Quick Boys

Looking Ahead To 2013-14 

Coming out of the rather enjoyable GTT tournament at the terrific Lawrenceville School's facilities the Quick Boys squad began to emerge in a tangible way from the fog of the post-tryout season.

Without too much preamble, some notes from the weekend's experiment:

• Clearly, the size of the field is a significant factor.  All the boys will need to attend to their ability to play passes of 20 yards or more on the ground, and drive balls 35 yards or so in the air.  While the boys looked to play many good passes over the weekend, far too many were left short, and a substantial number of those turned into the counter attacks which doomed our results.
• Defending was good in many ways.  Mainly, while we did concede far more than we'd like, given that the worst break downs came on set pieces and counters, the team defending was pretty good.  Any time a team tried to pass or dribble through the side, they found three or more QBs in close proximity.   As the back four become more adept at snuffing out counters, this bodes well for the team.
• The weekend provided confirmation that the group we have contains several solid fullback options, all of whom have the ability to play high up the field and contribute offensively.  More on this in a bit...
• Our wingers played well, and attacked with determination.  When they don't have the ball, however, we'll need to see harder running, more determined running.  More on this in a bit...
• The holding midfielders linked the team nicely, but found the bigger and faster opponents very difficult to manage when seeking space (time) to play passes.  They need to use the lateral pass to stretch out the defense in order to find the space necessary to play more attacking balls...longer, forward passes require more time to prepare, more time to find the target, and more time to evaluate the positions of the defenders.
• We're not a big team.  You may have noticed.  Defending wide areas effectively will be a key for this group.  If a team is swinging in cross after cross, we'll struggle.  
• The team can effectively (and with no real effort at refining the strategy in training...yet) hold a high back line, while simultaneously defending in a low pressure fashion.  More on this in a bit.

Non-QB Items Of Importance

While the club season may have wound down, I'm getting questions about what to do with the summer months.  I again urge those who pay significant amounts of money to play club ball (LMSC or any other club program!) to do the sensible thing and add some value to the investments of gear, camps, coaching, travel, etc. on the cheap.  Plop the kid down in front of the summer slate of games: Confederations Cup/ U20 World Cup or the MLS, US Open Cup, the Gold Cup (last chance saloon for the guys trying to make the USMNT roster for Brazil '14) or the summer friendlies featuring European teams travelling to the US.  I particularly like the U20 tournament as it is accessible...it's not the pantheon of active players...it's the kids hoping to make a living playing the game.  Many don't, so there's food for thought when marvelling at the abilities of these guys who won't have visible careers.  And remember that all these games (mostly) are available for weeks after the fact via ESPN3...

A couple tips...

1. Watch the games whether junior joins you or not...make it clear that the game is something you value and the players people you admire.  
2. When junior joins you, don't coach...just enjoy the game.  The osmotic learning process is cranking away, and even a sullen pre-teen is absorbing a remarkable amount just watching.  
3. If a player catches the eye...hunt them down on Youtube and see their top plays together.
4. Play a little dumb and ask questions- why did the attacker run there, the defense hold a line at a given point, what patterns are playing out in a game & what does that say about how a team wants the game to go....even if the kid is full of BS, respect his effort to be a student of the game, and see if he can articulate what he knows, even if it's not quite on the money.  Give a player room to be an expert, to teach the game a little and apply whatever he knows to the matches he watches.

About Those Outside Backs

Here's a great article by Michael Cox, touting the value of outside backs who can get forward.  While U13s can't do what Marcelo, or Carlos or Zambrotta do/did, they can certainly aspire to that quality.  Difficult to keep track of, fullbacks who surge forward cause all sorts of havoc (See: Baines, Leighton) and the Quick Boys have the personnel to emulate some of what the big boys do.

The trick we'll have, as a keen reader of Cox's article will note, is that we don't play international-style football.  He notes that the two games per week format of most major international tournaments requires the players to play more slowly and with less high pressure defending makes the outside back all the more important.  Of course, players like Baines, Lahm, and young Ben Davies at Swansea all make huge impacts in the more frenetic domestic leagues, so to some extent the  QBs should be able to include the wide defenders in offensive situations.

