Defending

One long pass and the opposition are suddenly straight through and score. It drives football coaches mad.

His Manager, Roberto Martinez calls him "one of the best ball-playing centre-halves in Europe. But is he the answer for Chelsea? Let's look at the evidence and facts.

The following article demonstrates coaching defensive tactics that could be employed by a team that are winning a match and want to get players behind the ball and force the opposition to play through them. Or by a team that are facing opposition who are better than they are. They are not the only defensive tactics that can be used by a team. A team would generally use more than one defensive tactic.

Use this multi goal game to coach your players to develop and improve quick passing, support, switch play and dribbling skills. It is a conditioned game, that is fast moving, intense, challenging and competitive.

We have recently seen Chelsea do an outstanding defensive job on both Liverpool and Atlético Madrid and Crystal Palace, under Tony Pulis have built their impressive run of form on the basis of a solid and organised defence.

In football, one of the biggest dangers is on the turnover of the ball that happens when the attacking team lose the ball and have committed players forward. They are open to a quick counter attack and many goals are scored from this transition of attacking to then having to defend a counter attack. The problem for the defending team is that they are now outnumbered, disorganised and have lots of space behind them, which is difficult to defend. This is the football training subject of a question from one of our coaches:

I am often asked how coaches can effectively coach a team. Many coaches can put on practices and drills to improve players’ techniques and skills, but coaching a team to work together to achieve a specific team objective can be difficult and intimidating for many coaches. In this blog, we look at the topic of coaching a team to defend effectively as a team. In this example, we look at a UEFA B practical curriculum topic and play an 8 v 8 game. The principles and structure of defending shown here are equally applicable to coaching 4 v 4 games through to 11 v 11 games.

I recently received a question on a UEFA B coaching topic, one which is very relevant to the way football has evolved tactically. The question was how do you Coach a team to defend a counter attack.