After the heavy rain last week, it was nice to be greeted with a dry, but windy and cold astro pitch. In week 3 of the academy we concentrated on the girls’ passing and movement with and without the ball.

Click here to see some photos of the evening session.

The first set up had half the girls in a circle with the other half around the outside. The girls in the middle received the ball from the outside players and returned it back to them before they went and looked for a different ball from a different player. They then moved on to receiving the ball from one player, turning and passing the ball to a different player on the outside. We were getting the girls to concentrate on their first touch and the quality of the pass to and from them. The final part was a no foot turn to change the direction of their movement, while staying in control of the ball.

Click here to see some video of the evening session.

The next session involved a 4v4 set up with an offside line 15 metres from Suzy in goal. We were looking for the girls to time their runs beyond the defence, beating the offside line and creating a goal scoring opportunity. They had 10 goes each team to see how many goals they could score. We made sure the girls kept the pitch wide and didn’t force their passes, and if needed they played backwards and started again. The non bibs of Alexia, Chloe J and Lucy did really well in playing the ball quickly to move the defence out of position.

We finished with a small sided game where we encouraged the girls to try different combination plays to break the offside line i.e. one twos, overlaps and switching the play. It was great to watch the girls try all these different ideas and even better seeing them come off at times.

Huge thank you to Lucy, Denva, Chloe H, Chloe J, Alexia, Amber and Tia for their hard work and Steve Dawson for taking the photographs.