We see it all the time in local football, especially in juniors, where the ball is your team’s back line, your mids have worked hard to assist the defender’s and then there’s a massive gap of no teammates between defensive and forward 50m area’s. In some cases this goes back to tactical design from the...
We’ve got end to handball with defender/s in the middle and we’ve also got end to end handball where some of the offensive players in the previous rep take up defensive duties immediately after the ball has made it to their end and they both train transition but in only 1 of the 2 ways...
This is a team defensive set up that Melbourne put to excellent use in their 2021 premiership year and still use a fair bit of in 2023. It’s a pretty simple formation that aims to force the opposition to kick it to where you want them to of which you can then organise your numbers...
If you’ve kept up with reading my content then by now you should have some familiarity with constraints and how they can provide affordances for your players which is one of the strongest learning methods there is, especially in team sports. To quickly recap, constraints are alternative rules a coach can include in traditional games...
This is a forward/defensive 50 game that’s pretty easy to set up and get going quickly once players know their roles. I’ve made the example with 12 players but you could easily increase that up to 16 players with 6v6 in the main area while staying with the 4 neutral players. This is how it...
There are real staple training drills that most coaches use year in and year out and if this continues then they’ll never die. This will lay out a framework to ensure that you are designing and using training activities that have far more representation to the game itself which will in turn change the focus...
This training activity focuses on both teams being able to maintain possession in their respective boundaries. The starting set up looks like this: Team Blue had 1 player along each side of the playing area (30x30m or so adjusting as needed) and then another 2 players in the middle of the playing area. Team Orange...
Defensive 50 Intercept Marks are a huge part of football these days so it makes sense to instill some tactics/strategies to help make this happen so you’re not hoping someone takes a pack mark from out of nowhere which is not really controllable. What is controllable though is creating a defensive formation when out of...
Once you’ve (hopefully) moved your coaching away from cone to cone drills to something closer to a games-based approach, then it’s time to really start making those games work for what you want to see on game day. A game is general is not the worst idea in that it consists of much of the...
The more bridges you can find to connect training idea’s the better for your players ability to learn, retain and consolidate whatever tactic/strategies you’re trying to implement on game day. Usually it’s the designated play against no one like cone to cone drills that have players run through the perfect example of that play over...