Principles of Play and Planning - Go Forward!
As you start to plan for next season there will be a lot of discussion on where you should start! We recommend you start by addressing the following questions! We'll walk through an example later in the article.
- What are you good at as a team and individuals?
- Technical and tactical profiling required here.
- How will these attributes be utilised best based upon the principles of play (PoP)?
- How will you then build and plan a gameplan around this?
If we take just one of the Principles of Play we can start to understand the issues we have in planning how we will play. This week we're using 'Go Forwards' so let's start planning with this hypothetical team and look into what we are good/bad at!
Technical Profile:
- No identified strength in kicking ability.
- Good ball grip, low body height in contact and good footwork.
Tactical Profile:
- Tend to kick poorly when under pressure and lose the ball.
- Excellent ball carry technique, consistently break the gainline and good ball presentation for continuity.
So if we are simply focussing on going forwards using our ball carriers we can design a coaching programme to help us better these technical and tactical positives. Here are some examples of drills to try out when working on going forwards.
Obviously we don't want to be a ball carry only team so we need to offer other threats. To do this based on strength we have already identified we can start to think about developing an offloading style of game. Looking first at the technical aspects before breaking out and using a game to develop awareness of when to use it.
You should be able to see from this that simply looking at "what are we not good at and what can we do well?" allows you to form the foundations of a gameplan. This is not to say that we can't develop the weaker aspects of our game, but as a starting point you should always build around your best attributes as a team.
Next time we will start looking at another Principle of Play: Support!