The U.S. - Turkey match perfectly demonstrated what Wanderer has been discussing. The good news - today's U.S. youth structure gives us players that can be competitive at the world's highest levels. It is churning out athletic, well-trained kids who know how to defend and how to strike quickly via counterattacks. The bad news - as Wanderer writes, we have very few kids growing up in the U.S. who are good at a possession game. Look at the senior national team. Game after game, if no Reyna and no O'Brien, we simply concede possession in the midfield and play almost exclusively a counterattack game. As in vs. Turkey. I understand - the last game of our youth season, once my kid beat one guy off the dribble, his coaches were yelling at him to pass. And if two guys converged on him, they yelled at him to get rid of the ball, in a hurry. "Don't mess." A 9 year old kid. Now, what are his chances at becoming the next O'Brien with that attitude? Zero. Fortunately, my kid is stubborn, plus we're moving to a club next year where they let the good players play. But sadly, as Wanderer has long been saying, that kind of attitude is a rarity in U.S. youth soccer. As a result, there are about 2 guys in the whole country that can hold the ball under international-quality pressure. Counterattack ain't bad ... you can advance to Final 8 of World Cup and beat anybody on a given day with counterattack. But consistently winning against the top competition by conceding possession in the midfield ... nope, that's not going to happen. Fooling ourselves if we think we can really be #1 following that path.
Unfortunately, I think this has as much to do with American society as it does American coaching. When's the last time your kid gathered a group of players on his block into a game of neighborhood soccer? No coaches, no parents, just kids playing ball. The creative, skilled, possession games that develop in countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Spain largely come from exactly that scenario. I've seen this with my own eyes, and it makes a huge difference. It's badly underrated by youth soccer. Funny thing is, there is an enormous amount of evidence that young players need time away from coaches and parents to experiment, learn the game on their own, and learn creativity. It accelerates their development as a young player - so long as there is a balance of coaching in proper fundamentals. In Europe, you are starting to see that balance in their development of basketball players. In every city, neighborhood basketball courts are easy to find. More and more kids are playing - on their own and away from coaching. The flip side is that, in Spain, at least, they have developed their club basketball system to mirror what they do in soccer. I imagine other countries are doing the same. This balance allows kids to develop both excellent fundamental skills and a great deal of creativity. The amount of foreign NBA players is a tribute to that balance, and the importance of not overcoaching a player, but still helping a player develop solid fundamental skills.
Creativity & Development Nutmeg - How can I argue against free play? Would Freddy Adu be Freddy Adu if he had grown up in D.C., rather than Ghana? At the same time, I think you overstate matters. Basketball courts may be popping up in Europe, but there is nowhere near the free play over there that there is in the U.S. Dirk Nowitski sure as hell didn't grow up pounding the courts on the mean streets of Dortmund -- or whatever city he's from. Surely the European basketball success proves that a) excellent coaching + b) a modest amount of free play beats a) mediocre coaching + b) a ton of free play. At least in basketball. Again, not to denigrate free play. The more we have, the better our players are -- and this is particularly true for possession. At the same time, JOB to my knowledge was a typical Southern Cal U.S. kid. A very good young player, yes, but not to my knowledge indulging in more free play than many other very good young players. However, unlike the rest of those guys, he got Ajax coaching. They did a hell of a good job. More free play in the U.S., great. But we can do a lot better with even the same amount of free play, with different -- and better -- youth coaching principles.
And if you saw Convey, or Cunningham, or Martino, or O'Brien, or any other U.S. player do that, constantly try and dribble through 2 players, you'd be yelling for their heads. Possession does not mean dribbling through 2, 3, 4 players. Possession is positioning and quick passing to stay out of trouble, while trying to find an advantage to go forward in a dangerous situation (dangerous for the other team). What I think is missing is the positional play, moving without the ball. Without that, when the player is converged on by two guys, with his coach yelling "don't mess", he'll boot the ball up the field, likely losing possession. The 'free play' you speak about I assume you mean is to develope the close control/dribbling that can either save a player in close quarters when he has no other option or to take on a player (or two) when it's the right thing to do. I agree that we need more of that, we need more dangerous players willing to take on opponents in the offensive half of the field. And that aggressive mentality will create dangerous chances for teammates, if they recognize what's happening, and have the positional sense to move into a dangerous position based upon the movements of opponents towards the player with the ball. Bah, I'm rambling now.
If you want to point to examples of why Turkey had more possession then the US, you need to start with first touch. WAY too many times, US players received balls and couldn't control cleanly enough to get a second touch. Contrast that to Turkey whom was under the same amount of pressure, but their control allowed them the time and space to pick out dangerous runs. With better first touch, we beat them 4-2.
