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Breakdown - Competing For The Ball

A great drill with explanations and supporting theory to help coaches improve their players accuracy and legality at the breakdown

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We're going to look particularly at the defensive breakdown. So probably leading into the tackle. Just post the tackle. The work that you do around to obviously hopefully steel opposition ball or effect ball speed. So just on my call they go down, put an arm up on the bag to show that you've made the tackle so left arm up, then it's left arm up. Get the ball out, drag the ball. Good, put it back in next one down. Dragging the ball out. Okay good. So let's see it again just speeding through and all we're encouraging the guys to do is get up, contest for the ball. Now the same points that we talked about there. Technically. What do we need off the ground first? Hips up. He's made that tackle. What do we think the first thing that we need Dennis to get up? Okay, so show release but he's got to get up first to show the release. I'm asking which which part of and we one popped up first. That's it. So we work really hard on popping his arse up.So if you see surfers. We just call it that Surfer motion. So all I want okay. It's like you've landed nuts first on a bowlof netals there. I just want those hips up nice and quick. There you go. Okay. Now I want you to get up completely Dennis. There we go. Now we working back down so I mean again, Beautiful now. Can you do it all in one motion? There we go. Perfect. So that's again the technical point. Thanks very much. The technical point are we looking for again? First thing up? Always, like you said, getting that back side up making sure you show positive position always hips up first once your hips up you can show at least you can still keep head and chest over the ball and you can start to attack it. Okay, so when we break this down, I just want you to recover first. So hips first, great position feet need to be where? Wide probably shoulder-width apart not too wide, but they more importantly need to be up against a bag Okay. Why do we want his feet up? What does it show you? That he's supporting his body weight. Perfect. So looking at these guys here to get their feet up if he's feet are out the back, but you feet out the back even more? Now lean on the bag. Okay looks to me like all of that weight that we talked about earlier. Weight's going through the shoulders. That's poor shape.More often than not you just look at it and go no that doesn't look great doesn't look like he's supporting. If his feet are up looks a whole lot better next bit is head and chest right over the ball. So anyone who jackals a ball like that is likely to wear a forearm. Okay right across the nose. If he's got head and chest over it gives them a good opportunity now. Back down we go in the pairs. What we talked about inside is obviously locating the ball. Okay, so we know we can't put our hands through and past so all that we do now is I want you to just put the ball anywhere, so yeah, so these guys can't see where the balls going. Okay, last one. Good. Okay. So key part is the balls always in motion. As we said refs. don't want anyone going on their hands passedthe ball. You've got to find the ball first what you can also do if you just lie on your side over here, please pull something very similar if you come with me go grab the ball. If you've got the ball now, you're standing over jacking him just as same thing different exercise. Okay up you come what I want you to do is ifyou start to see him come down. You can just move the ball around. He's going to Target the ball off we go. Up you come once you got a good jackle on and leave it there with him and go moving around. So it's again we doing is targeting the ball making sure he gets good shape without putting your hands on the floor. Really, I guess we want to encouraged this breakdown defensively to be as clean as it can be. All right, so you can use the bags either or if you don't have bags, it's just something you can do obviously with a players there. That's at the end of a session on a Tuesday we'll do literally four of those three of those drills 15 minutes. All the back row all the hookers all the Steelers that we've got. You know, it's on a Tuesday night. If you've got 10 minutes, you just put them through three of those but if you go bang this is all we looking to do