HOW TO NOT DEFEND DUSTY MARTIN - GRAND FINAL VISION

Dusty finished the Cats last night and wrapped up the Norm Smith with his 3rd goal last night with about 8 minutes to go to put them up by 22 points - but she he even had been able to do so in the first place?

As mentioned in ym last post, during the AFL coaching course I;m doing right now we talked a lot about how to play Dusty if you were Geelong and watching all the footy shows last week it was clear - clamp down on him!

Easier said then done in some cases I know but in this case it baffles the mind as to how it wasn't done and I in my family group message where my brother and sister are both Richmond supporters, I sent this as soon as it happened:

Later I set this in the group message:

And then of course the vision:

As a defender you have to guard the most dangerous player or space, in this case it was the player who's only at the time is only a 2 time premiership and Norm Smith medallist so I'm not sure if the roll back defense and to guard nothing but grass was the best option so it would be interesting to get an answer as to why Blicavs defended the way he did.

LENGTHEN THE GROUND - GRAND FINAL VISION

This week I started another course through AFL Sportsready titled Advanced Certificate in Creating and Coaching AFL Game Plans again presented by Austin Stubbs of AFLHP.

We've covered a lot of different tactics used by various AFL teams with a lot more to come in part 2 this week but as the course fell on Grand Final week, we also had a good look at Richmond and Geelong, what they want to do and how they'll win the game.

1 tactic we touched on was lengthening the ground which Shane Edwards talked about post game:

Here's a bastardised version of what it can look like and what he was referring to specifically with what Richmond wanted to do in the 3rd quarter after being smorthered for most of the 2nd quarter by the Cats:

This is definitely something that can, and should, be trained as there will definitely be times that you'll need to implement this in a game situation and instead of just bringing it out of the blue at half time in round 7 and expecting everything to turn out OK, make it something that your players are familiar with and can use at their own discretion to be even more effective.

PSYCHOLOGICAL CO-ACTIVE PART 2

 

Grand Finals are won above the neck and here's some more pointers on winning the psychological battle against yourself and assisting your players to do the same.

• Players might looked gassed but they might actuallybe freaking out mentally as they are unprepared for the gravity of the moment and all their senses and thus, output, heightens dramatically
• Situations that on the surface might appear to be fitness problems but aren’t, might really be your team going down a man in the 1st few mins (anxiety), a player on debut (nerves), getting scored on early in the match (panic), the tempo of the match exceeding expectations (perception of effort) or bad tactics (opposition has advantages in various scenarios aiding their ability to build up/disturb your build up/exploit transitions)
• If you want to improve a players ability to make correct decsion making actions from the middle of the last quarter to the end of the game, then you need to agree on the goal (improvement/the maintenance of pressing actions from min 100 – 120) + you also need to determine the limiting factor (Is endurance ability too low?, Is communication poor? Are your tactics not as sharp as they need to be? Are you pressing at the wrong time? Are you making the wrong decisions? Do you lack aerobic capacity? Do you lack repeat speed? Are you pressing too hard when you need to corrall and vice versa putting you out of position and thus forcing to expend more energy resources to recover your position? Is your pre-game nutrition poor?
• Whatever the factors are you need to pinpoint which one's are the fartherest behind (vo2max might be only be average to good but you're also not eating pre-game
• There always seems like there’s so much to improve on but you need to choose what you’re NOT going to do
• Everything can help but what’s going to help right now?

PSYCHOLOGICAL CO-ACTIVE PART 1

 

My favourite day of the year, Grand Final Day, is upon us which usually coincides with my birthday week.

The 2 teams who make it to grand finals can no longer gain any more technical, tactical or physical benefit from training to make them any more prepared for what they are right now for the big dance, and there's only 1 co-active left that can now make or break the grand final result...

Psychological.

The psychological is easily the hardest co-active to master from a coaches and players point of view.

Most coaches don't have any experience on how to train their players for greater psychological capacity, not even know what it is.