Yeah, but they wouldn't create 3/4 goals a game by using such a tactic, would they? The kid ain't stupid. If attacking 2 defenders off the dribble didn't work, he wouldn't do it. And indeed, it often doesn't work -- against better teams, when stronger teammates are open, etc. Bottom line -- his decision making is better than some silly coaching maxim that you don't want to hold onto the ball too long. At any rate, I agree with the rest of your post -- this is really about possession rather than dribbling (although the two skills are related), and it's also about what the other teammates are doing. Are they moving to the right positions to reward the teammate who is maintaining possession? If not, then possession is indeed pointless, might as well just boot the ball.
Re: Creativity & Development I would not place a bet on that statement, John. Since 1993, I have been to Europe at least once each year, and most years twice or more. I am always surprised at how often kids are playing pickup basketball, and the number of courts and players is increasing. Contrast that with studies done by the NCAA that say across the board, unorganized participation in sports among kids has decreased steadily. But that's an aside, and I don't think you and I disagree too much. In fact, I would say part of great coaching is allowing your kids to play without the pressure of you watching over their shoulder every two minutes. From what I have been told, at Ajax, which you use as an example, coaches often vacate practices after skillwork, and let kids go at it. Once again, it is a balance. I absolutely believe that the best scenario is to have world class coaches developing our kids. I also believe that unless our kids have the opportunity to experiment with what they have learned away from an organized, supervised training session or game, they will never develop the confidence, the skill, or the creativity on the ball that is needed in a possession game.
Not if they were 9. First: young players learn confidence on the ball by dribbling through a few players at a time. Do you really believe that Maradona wasn't dribbling circles around his school-boy buddies at 9 years old? I promise you he was. Those experiences gave him confidence to keep applying his techniques at a higher and higher level. Perhaps the greatest goal in the history of the World Cup would not have been scored if you were coaching little Diego's youth team, and that would be sad. Second: Possession for possession's sake can be useful at times, but mostly to give your defense a break. To score goals in soccer, more often than not, you need creative, attacking play. And very often, that comes on the dribble. Once you break a player down on the dribble, the opposing defense is exposed. Case in point - Turkey yesterday. Go back, watch the game, and see how many times just beating one man really opened up the US defense. At the highest levels, yes, positional play needs to be learned. Great coaches can teach these concepts without coaching the great individual talent out of their players.
I feel like I'm in the twilight zone. I read your last post, and the thought "Thats's what I'm SAYING!" kept coming to mind. Guess I'm just not that eloquent in putting my thoughts down in words, eh? About the only thing I disagree with you on is the 'not if they were 9' type comments. While I do agree that some/most youth coachs stress 'teamwork' to the hinderence of individual skill, even at the youth level you need to start building that 'soccer knowledge'. It's a question of balance, where is the line between individualism/team play. I completely agree that youth players need to focus more on individual play more than they do currently. One of the things that hurts, and was mentioned above, is that outside of formal practices, a lot of kids (most kids) do not kick a ball around. Do not juggle. Do not play pickup games against other kids. To busy playing Nintendo, or baseball, or skating, or basketball, or... Too many other things for kids to do that are fun. It's the exception rather than the rule to see a kid 'just play soccer'.
I didn't even see the game, but there are a few posters who usually see it the way I see it. This is what I think: Dribbling is just a series of first touches strung together. If you let kids dribble, then it improves their overall touch, not to mention receiving on the run. But I will agree wholeheartedly that our players also don't know when to move off the ball or keep their tactical spacing 'tight'. Our players only know how to do one thing really well--and that's press and attack. We need to teach our youth players to think the game more, and that's why I push possession so much. However, Nutmeg is also correct, possession won't do anything for you if you don't creatively attack. But you also can't creatively attack unless you HAVE possession. This is why I'm such a huge advocate of Brazilian soccer. Slower paced games with FAST thinking. I know many of us are not Latinos, but I think if you put that Latino SKILL on our players, you have a WORLD beating team. I think we should teach the game like they teach it, basically because they are the best. We've got lots of problems here: 1) Lack of free play for kids, whether motivational or because of a lack of opportunity(johnny's friend lives on the other side of town) 2)Poor coaching that tries to make the game too collective at too young of an age 3)The whole youth soccer phenomena of 'let's go play games on some narrow ass field that hides all of the skill players and makes all the fast ones look good. I liken this last one to basketball---do 12 year old boys shoot baskets on an 8 feet high goal and a shortened court? In peewee football I played on a 100 yard field at 10 years old. Growing pains, growing pains, growing pains....
Then we've got to come up with another methodology to let them develop those skills. A lot of this will be solved when soccer gets more popular, because kids will start to realize that there's a definite long term future in it, it's on TV, etc.... A lot of this has already begun, mainly with the '99 U20 team IMHO. Those players and Donovan's U17s are the start of something big if we can keep them healthy.
