The Pursuit

Another beautiful and balmy day was the back drop for training today.  Today's focus was on combining in different fashions going forward and improving the speed of attack.  It began in a 40x65yd grid, where players on the inside would receive balls from servers on the outside.  After about 90 seconds of work the players on the inside would switch up with a player on the outside.  Gradually different components were employed, these ranged from opening up, wall passes, and dummy runs.  From this the players moved onto a 1v1 dribbling activity.  This is where the pursuit would begin.  In a 30x20yd area the players were challenged to dribble at speed past an opponent to an open goal, once scoring the player was then forced to defend and try and track down the opponent speeding toward their own goal.  After a touch of fitness then the rules were relaxed allowing players to shoot on goal, this made the game a little bit more soccer like and increased scoring and the attempts on goal as well.  The final part of this activity would involve a high pace attack of 2v2 where attacking was encouraged more than passing.  Attack...Attack...Attack, probably was the phrase used the most by the coaching staff at today's training session.  The team then moved onto practicing lots and lots of breakaways.  Players would play a ball get it back and be off to the races in alone on the goalkeeper.  It began with only the GK to beat but then a chasing defender was added in (coach loves to add in the pursuing defenders, the players not so much).  After two shifts of breakaways the team then split into two groups and played 8v8 with walls that had one touch.  Just a little bit of exhausting work for the GK.  After about 100 minutes of training the session was ended.  The core of defenders stuck around to put in a little extra time stepping to and playing balls away first time.  Strong investment in the session from the group today.  Tomorrow the team will return to train team defending and most likely revisit the attacking movements on Monday.  Looks like it should be a grand weekend for soccer.

GO HORNETS!!!