POSITIONAL PLAY (TOUCHLINE THEORY)

These points come from a soccer based article I read yesterday on positional play which is huge in soccer but also transfers to pretty much any team sport, football included, so I've added a fair bit of footy specific content to this to get your thinking juices flowing.

Avid readers of my content would be aware of my huge advocacy of game models, payer formations and such especially for local/amateur football where you don't always have control over the ball because of varying degrees of player skill level.

What we can control a lot more is the 99.9% of the game where we don't have the ball which entails player positioning in and out of possession and at stoppage points of the game.

AFL teams have a huge focus on controlling what they can control and I suggest us local/amateur football clubs determine what our specific controllables are and follow suit.

• The most difficult challenge of any football player is to know where to be and more importantly, how to get there.
• Without the ball, how can you add value to the side and where must you be in order to achieve that? This will include position or line specific formations such as a defensive sweeper winger or a high defensive press.  
• Usually a player finds a problem of their own positioning then moves to rectify it but that can cause problems for teammates who have based their positioning off their own position so you must have faith that everyone can perform the right thing and in sync. This initial responsibility is with the coach and their ability to develop and instill a game model of their choosing,and not expecting players to simply know what to do at any given time and in any given situation.
• Football isn't like chest which bases all movement around 1 dictating presence as every piece is moving and has a mind of it’s own
• What determines the outcome of any given scenario is rarely the positioning of 1 component but rather of those nearby components, and by extension, those of the entire team, making it more of a cascading waterfall!
• Not only must we constantly evaluate where we go but we must also recognise what we represent within the larger system, such as how does our movement impact those of our teammates, how do our individual positions affect the collective, and how does our collective position affect the game? If you want to use high forward 50 pressure as a means of keeping the ball i your forward half then you'll need 5 - 6 forwards in the forward 50 at all times to apply this high pressure. If you have forwards working up the ground to get touches in your defensive half, then this is going to be hard. Midfielders now push in to make up the numbers but this leaves a "line gap" defensively with your forwards too far back and your mids too deep forward on the rebound.
• With unlimited problems we stop seeking solutions and look for an approach/philosophy/formation solution that simply minimises damage while providing us with time to increase resources in the places we need them.
• Break the ground up into parts to isolate game actions which exactly what game models do as they break the game up into 4 game moments that each have 2 macro moments that each have 3 - 5 micro moments. This can make a usually very messy affair extremely simplified for players of all experience and abilities but more so you're middle to lower tier players who really need this preparation clarification as it can lower their in-game decision making quite dramatically if some of the thinking is already done for them.
• Your very best players should be the ones who are the options between lines as they can better, and more skillfully, exploit the holes in the opposition's defense, as well as perform the most valuable actions for the team as these tighter spaces require high level information processing, decision making and execution.
• To successfully defend a triangle you need at least 2 defenders so being able to form them against a single defender is vital and is something the Swans did a heap of this in 2021, using a soccer based player movement strategy.
• You want a template/game model that provides action items for a variety of players that can each fix the problem themselves rather then to having to rely on your few top talented players all the time because if they have a form slump or injury, you've got nothing to fall back on so leave their brilliance to when you really need it, like in the "between lines" point above.
• Every slight game action perturbation causes a reaction so if 2 players react in a way that contradicts 1 another, then the others will have to follow suit and adjust accordingly essentially making 1 positional mistake 2 or more mistakes. In the end as the group shifts and new disturbances emerge while you’re still tending to the previous one’s and it's clear you'll be out of position for a relatively long amount of time. 
• Teams that use positional play determine which spaces they want to attack base on their game model and then use a distraction in another area before striking the opposition in the desired area. For example you might use a short kicking possession on the skinny side to engage the opposition to that side while trying to create an opening to go fat side into space and/or an open player, dragging the opposition and manipulating/displacing them.