Watching the first 2 games of AFLW on Thursday night, I noticed a lot of outnumber advantage situations and as I took a bunch of clips of them I'll be fast-tracking to chapter 13 for this sneak peek as well as including these most recent clips of AFLW.
From a tactical standpoint, the ability to create, have teammates recognise and then utilise outnumber advantages is probably the number 1 thing team sports should focus on as it greatly enhances your chances of success at the micro level during games, which in turn enhances your success at the macro level and you win more then you lose - hopefully a lot more.
AFL has taken so much from Soccer it's not funny and Soccer has been doing this for decades through their own tactics and formations.
What may seem complicated isn't really complicated at all when you put it in a framework (which is the point of frameworks!):
Step 1 - Create the outnumber where you want it
Step 2 - Ensure the involved players recognise where the outnumber is located
Step 3 - Ensure players have many different ways of utilising the outnumber
Step 4 - Utilise the outnumber when the situation presents itself
That's pretty much it – it’s not rocket science - but steps 2 and 3 are the ones most teams fail on and when they do, it presents as kicking to outnumber disadvantages.
The scenarios we'll often see are teams with number advantages around the ball opting to blast kick out of contested situations instead of handballing out of them and those blast don't force the loose defenders in front of the ball to have to be drawn to a player and/or the ball.
We can often see teams running in numbers but while they’re in such a hurry to get territory, they kick long and forwards without using the numbers around the ball and again, the defense can simply sag back and defend the long ball easily as you’re again in an outnumber disadvantaged situation.
You've got to use your number advantage, whether it's a +1 or +3, to maintain possession of the ball but also to draw any defenders who haven't gone into the contest via running with the ball and/or using a handball chain out of stoppage with several draw and gives.
There are a million ways to create/utilise outnumber advantages and it's a matter of directing the players attention to them, and using lots of game play during training so they get exposed to as many of these scenarios as possible.
I'd even go so far as to video training game play for both players and coaches to study how they develop outnumber advantages and then how they go about recognising and utilising them.
It's not just work rate to get numbers to the every contest, it's extremely high game intelligence because if you work hard to create outnumber advantages but don't use them, then you’re simply getting more tired with every subsequent outnumber you create!
Extremely high game intelligence comes from hours and hours of game play with directed attention to specific game aspects.
Here are a bunch of quick outnumber advantage clips from the 2 AFLW games from Thursday night:
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