by Victor Meldrew »
15 Jun 2011 21:35
Franchise FC England are so, so far away from a decent team.
They are playing semi-international hoofball of the worst kind. Even the Sturridge chance against the bar was the result of mis-control in the first place.
I've tried to explain to my 11 year old that the most important thing in the game is to be comfortable on the ball and get used to passing and moving to provide options. That way you can work around the opposition rather than bombing the ball forward all the time. He's beginning to get the message and watching Barca in La Liga certainly helps.
Ten minutes in threes in a 10m x 10m area playing one touch and moving is seriously better than ten minutes running round a field to 'get fit'.
But hey, what do I know ?
Spot on with the emphasis on "move".
So many English players pass a ball then stop to wait and see what happens rather than having already moved.
I'm not sure where young kids would now do it but playing with a tennis ball from an early stage is great for learning immediate control-if you can control a tennis ball the control of a football is a piece of cake.
Unfortunately young ones tend to only play with footballs right from the off.
We breed and go for the hard-running,stamina-packed type of player from a young age but when you see Wellbeck or a Shane Long unable to get their body shape right to receive a ball or try to do something immediate they just can't do it and these are strikers costing millions of pounds.
When I was involved with running kids' football I found that so many sides were concerned with playing off-side and wellying away possession even at very young ages and at the supposed good standard of rep. football when I felt it should be the total football of the Dutch (now taken on by Barcelona) as an aim rather than pushing up a back four and playing for offsides just to try to get a 1-0 win.
Our kids do have a winning mentality but are not encouraged to keep possession or pass to a player who is marked for fear of losing that possession when (as shown by Barcelona and to a lesser extent by Swansea and Reading in the McGhee days) with better control learned and practised from a very young age it makes sense to pass to another player even if he is marked closely because it is so much easier then to lose that close marker than one who is standing a yard or two away.
All of what is happening at the FA will take ages and ages to bear fruit but whilst so many of our 10 year-olds are being coached (?) by the dad whose firm supplies the kit and used to play centre-half for the Dog and Duck on a Sunday and finds a place for his not-very-good son in the team we will remain the dinosaurs of world football. With our defenders clearing the ball anywhere as long as it is temporarily safe (ignoring the fact that possession has so easily been given away) and midfielders charging around aimlessly for much of games and forwards doing often little more than chasing lost causes we will remain non-winners on the international stage because so many other nations give so much more thought to how they should play the game and like the great managers,Clough and Shankley regard the ball as a valued possession and not something to be given away so cheaply.