Like everyday people, players won't naturally challenge themselves psychologically until "challenged" by others/coaches so it's pretty easy to see how this can be put in the too hard basket.

Here's a little story from my local club during grand final week last season (which we won).

We could quite possibly be the poorest club in metro Melbourne footy, without exaggeration.

In 2019 we were kicked off our home ground as it was deemed unfit to play on during that season by auditors so last year we played at a different ground, 4 suburbs away from our home base where we continued to train every Tuesday and Thursday.

We have 2 and half lights meaning we can't use the whole ground and can only train in parts of the ground effectively.

We're battlers, we know it.

Our ground's a shithole, but it's our shithole is one of our motto's.

We had been flogged in the first week of finals but then we bounced back in the second week to gain a spot in the Granny.

One of our players is the CEO of a VFL team and organised us to use their ground to train on during grand final week.

A VFL/AFL quality ground with full lights - it was Christmas time for our footy club.

Psychologically this provided a boost for us that no other team could have at that time of the season.

We had maybe 35 - 40 blokes train on that Thursday, more then we probably had at any other night that year.

Our skills were the same, our fitness was the same but psychologically I felt it gave us some major momentum, bloody hard to get from nowhere in August.

We already felt that we had the best team, we had displayed it during the year but now that we were on even keel in that we can train just like every other club on a full ground with full lighting and full player numbers, even if just for 1 week, I felt like it now put us in a close to unbeatable position, the psychological boost we gained giving us the edge over of the opposition.

Coming from our shithole, we were training on a ground far better than any other in our league, with lighting far better than any other in our league, and it gave us a feeling that we are now even even, albeit temporarily in front of our grand final opposition that gave us a sense of invincibility that would carry into Saturday and we lead the game from the first score to the last score.

This week will be focused on this with tips on what to look for, how to train it and make it a strength of your club with it then becoming a part of your culture.

GAME DAY PART 3: POST-GAME

 

PLAYERS

• Post game ask the players what the half time message was and see what you get back

REVIEWING LOSES

• Lack of conditioning is often not the problem so look at other factors such as tactical/technical (poor errors/decisions), sleep, poor pacing strategies, temperature/humidity, nutrition, hydration, poor load management in training, opposition exploiting your tactical/technical weaknesses, psychological stress, physical adaptation and eliminate them before doing more training volume, especially during the in-season.

FEEDBACK

• Negative appraisal post-game can cause testosterone levels to drop and what you say can impact the following week so choose your words wisely.

INJURY REPORTING

• Each week over 25% of your players will sustain an injury of some description that doesn't result in any loss of training or training time
• Those players who don't self report these minor, non-time loss injuries are then 3.6 x more likely to sustain an actual time loss injury in the next 7 days compared
• Those players who don't self report a moderate, non-time loss injury are then 6.9 x more likely to sustain an actual  time loss injury in the next 7 days
• 68% of all time loss injuries were preceded by not previously reporting a non-time loss injury with 94% of knee and 90% of hamstring time loss injuires preceded by a non-time loss compliant in the same location

POST GAME RECOVERY

• Positive interaction experiences is the best recovery modality as positive input wins in recovery and having fun promotes this

GAME DAY PART 2: IN-GAME

 

Yesterday we kicked this series off with Pre-Game so let's move to some of the different aspects you'll come across In-Game.

GAME ASSESSMENT

• Game components are consistency of sport mechanics/actions + control sport skill/player placement + anticipation (player movements to recover to base position and then respond).

PLAYER ASSESSMENT

• Is the player making tactical errors or are they not aware of their positioning?
• Perhaps they are not moving properly in relation to teammates on defense or not close enough as they move to offense?
• Is it a timing issue where they haven’t played enough, is your team preparation archaic and/or has there not enough focus on game sense at training?
• If positioning is fine but your team still loses the ball then to say it’s an individual mistake is lazy and wrong but you still need to look at each players technical/tactical/physical/psychological output at the specific time to find any other weak links.
• In invasion sports, the key to understanding the problem can be found with the interaction of all involved players where if the pass was made just 1 second earlier then the receiving player might have had more time and space to make the next pass which then would have put them into positive space and a score opportunity would have occurred.
• So is it a player positioning mistake or has the coach not even coached them in regards to it?
• Observe 1 player x 5 – 8mins specifically on the game components and calculate a score (4 is high, 1 is low) for them.
• Also grade on the ball skills (controlling the ball/ disposing of the ball) and off the ball skills (positioning/reading the play, knowing when to attack or defend).
• Having teammates judge their teammates might also help in their learning (seeing v being told).

