Number Of Touches
Data Comparing Training To Match Play
Data Comparing Training To Match Play
Part IV in the Player Development series. Read: Part I, Part II, Part III.
After the quick study on time of possession in Part I of the series, we followed up at a training session tracking the number of touches one player took in training. While games are exciting, and kids love to play, they might be best viewed by the adults involved as recesses...or electives a student will be more eager to take than core curricula. I doubt any thinking person would advise students to be given the option carte blanche to study whatever they like, most would take recess as often as they choose! There are some subjects that a functioning citizen simply must master to a degree. But, that is also presuming that the aim is to make each player achieve his or her potential to the fullest. It might also be worth submitting that teaching young people to enjoy any endeavor in a meaningful way, advancing their understanding and fundamental mastery of the topic is the best route to doing so.
Isabelle Kuszyk took 593 touches in a 90 minute session on October 15. To be truthful, it was less time than that, but I couldn't say for sure exactly how long the session ran. I would also offer, in the interest of full disclosure, that her injured teammate was the one doing the counting...though with the ol' ball coach looking over her shoulder frequently. So whatever margin of error an 11-YO doing the counting offers, we should account for that. That said, Lauren Levy, as she counted, broke the count down by the various exercises without my input...so I thought that showed a degree of intent in her work that makes her count carry significant credibility.
A couple weeks later, on Nov. 8, Alex Kades took 322 touches in a combined session with the 'Boks and Boys all together. The counting was done by the same junior coach, so all previous caveats apply!
The First Session
In list form, the exercises used on the 15th (number of touches per exercise in parentheses):
- 5V.2, 1-touch only 10 MINUTES (27 passes)
- Coerver Box - 4 moves/both feet = 8 sets* 22 MINUTES (492 touches)
- Possession, 4 v. 4 with bumper players 20 MINUTES (64 touches/passes)
- 5V.5 Scrimmage 30 MINUTES (37 touches/passes)
This is a pretty basic training session. Essentially, warm-up, technical, possession, play. It's a formula as old as the game, except that in each exercise every player is moving constantly, is involved. That's not every session I run, but it's an aim of good coaches. These days we add the acyclic speed/agility training after a warm-up, which with little effort can incorporate a ball in some way simultaneously knocking out two birds with one stone.
What really interests here is the number of touches per minute. Almost 3TPM in the 5v2. 22TPM in the Coerver box (!). 3.2TPM in the possession game, and, finally, 1.23TPM in the 5v5 scrimmage. What to conclude? Intuition confirmed, one suspects. Any decent technical exercise should be highly intense, high volume stuff. Any possession game should offer far more "live" ball time than a scrimmage with out-of-bounds, set pieces, etc. And so, at double the rate of the scrimmage, the possession games confirm this (5v2 and 4v4). The Coerver box exercise offers 17X more touches than a scrimmage.
The Second Session
Because we had 18 kids at this session, the practice plan was more focused on possession games, and so there was an unsurprising corresponding drop in the number of touches recorded...but it's still a pretty substantial number for a mere 90 minute session. With some stoppage time, here's the session's timeline and touches breakdown for Alex Kades:
5v.2 offered 2.7 touches per minute (TPM), 2 Up, 1 Down was a little bit of an outlier, touches-wise...The three zone game gave Alex 6.2 TPM, and the final scrimmage (where each team was sitting out roughly every other game- 2 1/2 minutes) allowed for 4.22 TPM. That's pretty good for 22 minutes of actual playing time (we could revise the TPM upward due to the team rotation: 6.72 TPM when his team was on) though it's the overall training session that counts.
The Match Data
Now, the real meat of the issue, in player development terms, is what would this training session look like stacked up against a match. In 8v8 games, how many touches does a player get? Two clear distinctions must be drawn immediately. One, the game is only 60 minutes...but we really know it's actually only 20 minutes of live play when the ball is in our possession. Second, of course, the position we count for and the opponent will vary quite widely those answers, but as a proof-of-concept opener, any old game will do. At one of the Springboks' final matches last weekend, we had no subs, so it was the perfect chance to simply target one player and count her touches.