I believe that the methodology is in place, it is just not utilized often enough. Jim Lennox wrote an excellent training manual when the NSCAA started their national coaching academy back in the 1980s. He took objective observations of how the game of soccer "works" and used proven educational principles to form an approach to consistantly create game-like actives that teach players a deeper understanding of the game. Quite frankly, I thought his work on the curriculum was probably the best work of his career. I don't care if it was all original, he pieced many different things together beautifully. I am not coaching anymore, but I still work in education and I still have discussions with teachers where I share many of the educational principals that I picked up in the NSCAA Coaching Academy(this is coming from someone who hates sports analogies). I am not saying that the curriculum is always taught well at the academies (I have no idea how it is taught today) and, to be honest, one week is not enough time to absorb all of the information that they expect you to get, but I am saying that there are answers available and that the answers are, in some cases, very, very good answers. One last note. I still remember my first night at the academy. Jim Lennox was being assisted by "Mooch" Myernick. He taught about clarity vs. reality, their inverse relationship and how that relates to training players in any team sport. It is worth the price of admission if you walk away with a deep understanding of just that one principle. Someone who gains a true understanding of this knowledge will never train their players the same way again.
It is also critical once you move up into high levels of play, to establish the _threat_ of beating guys off the dribble, as you'd be amazed how the threat alone serves to relieve a lot of the pressure you face on the ball. I think possession, at times, can be vastly overrated, particularly the kind Mexico uses where they square pass themselves into oblivion in the middle of the field. What's more important than possession is something the possession stats often reveal, and that is a team capable of working the ball patiently from the defense, through midfield and up to the strikers. That we scored our goal off of a goal kick I think demonstrates the problem. We did MUCH better at this late in the game as Stewart, Donovan, Mathis, Convey and even Beasley stepped up and did some nice passing and running with the ball to get us into attacking positions (the problem was that when we needed Hejduk or Armas to get involved as well, the plays tended to break down). The reason why we're "target-man" junkies is because we spend so much friggin' time pumping long balls over midfield to our target guy. This can be okay with McBride in there, but is less successful with others. McBride is not getting any younger. I'm wondering if we have a chicken and the egg scenario here. Do we play so much long ball because we lack skill, or do we lack skill because we play so much longball? Or is it both?
You know there was a study conducted by I believe the former coach of Norway that of all goals scored during the run of play in international soccer that year, something like 90% were scored when the team had touched the ball less than 4 times before the shot. So much for possession... When I read that I thought I would go back and see how the US' production of goals scored during the run of play stacked up against the statistic just for fun. Plus, a couple of posters who thought they actually knew something about soccer were trying to preach to us that the only way to score goals, set up free kicks, or create dangerous opportunities was through possession. Sure enough, almost every goal the US scored in the run of play was on a series of 4 or less touches. Not only that, but most of our dangerous free kicks were earned using the same direct style of play. So am I arguing against possession? Not at all. When you swing the pendulum completely in favor of direct attack soccer, you put a tremendous amount of pressure on your defense. Teams like Turkey will kill you in that scenario - their players are simply too skilled. Possession is crucial to maintaining a balance in your play, relieving pressure off your defenders, and it is important in the attack, but not for the reason many people believe. The Wanderer apparently likes to watch Brazilian soccer. So do I - I can't get enough of it. It has always struck me that Brazilians play soccer like a professional hockey team plays their sport. They love to press the ball into the opponent's half and keep it there through possession. One, they relieve the pressure on their defenders, and two: they are pressuring the opposing team. If they do turn the ball over, they are already in position to press the ball, force a turnover, and employ a direct attack. It is fascinating, but it simply highlights the need for balance in all aspects of the game. Too many youth coaches that I have gone up against coach the individual play out of their players. Too many players are encouraged, as John's son was, to pass the ball even though beating a guy on the dribble can lead to a dangerous opportunity. At a young age, coaches need to let their kids experiment - even fail - so they can learn when it is and is not appropriate to take on players. If they don't ever try it, they never will learn.
Norwegian coaches should stick to Football and get out of the statistics business. The obvious corrollary to this is the old joke about if 65% of fatal auto accidents involve sober drivers and 35% involve at least one drunk driver, then it must therefore be safer to drive drunk than sober. In other words, while 90% of goals might occur with less than four touches, what percentage of sequences in the offensive half are of four touches or more. If it's say 5%, than the reality is that the extra touches would be showing an increase in the likelihood of a goal. What he would need to look at, are "touch sequences." How many different offensive players touched the ball before a shot was taken or the defense broke the play up. Tally up how many of each sequence occurs with the final touch coming in the offensive half, and tally up how many goals were scored for each sequence length, and then look at how often goals were scored, per each sequence. That number as you presented it has no meaning without further information. Oh and Turkey's second goal was three touches.
