There's nothing I love more than coaches letting some little cats out of their bag in regards to tactics and coaching nous and Collingwood's Craig McRae isn't shy, or guarded, in a lot his press conferences.
I watch every one of his and of course John Longmire (Swans supporter), and they could not be ore polar opposite.
Horse pretty much repeats the same thing every week whether we win or lose and it's a very process-driven machine up in Sydney focusing on winning the contest above all else and applying pressure when the ball is in dispute - nothing else matters before either of those.
2 weekends ago the Pies won yet another close game, this time an after the siren goal winner from Jame Elliot and as much as Essendon was to blame for not setting up defensively in case of a kicked behind, he did state post-game that they do train these types of scenario's at training, and I actually did that with my school team twice throughout the season.
McRea talks about it in the video below and then I'll lay out the scenario's I used with my school team.
Anticipation might just be the most under-rated part of football mainly because it seems hard to quantify but when it isn't displayed you can definitely notice.
This past weekend we saw great individual anticipation from Fremantle's Michael Frederick to stay alert to the umpire's call/s and run in to smother Noah Balta's set shot that would have almost certainly won the game for the Tigers with any form of score.
We also saw poor team anticipation from Essendon who seem to think there as only 1 possible result from the Harry Jones' set and their failure to defend a possible kick in definitely lost them the game.
Having seen a heap of local/amateur footy in my days, when the ball is in the backline then the mantra is pretty much get the ball out of there using as few players as possible with as much territory as possible.
Now that's not a bad ploy but I'd bet more times than not that the ball is probably coming right back in as fast as it went out so it's a 1 second band aid of a fast/long rebound 50 to a game long problem of opposition inside 50 dominance, usually stemming from possession and ball control dominance.
Something that the Swans used a heap of last year but not so much of this year but it reappeared in the Freo game 2 weekends ago was to control the ball from defensive 50 using specific positional players to do so using something I called a rolling 6/6/6 formation, something I think can definitely be used in local/amateur football to potentially huge success.
As the ball is moved up the ground, this enabled the Swans to...
For full access to this training activity and plenty of others that incorporate game representative perception-action coupling, like all training activities should,then register for a level 3 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.
Below is a 14min video detailing 10 plays from the Sydney Swans form the 2nd half of their match against Fremantle from last Saturday, a season defining win that could result in a top 4 finish and allow for a genuine tilt at a Grand Final, 2 years removed from winning 5 games back in 2020.
From my eyes the Swans went back to a lot of the tactics they used last year that I detailed in full in it's own stand alone package titled Sydney Swans Game Style.
I haven't seen a lot of those tactics used this season with a lot more long kicking to packs and some extremely daring corridor kicks that have been inconsistent and being pulled off, leaving us vulnerable on turnover quite often.
Freo were hoping we'd do much of the same Saturday night and defended with a zone but also with a focus on the long kick, opening things up between the long kick option ad the ball carrier.
What you'll see in the video are 4 kick out to inside 50 plays and another 6 plays that resulted in inside forward 50's, which would put constant pressure on any defense.
You'll see which players the Swans chose to move the ball from back to forward and how they, and the others players, work in conjunction with that.
You'll also see how the Swans players create space to receive the ball, pretty much the total opposite of local/amateur footy in most cases.
Sydney have a reputation for being possibly the most skillful kicking team in the AFL but if you watch closely, there aren't too many elite-type kicks in any of these plays - instead players off the ball follow the system of who they want to use and in what parts of the ground they want to use them and ball carriers are simply choosing 100% options (as I call them), to maintain the ball and keep the defense having to shift and work harder then they want to, leaving them with less energy to work with offensively...
This game scenario doesn't really play out as such in the game video but it started to before the siren went and halted play.
Regardless, just the 1 kick-mark option alone had the huge potential to set off dominoes, a basketball term, where once you draw 1 defender, you can use the initial outnumber to continue drawing them while you possess the ball.
Patience is the key and if you watched the Swans v Freo Saturday night, it creates easy kick-mark options, saves your energy and saps the opposition's energy all at the same time.
Here's another 4 training activities that I've used with my school team so far this season.
Some of the activities are progressions of the same activity from the week/s prior and some train a specific aspect that we wanted to focus on from the previous week.
