Last week saw Scottish club football hit a real low. You know the details, so I won’t repeat them. But what next? There are many issues that should be looked at, so over the next few weeks let’s examine ways to make a better future for our game.
Coaching – Early Years and Facilities. Kids need to play football from an early age. Computer games and lack of facilities keep kids indoors, but I still believe that even in school yards kids do play. The problem I believe is rather a lack of coaching on technique – not of general coaching, but of technique.
I did SFA Early Touches coaching courses while in my final years of senior school, and coached for a couple of years after. My biggest frustration was the attitude of older ‘experienced’ coaches (I did the courses at the same time as 3 of my school teachers, and coached a team with my Maths teacher). I begrudgingly gave this up due entirely to his approach – he ‘knew better’. Everyone knows of the Dutch academies where youngsters from early primary ages are taught how to control a ball, take it in, look up…We simply don’t do enough of this, though the coaching courses I did do encourage it. Simply put, this is then down to the coaching. Either that they have not been lucky enough to do such a coaching course, or as I have seen so often, they think they know better or simply can’t be bothered. This invariably results in young kids being given a ball and aimlessly running around a pitch. Even where drills are taught, its not linked into the game at the end so kids don’t see the benefit of the coaching, but rather something that has to be done before the game happens. I’m 26, I know?. I did.
The lack of thought in coaching always frustrates me. Think about your Sunday league team, or probably even back to school when you used to train. I’ll bet almost everyone did a jog -what’s the point in that? My Sunday team insist its all about fitness – nonsense! By all means do some running, but take a ball; work in pairs and pass as you run; work on dribbling but with head up not looking at the ball – if you don’t have a supply of balls lay out some markers (cones, jumpers.) in a random pattern and then run between them-you still do the run, but you incorporate movement that you will have to do in a game. My Sunday team is clearly beyond help now (!), but kids footy need not be. Doing these things – working on touch, passes, movement and the ability to look up from an early age really are the foundations. Then build tactics on top of this as the kids get older. Today, we have to do these basics when kids are already 14. This is an attitude thing, not due to the SFA or SPL, and so SO easy to remedy.
I’ll go on in another article to discuss summer football, but briefly on kids football, it amazes me the comments of ‘lack of facilities’ that you hear. I accept we don’t have a Murray Park in every town, but there are many school pitches, council playing fields, parks etc that should be available. However, School facilities seem only to be used by the schools themselves or hired out at expensive rates. These are (in theory at least) government owned – so make them available! For goodness sake don’t close them down all summer! Same goes for the public pitches – I’ve played since April now using bags as goalposts, with long grass on the pitch. It`s crazy – the posts go back up next weekend ! Just in time for autumn rains and then the winter freeze. Why? ‘To let pitches recover’ – again, crazy! The reason they need to recover is because we’ve destroyed them playing bad football in a mudbath throughout January. School competitions have to happen in term times, but kids football HAS to be Summer based. Clubs from SPL down can help with all of these.
Elite talent needs opportunities with the very best coaching, but for me the biggest thing is to lay the foundations, and this need everyone to get their attitudes right – be they the SFA, government, teams, coaches or parents.
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Not been on Vital for a while but saw this article and felt I had drone on for a few minutes (see below).
Great article. I was just having a conversation with a colleague of mine at work about the very same thing and it transpired that a boys club related to HMFC coached by the father of a HMFC employee have very poor training methods. When I was a wee boy playing football (26 now) we were thrown out on to a pitch and told to get the ball up the park to the big boys. I don’t think much has changed.
In Edinburgh we are lucky, the Pitz down at Portobello let the youngsters play on the pitches for free if they aren’t booked which is obviously a good thing but how many other pitches are’locked’ to kids because they authorities aren’t insured for kids to play. We need to make the facilities we do have, accessible to kids, of which there are many. In Musselburgh at Pinkie playing fields there is a massive astro-turf that is empty for 90% of the time but is also padlocked so that kids can’t get in and play football. How many other places are like this???
Why do we send kids out to shocking pitches to play 11 a side games too? Kids should play 7 a-side games up until they are at least 15 and all games should be played on astro turf. Kids won’t learn much playing on a garbage pitch where every pass is a lottery if it makes it to its target with all the bobbles it encounters on the way.
Kids who are bigger also tend to get picked in teams due to the size of the pitch as they are more likely to be able to “punt it up the park”. This is a shocking tactic and may only bring short-term gain, if that, to a youth team. We need to encourage at all costs touch, technique, passing and vision at a young age. Growth comes with age and of course all of the players will eventually mature physically.
We need to foster an attitude of skill improvement from a young age and not a “win at all costs” mentality. This will take some time to filter through to all of the youth coaches out there but if we want to produce good players in the future kids need to enjoy the game and be taught the technical skills of the game. With any other sport, you introduce kids to the game and if they like it you take it further. With golf for example you would then teach them the technique of how to hold, stand and swing the club you wouldn’t tell them to just smash the ball as far as you can which is the equivilent of “punt the ball up the park” in football. Fingers crossed someone at the SFA tries to implement common sense in to the coaching of youngsters at football.
PS A shocking saying has to be “if in doubt put it out”.
Yes….. excellent points in the article, and your comments Dicksonium. When you see the frequent sloppy play from the likes of Driver and Templeton – and they are our “best” attacking players – it shows just how much extra technique could be improved on…. if only the players would put in the effort, and if coaches would demand it. I’ve heard that the Hearts U-15 and U-17 coaches demand a passing game from the boys nowadays …so lets hope that Jamie Walker and co bring a more rounded dimension to the team in the coming years.