Building spatial awareness

Spatial awareness and support.

“Spread out!!” one of the most common commands shouted out in youth football training sessions, usually by coaches of younger age groups (6-10) but sometimes even heard in adults football. Obviously if you have to keep yelling it out your players clearly aren’t learning why/when they may need to find space. And if this is the case you need to help them understand. My buzzword is “space” I don’t like spread out so much as it may force a player in a perfectly good space to move into a bad one or just go further away.

A good way to get your players thinking about finding good space. 

Example below is a session that I carried out with my u8s team, but this can absolutely be adapted for any ages..

 Start by taking an area (square/rectangle) and dividing it into a series of squares (vary this depending number of players) get players into groups of 3 or 4 and get them started with a simple challenge to get things started; which team can get their ball to visit all the squares the quickest? 

I keep things competitive with this group as they become uninterested with unopposed games.

                    

                                              6 square version was used in the session

After letting them have a go then try to come up with ideas as team and try it a couple more times we discussed some ideas as a group key questions to let them think about: They came to the idea that its quicker to pass it between the squares. So some questions:

·      

•            If you’ve got the ball do you want your team in the same square as you?? Why/why not?

• ·         Does it make it faster if they are in different squares?

They decided that having someone so close to them wasn’t very helpful for passing. So I set a challenge to the players: 

Try and be in a different square to someone on your team.

After this we started to look at finding space to support, using a piece of A3 we looked at where the 2 players off the ball can be the most help (squares next to the player on the ball) and spoke about why we might not always want team mates to be far away.

Challenge: Try to get in a square next to the player on the ball. Now players would have to start thinking about moving off the ball to become good support.

After running through and giving the player plenty of unopposed rounds we moved into an unopposed part. Having 9 players we made a 3v1 and a 4v1. Now the players had to move the ball through as many squares as possible without the defender getting the ball (we came up with a point for every square used and minus 2 if the defender got it) 

Now we looked at why being so close together can be a bad thing (the defender can cut out support easier) and where we might want support (a player either side if possible, to make it difficult for defender to cut passes out) after rotating players there was some good success by the groups and we moved onto our game. 

We adjusted our 6 squares so that the field was divided into 6 for the game, to give players some reference to finding space/ supporting. 

Finding “good space” is different to finding space; you might have space but it may not be helping us. 

Challenge player to try and not “hide” behind opponents – try to see the ball. 

That’s just a quick overview of the session. By adapting the challenges, questions it can be tailored to any group.  Its also important to note that this was the first in a series of sessions focusing on support and finding space, progressing onto directional practices that relate to the game.

If you have any questions please contact me via email or via @dwalsh_91 

These drills were made using the FA Coaches App, which is available to download via the app store.