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Thread: 1. A few people now have asked me why I so vehemently hang my hat on positional play (JdP) instead of any other playing style or philosophy. Why I think that it’s the best, when compared with every other way you can play. I think that’s a great question and I’ll try to
2. answer here best I can. I would not be able to say, in all good conscience, that it is the best way to play. There are many examples, even in recent history, of successful teams that use different styles of play, be that direct, catenatccio, the offside trap etc etc etc
3. to achieve result over days, weeks, months or years and good on them. Nothing is wrong with that at all. For me the answer is not simple or straight forward but multifaceted. I think if you are a Director of Methodology of a youth club that maybe goes all the way to U18 then
4. JdP is the only option for you because you are not all about winning. You do not have a top team that needs results. You are responsible for overseeing the well being and development of players all the way from, say, U8 through to U18. You have time with them to build and
5. develop them into being the best players that they can be. JdP lends itself to coaches that are fond of a player’s technical development because of you know anything about JdP it is that it is a highly demanding style in terms of a players technical ability. In JdP
6. players are asked to receive the ball in inches of space, asked to break that line of pressure to validate the whole movement, asked to put a switch pass on a six pence cross field to find the free man, be able to handle the third and fourth man movements comfortably at speed
7. and otherwise be able to use their technical ability to give teeth to what could otherwise be a very stale playing environment. If a coach can not produce players that can rely upon technical brilliance to break dead locks then the JdP itself is literally pointless.
8. So, we agree that at least in the youth environlment a JdP game must be predicated in real and actual technical, whilst under pressure, competency which thefroe encourages coaches to build technical players (or at least it should). Moving away from the technical element of JdP
9. we now look at the movement element of JdP itself. The understanding and utilization of space. Side note: if more coaches (and this is not a dig at coaches, more a dig at educational courses who teach coaches) knew about the importance of space and how to exploit it, the game
10. how we coach it and how it is played, would change and improve exponentially almost over night. Coaches and coach educators, on the whole, know nothing of and are frightened to refer to, the use of space through fear of being exposed as knowing NOTHING that will actually
11. help their players or coaches in their ward. It is proven through any number of rec videos where a coach has worked on a simple rondo for two weeks, how much improvement kids with two left feet see in terms of space management, possession, movement of the ball and movement
12. off the ball. Now imagine that this coach was not a rec coach. Imagine that the NSCAA OR US Soccer has taught him, properly, how to coach a rondo and the ooor coach hadn’t been left to just copy off of YouTube. Now imagine that the coach correctly works on technical
13. application for these players. Now imagine that these players are not rec, but are the top players on the club. Now imagine that the coach had them since 8 year old (or to better prove my point, another coach had them, but he had also been educated properly in ‘the way’
14. now further imagine that as the players grow older, the depth of knowledge of positional play of each of their subsequent coaches grew as they moved through the age groups and instead of just rondos, now we are looking at 4v4+5 games, end zone games where the timing
15. of both the pass and the run are taught properly. Taught to be deadly accurate and rapid. Now imagine that these coaches could teach JdP principles in actual games that they coach on the weekend to promote the high and overlapping fullbacks. The use of 2v1 and 3v2 to
16. Create positional as well as numerical superiority by pulling players out of position as far back as the GK & CB. Now, remember, they’re all as technical as it was possible to make them because they have been working on beating players 1v1, passing & receiving under pressure,
17. scanning, taking touches away from pressure, dismarking & back foot receiving since age 8 now what damage could this team do by the age of 14, 15 or 16. What kind of damage could the top players from this team do at 18,19 & 20 in terms of national or international settings?
18. Any of these players can now learn the offside trap. All of these players can learn to hit and chase a long ball. All of these players can instantly learn how to ‘send it’. If that’s what their high school or college or even pro coaches want from them.
19. But how many of the long ball players, send it players or off side steppers can, after years of knowing no better, adjust at the age of 16, 17, 18, 19 or 20 to play in the JdP way after all the years of a single faceted style of playing and being coached?
20. That for me is why I hang my hat, passionately, on a JdP style of playing and coaching.
