Introduction:
Welcome back. In this blog post, I’m going to examine the influence of training sessions on the coach’s tactical decisions mid-game. As we know, in the modern game of football, training sessions have become really important. This shows us that football is always progressing as at the start of football, training was not even considered necessary. The style of training many coaches implement is also changing and progressing.
In modern football clubs, training has become an essential part of the job. Most clubs train 4-5 times a week, excluding the games. Therefore, a question arises - ‘What benefit do these training sessions provide for the player and for the team?’
To answer this question I interviewed Kent Hørlyk Sehested. He is a semi-professional football coach and he took his time to explain, how exactly he sets up his training sessions and how they later benefit him in-game. Before I present, Kent's ideas to you, I am going to try and answer this question myself, based on the research I conducted beforehand.
Physicality:
In the 2 recent decades, technology has advanced considerably. Different training tech that can help increase the efficiency of a player also appeared. Now, in our modern age, all elite players during training are asked to wear special shirts that can track their physical attributes and how they change over a specific period of time. The information that is gathered from these players is then put together and analyzed. Through the analysis that was conducted in two case studies: “Tactical Preparation in Sport Games and Motivational Teaching of Sport Games Tactics in Physical Education Lessons and Training Units” by Pavol Peracek and Janka Perackova and “The Influence of Playing Formation on Physical Demands and Technical-Tactical Actions According to Playing Positions in an Elite Soccer Team
” by Paul B. Tchowunu, we can understand that the modern game requires the players to be very physically active and therefore a lot of training focuses on the physical aspect of the game. None of these exercises are new, due to the fact that they were all created during football’s history already. This is why modern coaches, don’t spend time on the innovation of a new exercise, but they just add their own twist to it so that it suits their team and their tactical approach. These exercises help the players to be ready for any physicality in a real match and therefore allow them to stay on top of the game. The physical exercise also allows the players to incorporate the tactics of the coach into their game more efficiently as they don’t have to restructure due to unexpected injuries.
Social Media:
Another example of a technology that advanced over the past 2 decades that is very damaging to coaches and players themselves is social media. It allows the players to be aware of the public's opinion about them. As humans, we have a natural tendency to want other people to like us, and therefore we change things about ourselves to please the preferences of other people. The same thing happens with football players. As players get more and more praise, they start being overconfident, and therefore their personality changes. Coaches have to take that into account and try to appeal to each player individually and build a healthy environment. Roma manager Jose Mourinho once said, “Psychological models must come before tactical models”. This leads us to understand that if you manage to appeal to your players on a psychological level, it will be easy to appeal to them on a tactical level. In “The Player Development Project” in which you can start coaching courses and learn about coaching itself, 6 different behavioral types of a football player are highlighted:
The Highly Confident
Technologically Savvy
Independent Thinkers
Love and Variety in Environment
Expect Fast Results
Constant feedback
During training sessions, every coach has the chance to talk to the player and to teach the player something new. An elite coach is able to use his authority to appeal to the players’ personalities which will lead the players to support the coach, therefore there will be more unity within the team. This can also help the tactical approach, as when the players support the coach, they follow his instructions tremendously well.
Tactical Training and Stability:
The last vital aspect of training is of course the tactical training itself. We can include many different tactical aspects into the broad term of tactical training, some of which are formations, ball movement, player movement, set pieces, e.t.c. All of the tactical aspects mentioned above can be applied in-game and therefore we can see that coaches use training to teach players their tactical styles and it takes them many months to fully get their ideas across. Training is also a mix of theory and practice as only one of those 2 will slow down the process and lead to there being a chance of the coach getting fired. If there was only practice then the players would understand what to practice and if there was only theory, the players wouldn't be ready for real-life situations.
Interview:
At the start of this post, I talked about an interview with Kent Hørlyk Sehested. In the interview, three main points arise which confirm the different aspects of training mentioned above. First and foremost I asked him if he adjusts his training to his tactics and if yes how? He explained to me that he bases all of his training on how he plays in-game. Kent said that if he wants his team to play a 4-3-3 for example he will use exercises that directly fit a 4-3-3 formation. This idea smoothly transitioned into him telling me that he like all other coaches doesn’t create his own exercises and just adjusts them to his needs. He explained to me that there aren’t any new ways to innovate the exercises, therefore they are always reused. This also confirms what I found previously in my research. Lastly, I asked him if he makes the players adjust to his training or if he adjusts the training to his players. He answered the latter. Kent explained that if he has a fast player he would need to adjust his tactic to include the fast player into his setup, and as he said previously he bases his training on his tactics, so of course, he also adjusts his training to a specific set of players.
Conclusion:
To answer the question I posed at the start I provided two sources of information - my research and an interview. Both of these sources agree with each other and therefore we can conclude that training sessions include everything that could happen in-game and therefore they become very beneficial to the team. They also help fix the negative aspects of the team, therefore being essential to the modern football team and coach.
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