Session: Pressure Cover Balance Part 4: 6 Goal Game
As always, making it to the United Soccer Coaches Convention was an enlightening experience. So many brilliant minds and concepts all pulled together at the same time, it's hard not to get excited to get back onto the field. In particular, I was inspired by the presentation by Coach Shap (who we had on the podcast in episode 408), where he discussed periodization and season long planning. The NJ High School season is still well away, but I am already trying to get some concept of what areas I want to focus on during our first weeks of the season. The session I am going to talk about here would likely be our fourth session of pre-season. The first two days being tryouts, then the 3rd, 4th, and sometimes 5th being days where the JV and Freshman squads are doing mirror sessions with the varsity. Conceptually, what I am trying to do is lay down basic tenets of our methodology to the players, as well as structuring the session to give my coaches a concept of the expectations and verbiage that we want to utilzie when talking about our core principles. Generally, what I want to do is hit major themes, scanning, pressure/cover/balance, and our shape in the middle third, and our key attacking concepts in the final third. This session will cover our defensive core concepts, focusing on basic 1v1 defending and building to the full pressure/cover/balance structure.
How do you structure your pre-season. Do you do something similar, do you make the focus specific game moments, do you break down sessions based on position? Let me know by reaching out to Matt@pennantcoaching.com.
The final session of my Pressure, Cover Balance Session is the 6 goal game, which is similar in design to the Three Keeper Box Game in that we are overloading information and angles for our players. The difference is that we are making this situation more game like in that we are going North South towards our goals, rather than a 360 degree view for our targets. We want players to understand that the goals that we are aiming for here aren’t meant to simulate finishing, but targeted entrance passes into the opposition's or our own final third.
The drill starts wth three goals (they can be pug sized, or for more of a challenge, possibly a larger collapsible goal, lined up at the halfway line, one in the middle, and wider apart towards the touch line on either side. Three more goals are set up opposite these goals on an extended line coming out from the 18 yard box towards the touch line. Each team is divided into 8v8 and defending three of the goals on one side.
What we are looking for here is for the players to defensively “funnel” the opposition towards one goal, preferably one of the wide goals, and make the defense of said goal manageable. Once we have shifted the opposition towards one of the goals we need to firstly defend that goal, but secondly make sure we are not letting any passes “break quarantine” and allow the opposition to get out of our “funnel” and attack the two other goals. This will require more structure and shape than in the previous drill and as coach you can really cement your defensive priorities and system while the drill plays out. Balance becomes exceedingly important here as we do not want to allow the opposition to break our line from touch line to touch line and make the defense of our goal to difficult by providing the opposition multiple angles. Playing a low/medium/high also becomes something we can introduce as players work to introduce the initial “funnel”. This can be coach-driven, where you are implementing your game model into the drill, or you can allow players to adjust to their personnel and the situation and decide on their own defensive posture.
From here, we would move to a short scrimmage where we are removing all barriers to play and using this as an evaluation of the understanding of our concepts. I would select three key points you want to address, such as 1. Are players getting touch tight? 2. Positioning of the cover player 3. Is the balance in a position to contain the funnel? and use that as the basis of your coaching points to address throughout the game.
