We had the biggest group ever at the Academy on Monday night, the sessions continue to grow week on week.  We welcomed Lucy-Liu, a girl Coach Chris knows from Manor CE Academy Futsal club and someone he recently signed to play for York Railway Institute U13 girls’ team.

The theme for tonight was changing the point of the attack.  Very often when you watch younger players they play the ball and run the way they are facing, unable to change the point or direction of the attack.  We set up a pitch with four smaller goals, only a metre across, two at each end of the pitch and in opposite corners.  The girls played a normal match with them able to score in either of the goals they were attacking.

Click here to see some photos of the evening session.

At first they attacked just one goal and tried to overload that particular goal.  We worked on them getting their heads up early and if one goal was defended, could they switch to attack the other goal?  This also meant the players had to move from one goal to the other to create the overload.  We changed the teams so that we played 5v6 to create an attacking overload every time.  The girls also realised that they needed to attack at pace to reduce the time the defenders could recover and then cover both goals.

The final part of the session was the pass to change the point of attack.  We worked with the girls on making sure the pass was firm, over as long a distance as possible and made as early as possible.  When one goal was covered, how quickly could they move the ball towards the other.

Special mention to Denva and Alexia who really worked on all parts of this session, and scored some well worked goals by changing the point of the attack as soon as was relevant.

A difficult session with lots of learning outcomes, but again some great results in the end, well played all.