Game insight

by Adam Clark | Jan 13, 2022 | Coaching Blog

For the past 3 months I’ve been mentoring coaches from outside of the UK – namely, Finland, Sweden and Estonia. We meet once per month via zoom, to discuss a topic that we have all recently studied.
So far we’ve discussed team tactics twice, with this past month being game insight. During the conversation all coaches shared some interesting pop up’s, that could be utilised in the future. Today, I want to discuss what game insight is and how a player develops it.

Firstly, what is game insight?

If we look at the logical order of a football action, it uses communication, decision making and an execution of a technique, for it to performed. While you can obviously break these parts into isolated events, it begs the question if football is actually being performed, if 1 or 2 of these components are absent?
Once a player participates in a game, they will possess some type of understanding, whether that be at a very young age or a senior player. There are rules that are universal (these never change) and other external factors that you can’t control. These could include the pitch surface, weather and referee for example.
The game itself, has a goal at each end of it’s pitch, with lines to highlight boundaries. There will then be a certain amount of players present, that will compete in scoring at least 1 more goal than their opponents and take victory.
This all sounds simple, but as we know, what goes on ‘during’ the game is unpredictable and as a coach, we have very minimal input on what actually happens. Some coaches decide to take it upon themselves and ‘commentate’ for the duration of the game. This doesn’t actually have any real impact on the development of the team intentions and the players that are participating on this occasion.
During the game the players will receive millions of different stimuli and then from this, they will be required to make decisions based on what THEY see or hear. The environment will communicate this to the players at every second of the game (so if you’re a coach, sit back and relax) and allow them to make their own decisions.

For the game to progress and show signs of a team working towards victory, the decision making component is now needed. The player will need to have communicated and now responds in action (to make a decision), then hopefully executes the correct technique…..

How does this happen?
What is this decision based on?
Is there such a thing as, making the right decision and executing it wrong, or making the wrong decision and pot luck playing a part?

While decision making itself is extremely complex, we know that the decisions players make are their own and they can be influenced by external factors. (Internal conflict and external influence, play a large part here). All of the stimuli that players consume has to be filtered at an extremely fast rate, to then enable them to execute a desired technique.

Making these decisions happen, is the brain. A very powerful muscle that we use in everything we do – so surely we need to ensure that our brain recognises these situations, to give us the best chance of succeeding?
How could we enhance this learning?
What situations could we create, to allow our players to recognise all these different stimuli, the game provides?

The answer is clear, train as you wish to compete on game day. By doing this, the brain will firstly experience and then store the information in the brain. These references can then be recalled upon in the future. There is of course, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions attached to these decisions and this can influence what a player will then do.

Once a player has a number of references in their brain (or library of life), we can say they have insight into a certain subject matter. Game insight???? Well, this is simply references associated with what the player has experienced previously and is now stored in the brain. It would be safe to say that a Premier League player has excellent game insight, compared to a player at non-league level. What the Premier League player has seen and experienced will influence their ability to perform, whereas the non-league player wouldn’t have been in the same situations. Both would have game insight, but one will have a quicker understanding on how to deal with it.

Do your players have a ‘bare’ brain, or do they possess the game insight you need, to execute the desired team intentions?

Team intentions

by Adam Clark | Jan 7, 2022 | Coaching Blog

While watching numerous games over the Christmas period, I took it upon myself to view as many games as possible, with the view of trying to understand what respective teams were doing, during game play.
The game is unpredictable and at times there will be situations that happen by ‘pot luck’, but are all situations reliant on this?

Throughout the process of viewing games, it was important to understand the differences between looking and seeing;

Looking – viewing the game zoomed in, following the ball and anticipating players actions.
Seeing – zooming out and looking at the game from a larger lens (focus on the team).

Using the above points within the context of viewing games, there was a high importance of ‘seeing’ in the games that I observed.

Depending on the ground that is hosting the game and the coverage that is provided, it is at times tricky to identify patterns that happen during the game. But, without any other software available, I had to rely on the camera angle that is provided, with mainstream television.

There are a few things that I used to assist my objective of, attempting to identify team intentions. I first used the followings steps;

Watch the first 10 minutes and try to identify early patterns
Look at the team in 2 phases to start – usually in attack and transitioning to defend
When the opposition had the ball in their defensive third (building up), where was the defensive block in relation to this

After gaining some initial thoughts here and looking at the teams behaviours, I then delved slightly deeper into the next part of questioning;

Where are they building up from most and where are they attempting to gain success?
When they lost possession of the ball, how did the team react?
Who are the key players so far in the game?

While gaining information from the previous 6 questions, I could then start to compile some notes of my observations and provoke some further thoughts of my own.

If player ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’ are key to the build up, why is this? Are they on the same vertical or horizontal line, which could enable higher levels of communication or are they superior than their opponents with individual qualities?
Is the team in question being proactive in their approach to the game? Does the communication from the team look organised – is it working? Or, are there parts of the team that are struggling for a variety of reasons and is the opposition targeting this as a consequence?

When looking at the team (zoomed out), it’s vital that we understand the logical structure of football;

The game – what it is
Team task – what team task to use in a certain scenario – creating goalscoring opportunities (example)
Team intentions – how will we execute the team task – creating goalscoring opportunities

By taking the game as a starting point, players will have to communicate which is the first step of a football action. Communication, decision making and execution of a decision make up the action and there will be more on this later. The first step, communication, can be explained as;

Player interactions (meaning at least 2 players communicating with each other, with opponents present), in order to execute a given intention, which will make the team more predictable.

The decision making of a player will always impact an outcome of a given scenario, but the hope is that their individual intention will contribute to the overall intention, and the objective of the game (to score at least 1 more goal than the opposition).

So, when zooming out and viewing from team level, it’s important to really try and see what the team are intending to do, opposed to looking at each players actions and observing the outcome.

Take the team first and focus on the players second.

Coach ramblings

by Adam Clark | Jan 5, 2022 | Coaching Blog

For 2022, there will be weekly blog posts on ramblings from my coaching world. This will be from delivered in an objective and subjective viewpoint, to give you the reader an opportunity (to hopefully) gain some new knowledge and understand my views as a coach.

Why the difference in blogs? On a weekly basis while watching different training and games, I see a variety of interesting things through my own lenses, that then provoke a variety of ‘pop-ups’. These pop ups are gold, as we as coaches could be thinking of something new, that could be unique, or even how we could possibly do something in that situation? While the context will never be wholly understood, the brain will always react to the stimulus and give our own response (interpretation) of what we see.

Most recently while watching games over the Christmas period, I took it upon myself to try and understand the team intentions from certain games. While this is an impossible task, as I’m not part of that respective team, it was interesting to try and work out what teams we’re intending to do and come to my own conclusion.

I then asked myself the question, how many coaches understand what a team intention is and how they do use them?

This first blog post on team intentions, will be posted this Friday!