Creating Overloads at Midfield: Part 4 The Game
The final stage of the session is a full sided 11v11, but with the caveat that the midfield has two neutral players that can only play within a designated area, creating an overload in the central area. In Episode 408 of The Coaching Soccer Weekly Coach Shap made note of how important it is to label the players in each drill so they know how their role fits into what you are attempting to accomplish in the drill so it may be a good idea to label the positions you wanted included in the previous drill, Shoreman Drill, and so they can more easily take those concepts into the full sided game.
The focus here as a coach, is to allow play to occur naturally and look for moments that may have cropped up as pay dirt or difficulties so far in the session, and then highlight those. We don’t want to focus too heavily on, say, working the back lines offside trap, or spend 5 minutes discussing our forwards finishing. We want to look for moments where the overloads we discussed create the opportunity to play forward and break lines, or possess when we are under pressure. If filming, it may be a good idea to just set the camera up so it only focuses on the central cone area and beyond, so you can maintain focus on those areas and utilize them as clips to denote how the numerical advantage was utilized.
Coaching wise its best here to stop on highlight moments after they have either petered out because of a defensive transition in the final third, or a goal. The key is to make sure the players see the moment in the midfield, and the result is allowed to play out. This allows players to fully contextualize the moment and puts the onus on that moment, since we are stopping an important part of the game (a turnover) to call back to the focus of our session, overloads in the central area. From here, we would simply remove the neutrals and move on to a full sided 11v11 and see if we can then take the focus of the session into the actual match.