I started with Lucy Ulrich, who played right back and right mid. She had a tremendous first half, and saw quite a lot of the ball in a game that was open and fast, and ended up 4-4. This is a player who has taken the urging to attack the goal line when playing in wide positions, and dribble the ball behind the defensive group. In so doing, she turns the defenders toward their own goal (a lousy way to have to face to play defense...own goals become much more likely) and by dribbling the ball, gives her teammates time to run into the penalty area and get set to finish a pass/cross. To say Lucy is much improved in being aggressive in this situation is a massive understatement. She is essentially a new, and very effective, player both offensively and defensively. Fun to watch the changes.
Lucy, in her two roles, got 63 touches on the ball. Those touches, by way of definition, are opportunities to play the ball with control. A blocked shot, for example, isn't a "touch." But a pass to her feet that she simply misses is a touch because it was an opportunity where she ought to have been able to play the ball. The logic is simply that I wanted to tally the number of such opportunities, regardless of the outcome. It is safe, though not necessarily iron-clad, to say that she averaged 1 touch per minute of game time, or 6 touches per minute of the 'Boks in possession. That second number looks very good.
In the second half, Lucy was put in goal, so Mia Monheit fell in the crosshairs. She played center back, and center mid throughout the period, and I expected to see her have even more touches. In fact, she finished with 43. Which tells me that she's not finding the ball as much as I'd like a central player to do...and that our team doesn't look for the central players enough just yet. So that's useful information before we even consider the value to the individuals a match provides in terms of time on the ball. But it comes out to .71 touches per minute of match time, or a more palatable 4.3 touches per minute of the 'Boks in possession. While it might not have been Mia's best game, it does provide a sense of the range of numbers a match offers a given player.
Conclusion
While it can be said that any given training session offers a highly competitive TPM ratio, with technical-based sessions vastly outstripping matches, it really isn't the ratio that makes the difference. It's the volume. Because the game offers a good number of touches, it's only while the team is in possession...and it is very safe to say that at best a team will be in possession for only a third of a game. So for that hour, the TPM ratio is blown away by the same amount of time in a thoughtful training environment. If we average the two training sessions, it's around 450 touches in 90 minutes. If we compare that average to the highest of the match numbers (63), we see it would take over 7 games to get 1 session's worth of touches (450/63=7.14). That's nearly a whole season!
The raw numbers highlight the difference in volume: 322 touches in a session that featured no specific technical exercises/593 in a session that was highly technical. Compared to nearly an hour's drive each way, 60 minutes of match time, of which the players studied only took 43 & 63 touches, that TPM ration starts to look a bit wan. That's three hours of a Saturday spent for so few touches! (For those of you keeping score, three hours equals: .35 TPM for Lucy that day!) And I would further submit the players are never only accountable in a training session when they have the ball and are taking touches. A thoughtful session will involve "opposed practice" for much of the period, ensuring that every player is involved in defensive situations at a roughly equivalent rate, so the other half of the game is not neglected.
For sure, matches offer the best test of those skills and tactics learned in training...but like school, we needn't take a test a day or even a week; that would be counter-productive to actual learning. This is why we see the top youth academies in the world playing a mere 30 matches per calendar year. The approach of "if some is good, more is better" works about as well in youth soccer as it does in morphine use.
What really interests here is the number of touches per minute. Almost 3TPM in the 5v2. 22TPM in the Coerver box (!). 3.2TPM in the possession game, and, finally, 1.23TPM in the 5v5 scrimmage. What to conclude? Intuition confirmed, one suspects. Any decent technical exercise should be highly intense, high volume stuff. Any possession game should offer far more "live" ball time than a scrimmage with out-of-bounds, set pieces, etc. And so, at double the rate of the scrimmage, the possession games confirm this (5v2 and 4v4). The Coerver box exercise offers 17X more touches than a scrimmage.
The Second Session
Because we had 18 kids at this session, the practice plan was more focused on possession games, and so there was an unsurprising corresponding drop in the number of touches recorded...but it's still a pretty substantial number for a mere 90 minute session. With some stoppage time, here's the session's timeline and touches breakdown for Alex Kades:
- 5v.2 10 Minutes (27 passes)
- 2 Up, 1 Down 15 Minutes (2 touches)
- 3v.3v.3 Three Zone game 20 Minutes (124 touches/passes)
- 6v.6+6 Scrimmage 35 Minutes (148 touches/passes)
5v.2 offered 2.7 touches per minute (TPM), 2 Up, 1 Down was a little bit of an outlier, touches-wise...The three zone game gave Alex 6.2 TPM, and the final scrimmage (where each team was sitting out roughly every other game- 2 1/2 minutes) allowed for 4.22 TPM. That's pretty good for 22 minutes of actual playing time (we could revise the TPM upward due to the team rotation: 6.72 TPM when his team was on) though it's the overall training session that counts.