As always we are dependent on training numbers between the 2 teams (senior B's and C's) and also the mix of what we get from both teams so we can go in with a great plan but if the numbers and players available don't quite fit it then we modify or change the activity on the swap.
The 3 Zones of Football present in every single action during a game but also ever-shifting because as soon as the ball moves, players move and each of the zones changes location depending on how far the ball has traveled.
As the zones shift the same, or different players, from the previous action will fill each zone and with each zone having different responsibilities in the specific point in time, players need to be able to perceive the action in front of them, process that information and then determine what zone they are in, what zone can get to and then after all that, act - all within a split second.
Here's some more on each of the 3 zones of football.
Feedback, and everything it entails which we'll unpack below, is a real major driver in community football and can make or break the coaches ability to get what they want, and what they can, out of their respective groups.
We often think of feedback as the image suggests, a good old fashion bake from Ron Barassi, focusing on negative aspects and how they can be improved but recently their has been a push for more positive feedback to continuously push up player confidence but it still needs more work in local/amateur football circles.
Here are the 4 training activities I used for training session #2 with my school footy group a few months ago, that builds off of session #1 posted last week.
1 of the secrets of building adaptable players is to present activities that are similar but not completely different so they get exposure to similar scenarios that will have a lot of the same/similar aspects but with different moving parts because of the variability of how you design the activity.
Completely different activities present totally new problems which can be useful, but if you don't revisit the same or a similar activity then you simply aren't providing the players with enough repetition and exposure to a problem and then putting together various solutions to be able to solve it - you essentially introduce new information but not give them a chance to process and act on it and thus no learning, and improved performance, occurs.
I've been incredibly busy with school holidays and thus peak coaching work so I haven't posted for a while so here's a free post on how this year I've taken the jump into coaching school footy in the AGSV system which I've thoroughly enjoyed.
I'll post all of these training sessions like this going forward but they'll be part of the level 3 membership but will show how most of these are progressed as well as other team tactical stuff we've tried to implement during the season - all which can help your own coaching now and in the future.
I'm in a co-coaching position in my main team (senior B's) but I also help out with other training sessions where they need an extra coach so have also trained year 7 - 10 teams as well as assisted with coaching in year 8 boys and one of the junior girls teams as well.
The very first training session I was on my own with the senior B and C's on my own and not knowing anyone there at all where we had about 30 players which was also the very same day they all came back for term 2.
On Wednesdays we train off the main campus so the players get a bus from school to the ground and we only really get 60 - 70mins of training time by the time they get there and then have to be gone which limits us to 3 - 4 activities/session.
Based on all the uncertainty above I didn't have anything too complex planned so here what I did that very first session:
RICOCHET
No one knows me, I don't know none of them and some of them barely know each other so lets play a simple game to get the ball rolling with limited talking and get some smiles happening considering we have a motivation continuum within the group of extremely high to non-existent.
You've all probably played this before so it's just 2 teams, 1 football each, both teams simply handball to each other and try and make the balls collide in the middle and whoever catches a ball of the collision gets a point.
4v1 RONDO CORNERS
Again nothing groundbreaking so it's a 4v1 with all offensive players in a corner of a smallish square against the single defender. Offensive players can only handball to corner teammates on their left or right, not over or through the middle. It's really the defender who makes this activity what it's meant to be (quick/clean hands and decision making) so make the scoring defense-bias as in who can intercept the most balls and keep a a score sheet to build competitiveness (I didn't though!).
COLLINGWOOD KICK
I saw this kicking activity on the Collingwood Twitter page and although it's a cone to cone drill, it does still use some game representative information being the man on the mark and the new rules in regards to them.
This didn't work too well as there were more 3rds players then 2nds players and as I found out, most of them barely play any sport at all, let alone community football, and are simply here because they literally have to be, with sport being part of their compulsory curriculum.
This would work well with higher level players though but another interesting thing I found out is that they don't even play the stand rule so I wouldn't even have used it if I had known that!
Here it is anyway:
5 STAR HANDBALL GOAL KICKING RACE
It got to the point where teaching anything was not gonna happen and they all just kept kicking balls away to the goals so let's get some of that in and finish up so we did the old 5 star handball in a tight group, blow the whistle then both teams have a pot at the goals and see who wins.
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