TACTICAL SPEED

• Speed is often confused with insight.
• When you start running earlier than the others you will appear faster.
• Being quicker than your opponent is of less advantage if they can read the build up of play better than you so create position specific scenarios at training for this.

SCANNING

• Great players scan their environment 6 – 8 times/10secs before they receive the ball to increase likelihood of possession.

TEAM SPEED

• If 1 player accelerates then 3 – 4 others have to join them to throw the opposition into disarray and disrupt as many as their defenders as you can.

PACING

• It isn’t just the distribution of energy resources but the rhythm/skill required to actually utilise the changes in effort
• Requires physical and psychological expression where both need to be on the same page as one without pacing skills can be useless at the end of games
• First you need to be physically prepared or you’re just prolonging the inevitable (get blown up) as the end goal is faster pacing
• Pacing is highly motivational so psychologically profile each player to see how they respond to different modifiers in training
• Rehearse pacing but make sure players learn how to win without being dependant on just a single strategy (starting well and tapering off v finishing strong)
• You need to know where pacing fits into your sport (MMA can be 2secs or 5min rounds, tennis can go for 2 – 5hrs, bball is 48mins split up by 24sec segments etc) to find the gaps you can exploit and gain advantage
• Pacing can also be deceptive as players can be fast but play slow and vice versa
• Less skilled players play aggressively as they often rely on effort over brains and coaches can be the same with their pre-game approach in what they say and instruct players to do
• Motivation, confidence, strategy and tactics will determine what pace is ideal
• Pace is not the same as speed and pace is more of a work rate type than speed with Lebron James, Lionel Messi and Rafer Nadal all being low paced athletes who have excellent speed/acceleration when scoring
• Mix up the same conditioning drill as 1 that has an end (5 up and backs) vs one that doesn’t (undisclosed time) and see how athletes match up with their outputs to see what they respond to best

HALF TIME

• Is 15 – 20% of the total game time
• Ask line captains questions to get their thoughts
• Ask line captains what opportunities are you seeing for us that we can take advantage of
• Sometimes you might only speak to players with specific roles or team lines that seem to be out of whack
• Each line meets x 90 – 120secs, the the coach meets with line captains x 60secs, then the coach meets with the entire line x 60secs for all lines that will take about 12mins all up
• Alternatively each line meets and writes on the white board 3 things they’re seeing then look what matches up from line to line
• Players will be on their own in as the coach moves from line to line
• 90 - 120secs beforegoing abck out the caoch and then gives their final address to the entire team to let everyone know what everyone else is doing
• Each line only has 2 – 3 objectives/game so this could take even less time then this, giving players more "free" time
• If a coach talks too much then squirt them with water

GAME DAY PART 1 - PRE-GAME

The best round of football for the year, Preliminary Final round is upon us and by jeez it should be a cracker so I thought I would gather some notes from my files in regards to the different aspects of game day.

This will be a 3 part series (Pre-Game today, In-Game tomorrow and Post- Game Saturday) mostly in short form just to provide you with some idea's that you can than run with.

GAME MODEL

• Reduces player uncertainty when they play and provides more time for creativity

DEFENSIVE CHECKLIST

• Isolate the player in possession from their teammates
• Guard their teammates in a way that terminates their role in the offense
• Dispossess/win the ball back

ATTACKING CHECKLIST

• There is no such thing as reaction or defense as you’re either attacking with the ball or attacking the team in possession of the ball, to get it back.
• The defense must get into, and stay, in attack mode until it has possession, by applying sustained pressure so that the opposition become reactive rather than proactive.
• In doing so you have the chance to force a turnover.

