Tag Archives for " Pascual "

0 The Secret of Building a Style of Play Around Specific Types of Players

Today's article is a blog post from Paul Grech and his blog, Blueprint for Football.  The blog post is an interview Grech did with Jordi Pascual, the author of our books, Coaching Spanish Soccer and Developing a Style of Play.

Given that he had a team that contained the talents of David de Gea, Thiago Alcantara, Iker Muniain and Isco, it is tempting to assume that Julen Lopetegui's job as the Spanish Under 21 manager is a fairly easy one. Yet there was more to Spain as they won their second consecutive European title then a collection of talented players; their typical play based on short passing and intense pressure placed those talents in a position to excel.

Again, the temptation is there to generalise and assume that a Spanish national team playing that kind of football is a given; that it is automatic. Yet it is not. Players spend only a fraction of their time with the national team and during such restricted time-frames it is practically impossible for them to 'learn' a method of playing.

So how do Spain manage to play in that manner? An explanation was provided in part by Lopetegui himself who said "We have a crystal clear philosophy on how to play football...ultimately for all Spanish national team football we want to

0 Developing a Style of Play - Defensive Transition

This is an excerpt from our new book, Developing a Style of Play by Jordi Pascual.

The excerpt is from Chapter Three that looks at various principles of Attacking, Defending, Transition From Attack to Defense and Transition From Defense to Attack.  This particular part looks at the principles of Transition From Attack to Defense.

Developing a Style of Play - Chapter 3.4

We'll go into Defensive Phase from the moment that the opponents have recovered the ball and don't do counter attack, either because they refuse to do it, either because we managed to stop it, but they still have the possession of the ball. Since our aim is to have the ball in attack, this means that, the objective of this phase is that the opponent team make a mistake and, as a consequence, make them lose the ball.

Here we have the following Principles and Sub-Principles:

The First Principle is what is referred t