Ppl who wants Soccer Specific Stadium first is missing the point... MLS definitely needs to improve the skill of play first... They need these clubs to have youth teams playing each other... Once you get good domestic players playing in this league, ppl will come no matter how big the stadium... heck, you can sell these players if you really need to.
I like all of the skill leagues basically. I love Spanish and Argentine football also. The game is more exciting to me when there's dribbling and holding and one-two combinations. It bothers the hell out of me that you have coaches telling 9 year old kids to pass the ball all the time. OK, don't let him have opportunities to hold the ball under pressure and I guarantee you that when he gets older he won't be able to hold the ball under pressure. *Sigh* I won't disagree that most goals are scored on 4 passes or less. But that's a little bit different than what I'm talking about. It's one thing to sit back and choose to counterattack. It's another thing to have the capability to go out, control the flow of the game, and then decide to score at will. That's what Germany did to us in the last WC. They came out, controlled possession, started forcing it down our throats, and got the header to go up 1-0. Then after Klose's header off the post they started backing off some and then just conceded possession. But at that point we were chasing them.
Kid Development The question is, if most goals are scored with 4 passes or less should we have our 9 year olds thinking like that? I don't think so ... I'm pretty sure that if you get a country's youth coaches citing such statistics and teaching a very direct game, you get kids who are good at launching long passes, fast kids who are good at running on the ball, and a soccer culture that is very good at scoring counterattack goals. None of those are bad things, and coupled with good athletes, good organization, good keepers, and some defensive skills, that can make for a dangerous team that can beat anybody on the right day. Kinda like Norway. I think we can -- and should -- aim higher. We have more people than Brazil. We have something like 25x the population of the Netherlands. We don't have to be a big Norway. When I watched an outstanding U10 team in Spain last summer, they won every game (by a large margin) without playing a single ball in the air. Not one. Does that mean that those Spanish youth coaches were remiss in not teaching an air game? Because, after all, a lot of international goals are scored in the air. Nah ... these are U10s, not adults. Teach 'em the U10 basics -- dribbling, possession, spacing, movement off the ball, basic combinations (these Spanish kids did give-and-goes all game, time and time again). Let 'em excel at what U10s should excel at. There's time later in their careers to show them the air game. Or, for that matter, when & how to launch long passes. After -- only after -- they've mastered the basic elements of the short game.
Re: Kid Development I agree. Soccer is a game played on large field with few stoppages. The coach can only have a very, very limited impact on the game once it has begun. How quickly and well players solve problems on their own determine the success of a team. If you don't take the approach of training your players to become good problem solvers, you cannot be successful in this game at a high level, over a long period of time. Possession is one third of the offensive options available to a player(the other two are to change direction or to change speed). In a game that is so relient on player problem solving, do we really want to remove one third of their offensive options from the training of our players? One other point. Statistics can tell you anything you want them to. All you've got to do is narrow your viewpoint and ignore information that doesn't support it.
Re: Re: Kid Development Obviously, statistics can be manufactured to prove a point, but statistics can also be used to objectively examine what's going on. Egil Olsen looked in detail at the way goals were being scored and used that information to turn Norway from a UEFA bottom-feeder into a team that got excellent results against Europe's best. What he learned was that defenses -- especially among bottom-feeder countries -- were very sloppy. So Olsen made sure that his own defenders covered their zones extremely well, didn't make stupid giveaways, and were very strong on offensive and defensive set pieces. It was a tactical breakthrough, and now pretty much every European bottom-feeder has followed his lead. But IMO, this wasn't so much a recipe for how to play offense as how not to play defense. Now that defenses have gotten sharper, certain strategies are less effective (e.g. the number of set-piece goals has gone way down).
Re: Re: Re: Kid Development Thanks for the follow-up here. IIRC, it was both a defensive and offensive strategy, and Norway began to use a very direct style of play that led to very good results after the study was conducted. I want to be clear on my stance here, though. As I've said a number of times, it really comes down to a balance in the game. I am not arguing that at the youth levels coaches should instruct their players to employ fast-break soccer. Quite the opposite. I believe US coaches should back way off, teach fundamentals, then encourage players like John's son to experiment. No way should a 9 year old kid who shows an ability to beat kids on the dribble be discouraged from doing so. That's a joke. Once the fundamentals are in place, and it really is the coach's job to make that call, the coach can start training teamwork, spacing, off-the-ball runs, etc. But skill-work fundamentals should be the earliest training a young soccer player receives. As long as those fundamentals aren't being violated, coaches should encourage their players to experiment at their comfort level. It's all about balance.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Kid Development Yes, but their offensive strategy relied heavily on the opposing defense to be indisciplined and screw up. When the opposing defense kept its shape, Norway's offense struggled. In ten games at the finals of major competitions, they only scored seven goals. Breaking that down, they scored a respectable five goals in three games against non-UEFA teams (read: error-prone defenses) but a disastrous two goals in seven games against UEFA teams.