PRE-GAME PLAYER NARRATIVE

• I’m going to take charge of myself
• I'm going to be the best individual and teammate I can be
• Nothing will take me away from my best mindset
• I can’t force a great performance
• I will have my best game possible

LEADERS

• You have to affect someone else on the team causing them to play better by the way that you play

PRE-GAME PHONE USE

• Causes mental fatigue especially if used 30mins pre-game
• 1 study showed that within 3 different groups (video watchers, video gamers and social media watchers) they all made the same amount of passes but the quality of passing decision making decreased in the social media and video games groups
• Social media/video gamers leads to a prolonged period of electrical impulses in certain areas of the brain, reducing the speed of information processing and thus leading to less successful decision making accuracy
• When mentally fatigued, players usually demonstrate longer fixation time on opponents and shorter fixation time on their teammates and they may not adequately interpret (sports perception) or anticipate (frontal cortex) opponents actions affecting their decision making accuracy

PLAYER DEVELOPMENT: HOW TO CHALLENGE YOUR PLAYERS

This is taken from an article in my files but again I didn't note who it was by but lays out a process using an athlete-centered approach and in it they outline a basic progression of pushing your players to higher levels over and over again for continued long term development.

It all starts with this image:

Level 1 is a low level challenge requiring low skill and is where a novice starts their developmental journey.

Level 2 ups the ante on the challenge level while maintaining the low skill status from level 1.

Level 3 now increases the skill level to match the challenge level increase from level 2

Level 4 is the end result if all goes to plan as both skill and challenge have both increased in difficulty and there has been success at that new level of performance.

Here a few things to be aware of throughout this process though.

When a player has reached level 2 then they have shown that they have the basic skill level required to complete the task so the coach now needs to up the challenge just at the edge of the player's ability so that boredom doesn't set in from repeating something considered easy to the player and motivation to improve is maintained.  

There will be some trial and error to find the right challenge at this point but I would always err on the side of easier v harder as if it's too hard then it can create anxiety and that can trickle down to skills players have been competent at in the past (goal kicking yips for example).

A coach can do this by changing the constraints of the game which could drop them back to level 1 but performance decreases are often followed by performance increases when the learning process has been successful. 

A coach can also remove the player from the current activity and give them a different acticvity that works the same skill aspect through a small sided game or individual coaching, than bring them back in the original activity.

Once at level 2 and you have enough skill level to meet most challenges, a lot of times players can move from level 2 to level 3 on playing the game in various forms.

You'll see a diagonal zone called flow zone which is hopefully where you keep your players as the training is just hard enough to challenge their current skill level but no so hard they a complete roadblock and drop in confidence and motivation - this is why finding the edge of each players skill level is crucial and is something paid ZERO attention to at local/amateur football clubs.

The days of everyone doing the same drill and the coach expecting the same result from everyone HAS TO GO.

With decreased salary cap and less player points allowances from local leagues in the coming years, the shifting of player development at junior/youth levels of football is going to be the main feeder of your senior playing group in the future.

20 GAME SENSE DRILLS VOLUME 2

 

Available now is volume 2 of 20 Game Sense Drills, the next installment from volume 1.

Containing the following training drills:

- Switch On Warm Up

- Away Lead + Square Up Kick

- 6 Group 1-2

- The Spiral Drill + 10 Points From It

- 3 Player 2 Handball

- 3 Player Push Back Kick

- 4v1 + Cone Touch

- 6 Player Scan + Kick

- 3v2 Outside Kick

- 4v4+2

 - 5v2 Rondo

- 6 Level Game

- Brain Train

- Ball Movement

- Ball Movement Part 2

- Sydney Swans Fake Kick Out Tactic

- Whistle Switch Kick

- Possession + Compact Defense

- Goal Kicking Kings

 - Kicking With Context Training Scenarios

Purchase for just $75 here.

