs when a player sees an opportunity and takes a chance and it doesn't work (this might be trying a through ball that is hit too hard, or a shot on goal or trying to split two players with a dribble because space is seen behind them)
A glop occurs when the team loses possession but for a good reason. The most obvious one would be when there is a loss of possession because your team scores a goal. Coaches will "accept" this type of a loss of possession every time. Another example might be when the ball is crossed in from an opponent you you clear the ball to safety although it does result in possession for the opponent. While some would classify this as a flop, I believe it belongs in a the glop category
If you are going to track statistics, it's important to realize these four types of losses of possesion are quite different.
If you track these, you want to first emphasize the ulop. As a coach, you would love to get rid of all ulops. However, reality is, some will occur. They happen to the best players in the world and they will happen to your players as well. The key is to work to minimize them as much as possible. To pick a random number, if your team averages 20 ulop's a game, you can set a goal of reducing it to 10 a game. If successful in reaching this goal, you would see a marked improvement in play.
The flops should be tracked as being directly result of the player losing the ball or a result of them losing the ball due to receiving it under pressure. For example, if a player receives the ball with no pressure and then dribble into pressure and as a result of this pressure loses the ball, this would be one category. A completely different category would be the player who receives the ball under pressure and while trying to work the ball out of pressure, loses the ball. The second example is much easier to accept than the first one.
The rlop's would be generally considered to be worthwhile losses of possession but only f done in the proper time and location. If the team is winning 1-0 with one minute to go, that is NOT the time to try to dribble through a couple of opponents in your defensive 18.
The point I'm trying to make is that while it can be worthwhile to track loss of possession, it would be much more worthwhile if you do it in a specific and measurable way.
Each of the 4 categories above result in the opponent receiving the ball but they shouldn't all be considered the same. Glops are good all over the field. Ulops are unacceptable all over the field. The other two are understandable depending upon the situation.
As you can see, not all loss of possessions are the same. If you can limit the ulops, have the flops occur in limited quantities and have the rlops occur in the right time and place, your team will be more successful.