Furthermore, as we consider the central forward, the wingers and the attacking center mid (ACM), it's pretty clear they must help get the backs involved.  Here's an article that supports this notion, and underscores the need for a team that wishes to play possession-oriented football to have attackers who don't stink at keeping possession.  The author is an analytics freak, and often has some really insightful stuff to offer.  His points show that while scoring goals is crucial for an attacker, when they decide not to go to goal, they cannot undervalue the possession.  His article doesn't take into account profligate attackers who take shots that have no chance of going in, lose the dribble in improbable situations (think Jermaine Defoe and Luis Suarez, respectively) but it seems reasonable that those possessions which end in something other than a pass but still give possession away too cheaply would count the same.

Point being, if the forwards lose the ball, those wing backs have to stay home and put out the fires.  Likewise, they'll be discouraged from venturing forward if the attacker ahead of them either ignores them or fails to hit a decent pass.

And The Wingers?

If they don't run hard, two things don't happen: they don't get the ball in the most dangerous fashion, and, two, the wing backs can't get involved nearly as easily.  Super-basic, but here is why running hard helps those outside backs:

Your garden variety 4-4-2 set up against our dashing 4-3-3.  The problem the team has to resolve is how to bend the two banks of four defenders sufficiently to get in behind them.  With only a front four, the team has to manipulate the defense, and add players from the back of the team to create 2v1 and 3v2 type situations, the backbone of good attacking.





Here the right holding mid has the ball (dashed outer blue line) and the right winger makes a diagonal run toward the center of the defense.  If the left back in black doesn't follow, of course the ball is played to the winger!  But if the winger is well-marked, the outside back now has good space to run into.  The left mid for the black team may track the fullback, but he may also be needed to pressure the holding mid with the ball (as the two black center mids are dealing with the ACM and the other holder).  Essentially, the left mid and left back are in a 3v2 down that flank.  Sweet.


The space here is great for the right back...plus, if he gets the ball and is in behind the left mid, he's now got up to four runners heading into the 18 to pick out when he decides to cross.  It's the running that makes it possible.  As simple as it sounds, it has to be convincing running, the timing has to be accurate so the left back is nervous enough to actually mark the winger.  The midfielders and backs for the blue team have to be able to keep the ball long enough to set the play up well.

One last thought on wingers running...even when they don't run particularly convincingly, they are out of position defensively when the turnover occurs.  Running hard makes it more likely a player will get the ball, and it won't cost the team anything when we lose the ball as they'll be out of position either way.  May as well make the most convincing run possible (think Neymar's goal against Spain...if he doesn't run hard into an offside position, the Spanish defense would mark him.  That he ran hard and offside tempts the defenders into presuming he's ineligible to receive the ball so when he steps back into an ONside position, no one is near him).  A well-organized team will know to cover for wingers who make runs (any player who makes a good attacking run, for that matter) and so long as that player hustles to help defensively, it'll work out often enough.

Neymar's goal:

OK, Easy...Now About The Defending?

Also pretty simple.  U13s are reckless, overly aggressive and technically immature.  So are the 20-somethings who play the top level of the game, too, but that's another post.  At any rate, here's a schematic of what our defense would look like ideally when the ball is lost in the opponent's half with enough time (dead ball, turnover deep in the half, ball in the GK's hands, etc.) for the team to drop back to mid-field.  In so doing, we make the team compact and impossible to dribble through.  We also make it very tough for any team that has results-hunted for the previous 12 years to pass through us (always remember that results at the youth level come at the expense of technical development...ALWAYS).  So what does such a team have left to throw at us?  The long ball.  So we trust our speedy defenders, Henry's ability to anticipate long balls and get off his line effectively, and his excellent passing ability.  

The trapezoid is the space that Henry has to cover...no mean feat.  But, if the ball falls short, and the backs get there first, we'll be happy to play back to Henry's feet and begin to build from him.  By holding a high line (the red dashed line) the back four stop the attackers from being able to run forward with momentum.  They have to start the forward movement with perfect timing (the offside law helps us here) and from a standstill, essentially.  Tough to do.  Here's Man U a year ago doing the same basic thing:

9 of 11 United players are within a space that is
less than 20 yards tall, and maybe 30 yards wide

A More Reasonable Goal:

Here's a team that did at the college level what few others have been able to pull off.  Is Caleb Porter a genius?  Did he just get the only 18 guys in the nation who could play this way?  Or, does it just take good players, thoughtful coaching and some guts to pay the price to learn to play this way?  At any rate, it got Porter a gig with the U23 MNT (which ended on a sour note when they failed to qualify for the Olympics) and, following that, the Portland Timbers job- where he's in the middle of reeling off 15 straight undefeated.  Umm...you can't do that in pro soccer.  Well, Bayern did win 14 in a row at one point this year...