The Match Data
Now, the real meat of the issue, in player development terms, is what would this training session look like stacked up against a match. In 8v8 games, how many touches does a player get? Two clear distinctions must be drawn immediately. One, the game is only 60 minutes...but we really know it's actually only 20 minutes of live play when the ball is in our possession. Second, of course, the position we count for and the opponent will vary quite widely those answers, but as a proof-of-concept opener, any old game will do. At one of the Springboks' final matches last weekend, we had no subs, so it was the perfect chance to simply target one player and count her touches.
I started with Lucy Ulrich, who played right back and right mid. She had a tremendous first half, and saw quite a lot of the ball in a game that was open and fast, and ended up 4-4. This is a player who has taken the urging to attack the goal line when playing in wide positions, and dribble the ball behind the defensive group. In so doing, she turns the defenders toward their own goal (a lousy way to have to face to play defense...own goals become much more likely) and by dribbling the ball, gives her teammates time to run into the penalty area and get set to finish a pass/cross. To say Lucy is much improved in being aggressive in this situation is a massive understatement. She is essentially a new, and very effective, player both offensively and defensively. Fun to watch the changes.
Lucy, in her two roles, got 63 touches on the ball. Those touches, by way of definition, are opportunities to play the ball with control. A blocked shot, for example, isn't a "touch." But a pass to her feet that she simply misses is a touch because it was an opportunity where she ought to have been able to play the ball. The logic is simply that I wanted to tally the number of such opportunities, regardless of the outcome. It is safe, though not necessarily iron-clad, to say that she averaged 1 touch per minute of game time, or 6 touches per minute of the 'Boks in possession. That second number looks very good.
In the second half, Lucy was put in goal, so Mia Monheit fell in the crosshairs. She played center back, and center mid throughout the period, and I expected to see her have even more touches. In fact, she finished with 43. Which tells me that she's not finding the ball as much as I'd like a central player to do...and that our team doesn't look for the central players enough just yet. So that's useful information before we even consider the value to the individuals a match provides in terms of time on the ball. But it comes out to .71 touches per minute of match time, or a more palatable 4.3 touches per minute of the 'Boks in possession. While it might not have been Mia's best game, it does provide a sense of the range of numbers a match offers a given player.
Conclusion
While it can be said that any given training session offers a highly competitive TPM ratio, with technical-based sessions vastly outstripping matches, it really isn't the ratio that makes the difference. It's the volume. Because the game offers a good number of touches, it's only while the team is in possession...and it is very safe to say that at best a team will be in possession for only a third of a game. So for that hour, the TPM ratio is blown away by the same amount of time in a thoughtful training environment. If we average the two training sessions, it's around 450 touches in 90 minutes. If we compare that average to the highest of the match numbers (63), we see it would take over 7 games to get 1 session's worth of touches (450/63=7.14). That's nearly a whole season!
The raw numbers highlight the difference in volume: 322 touches in a session that featured no specific technical exercises/593 in a session that was highly technical. Compared to nearly an hour's drive each way, 60 minutes of match time, of which the players studied only took 43 & 63 touches, that TPM ration starts to look a bit wan. That's three hours of a Saturday spent for so few touches! (For those of you keeping score, three hours equals: .35 TPM for Lucy that day!) And I would further submit the players are never only accountable in a training session when they have the ball and are taking touches. A thoughtful session will involve "opposed practice" for much of the period, ensuring that every player is involved in defensive situations at a roughly equivalent rate, so the other half of the game is not neglected.
For sure, matches offer the best test of those skills and tactics learned in training...but like school, we needn't take a test a day or even a week; that would be counter-productive to actual learning. This is why we see the top youth academies in the world playing a mere 30 matches per calendar year. The approach of "if some is good, more is better" works about as well in youth soccer as it does in morphine use.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.