Playing from the back (Foundation Ages)

A few years ago the FA introduced a new rule to mini soccer; "the retreat line". A rule that is now used by every grassroots league in the country for its 5 and 7 a side format games. The rule is simple, on an opponents goal kick you must retreat to the half way line and when they take it you can press as normal. An initiative taken from other countries to encourage our young players to play from the back. Speaking to other coaches it seems to have divided opinions on whether it is a good step from the FA or not, some argue that it's just not realistic. Personally I feel that it has it strengths, the majority of games that I've seen teams are looking to pay short from goal kicks and attempt to play through the thirds, great! On the flip side, this attempting to play from the back leads to mistakes (going to happen with young players) and results in conceding goals through a misplaced pass or bad touch - goals that are not really down to poor defending or good attacking play. Either way it's something we now have to deal with and when planning practices it's something we need to consider to ensure that our practice is relating to our game.

Teams that I coach have been caught out a number of times trying to play out from the back, which often leads to a straight 1v1 with the player who has won possession in our third. This has prompted me to think about practices we can do to build or confidence and success at playing out from the back.

Playing out from the back

Good passing (from the GK) and good receiving skills are essential for successfully playing out from the back. With younger players we still need to spend time working in technical, high returns practice.

Set up

Use marker cones to give players starting points shown below. GK has a number of footballs.
Players need to transfer their footballs to their target player, who looks to make runs into central channel to receive.

After going through a few rounds/rotations to give players a chance to understand the practice play it as a race against the other practice (ran on the opposite side of the field).

Coaching points

• First touch forward: can we take our first touch forward? Why might this help? Is it better to be close to the half way line? 
• Quality of passing: why will this be really important in our games? 
• Speed: what happens if we are slow on the ball in a game? 
• Cover: if our defending partner gets the ball where is a good place for us to go? (use of orange marker for covering position)
• How are the above linked?

The main issues of playing out from the back comes from being put under pressure as soon as the goal kick is taken. So the real work is going to be done in our opposed practices that give us more realism.

Set up

Using the same field as above, take the starting markers out (start to let players learn good starting positions). Practice is the same as the unopposed practice but with opposition now put in. Start with one defending player and increase the challenge if needed - or when doing this practice we had 3 defenders, 1 could choose which area to press varying the challenge for players.

Defenders start from central channel (retreat line) and look to win ball back and score.

Coaching points

• First touch: Where? What do we have to think about now? 
• Quality of passing: What happens if our passes aren't so good?
• Speed: How long do we have before we are in trouble?
• Cover: does covering our partner help? 

Taking this opposed practice on another step to become more game related.

Set up

Again same field set up as the previous practices. This time working from one goal, with one team playing and one team pressing.  Begin the practice with the central channel being a "safe zone".

We can now look at more game realistic scenarios, presenting the players with problems and decision making situations that they will come across in games.

Of course these points can be covered within an unconditioned game, just remember to put the retreat line into you practice games!

Have any other ideas on how we can develop playing from the back?