MIXED SQUARES TRAINING DRILL (3 DRILLS)

                                                      

Players Required: 35 - 40 in total (but alter numbers and area size to fit your training numbers)

Balls Required: 3 in total

Space Required: 65 x 45m

Drill Level: Easy to Moderate

Pretty simple here.

Drill #1...

To access this drill in full and plenty of others register for a level 3 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.

WANT TO GET DRAFTED? HERE'S HOW...

                                    

Mid last year I took part in a course ran by the Lindsay Gilbee Elite Kicking Academy and as part of that we received a talk from Simon Dalrymple.

Simon was the recruiting manager behind the Bulldogs premiership team in 2016 and is now the Melbourne-based recruiter the all might Sydney Swans (KPF please Simon!).

His talk was on talent assessment which also provides the basic criteria for what recruiters are looking for.

ABILITY TO PLAY

• Based on your coach's instruction and what your team needs
• Ball Winning Ability (inside/outside, on the ground, in the air)
• Ball Use (by hand and foot on preferred/non-prefferred sides of the body)
• Decision Making
• Positional Craft
• Footy Nous

PHYSICALLY

• Speed
• Power
• Endurance
• Agility
• Body Type

PSYCHOLOGICALLY

• Character
• Intelligence
• Resilience
• Competitiveness
• Lifestyle

HOW CAN I MAKE IT?

• Have a weapon
• Play to strengths
• Improve weaknesses
• Train as you want to play
• Do you need speed or endurance
• Strength of character

HAVE NO REGRETS

• Be as good as you can be
• Enjoy it

FORWARDS RUNNING PATTERN DRILL + PROGRAM

                                                    

Local/amateur football training is extremely GENERAL where everyone does the same skill work and the same running work regardless of positional requirements.

I'll give this a pass "for now" because that's how it's always been done but from now on it's not good enough and coaches need to do better.

With time being maybe the biggest factor in deciding what to do and how to do it, coaches feel forced into this general training dilemma but what a lack of time does it make the importance of specificity within your training even more critical.

Harder to organise and carry over sure but still as critical to your on-field success.

This drill and accompanying program is a forwards running pattern drill involving balls work.

The running patterns are based off full ground defensive press that most teams are doing in a scenario of an intercept mark in their forward 50 which I chose specifically as it will involve running efforts over the longest distance so if you can cover this drill, smaller leading requirements will be easier.

In the boredom of lockdown I analysed a bunch of my team's senior games from last year to look for any trends in the stats I took and have used them to form the program part of this which you can read about below.

Players Required: 5/group

Balls Required: 2/group

Space Required: Half a ground or so

Drill Level: Easy

Here it is...

If you would like full access to this training drill and program then register for a level 2 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.

4v1 RONDO PROGRESSIONS/LAYERS (7 OPTIONS)

                                                   

I've posted plenty of Rondo progressions before and here are some more.

Rondo drills are easy to set up and easy to constrain so training doesn't need to be stop start to reintroduce totally different drills for 2hrs.

You could use 3 - 5 layers from a single set up for a good 20 - 30min block per training session giving players literally 100's of decision making opportunities, compared to cone drills which provide a big fat ZERO.

Players Required: 5/group

Balls Required: 1/group

Space Required: 10 x 10m

Drill Level: Moderate to Hard

Here are a bunch more layers you can use for this...

To access these 7 training drills register for a level 3 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.

3 TEAM 4v2 TRAINING DRILL

                                                          

When you're the single coach in charge of 30 - 40 players at once, training drills that can be used in a multitude of ways and thus requiring just the initial set up of that drill, is a life saver.

Between having players go out to drills, come back in, have a drink and "do a lap" between drills, coaches are sacrificing 15 - 20mins of precious training at least every training session.

Every second counts and a training drill such as this follows that mantra.

Players Required: 6/group 

Balls Required: 1/group

Space Required: 30 x 30m

Drill Level: Moderate to Hard

You are only constrained by your imagination for this drill and what you can do with it so here's the video and more information/variations below...

If you would like full access to this drill than register for a level 3 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.