U13 - First friendly game

Tonight we played our first friendly.  Our friends from Niagara Falls u13 were our guest and a very nice team to share a field with.  They came to the game with the right attitude, and that was to work on things.

We played on the turf field in St Catharines and the rain was coming down.  The weather radar let us down as it said the clouds should have passed by 4:50.

Back to the game.  The bottom line is we lost 5-0 but I don't care.  The kids had some good ideas and were working hard to establish their shape.  That made me happy.  Niagara Falls already had 5 full field games and they were sharper than us.  Three of there goals were off giveaways from poor restarts and that's something we can fix.  Restarts are a definite topic of the next 2 sessions.

We haven't really organize ourselves past our overall shape and moving the ball around the back and into the midfield.  This is our next practice's topic.

A few individual things we need to fix are:

• 1v1 defending and intensity doing so
• Getting to the ball first
• Not letting the ball bounce, playing it out of the air

I was very happy with our wide defenders and wingers tonight.  One bone of contention for me in the past was keeping our width and today we did that.  Our holding midfielders also kept their shape and that was a problem last year.  They would always creep up between the attacking mids, killing that triangle.

Coach Paul and I agreed that the boys looked more organized than when we started last year.  Our next friendly is coming up followed by a tournament and I hope to have more of the movement organized by then. We have 2 sessions to before the tournament.

Next session we will work on getting to the ball first, then organizing the movement within the midfield and forward from there via phase-of-play.  That will be one session.

The following session will be 1v1 defending at first, restarts, then phase-of-play moving the ball into space behind the defenders (penetrating passes) from the midfield.

After that we would do a session on penetrating the defensive line via the flank players.  That's a science in itself.

One step at a time the team's delivery will be put together.  Coach Paul and I look forward to helping that happen.