A Football guide for young players: How to train like professional players

I had watched the players play and what I felt was that they were technically excellent, derived from many hours of playing in unorganised games, but in many ways “football naive”. For example, they were great dribblers of the ball, but often in the wrong part of the pitch, so the aim was to not lose this skill but show where it was best used. I explained to the local coaches (as part of the program was also Coach education) that as a kid I had played 60 games a season – school, Boys club and Sunday League. Playing this number of games gives you a game education and helps eliminate things such as ball watching. Also, playing with older men soon gets you out of bad habits, such as not chasing a ball you lost! These kids (men) were only playing about 10-15 games a season due to distance, facilities (pitches are not the best in a monsoon) and organisational problems.

So where to start? I tried to introduce professional football by utilising this program.

DO THE BORING THINGS WELL

DEFENDING

Close the man with the ball down

Make the player pass backwards (you can’t stop that)

Track your player, do not ball watch

Organise at set pieces, take responsibility

No stupid fouls

Keep ball out of our penalty box (90% goals scored in the box)

Block crosses

ATTACKING

Get the ball into the penalty box as soon as you can

Get as many players in the penalty box as we can

Receive the ball when you can see the opponent’s goal (side on)

Keep the ball moving, passing or dribbling

Quality delivery at all set pieces

Keep ball at throw ins, throw down line, never square

Shoot at every opportunity, “hit the target”

Watch the ball hit your foot, don’t look at the goal

Each player received a copy of this in English and Manipuri (tribal translations can’t be put on computer). Then we went through each aspect where it counted, on the pitch.

At night time, we showed DVDs of world class games and showed that even at this level, these boring things apply. The great players do all the boring things well! By the end of the month, the players were playing practice matches and were starting to have a go at each other if they did the wrong thing. The process was sinking in to the best players.

We worked every day on the pitch in various coaching practices, trying to make them as varied and as interesting as possible. Also, there were a large number of Coaches watching so we made the practices available on USB drives for them. An example being:

The Coaches were left with about 20 of these practices.

The players were taught how to play in many different formations and how sometimes in the same formation you press or retreat. These were concepts that were very new to players and teaching pressing was very difficult as it involves the whole team. Also not easy when its 40 degrees Centigrade.

One of the realities of football in Asia is that the EPL coverage on TV is killing the local game and whilst these young players all knew Gerrard, Suarez, Rooney (and of course Messi, Ronaldo and Beckham), they struggled to name Indian national team players. This is happening all over Asia and is a growing problem for Asian Leagues. Malaysia being a great example where Malaysian money is sponsoring EPL Teams and local teams are bankrupt.

To help this problem, a copy of the “Perfect Player” was given to each player to both let them see that no player is perfect and that they always could strive to be better. We asked them to try to illustrate the idea with Indian players who were similar to the big names mentioned.