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Soccer Newsletter150 Welcome to the Soccer Newsletter. Today’s topic is “all for one or none at all”. The 11th week of the Full Season Training Sessions are now online. To learn more about this, go to http://finesoccer.com/full_season.htm Also, if you haven’t done so already, please take a moment to participate in the latest online survey at http://finesoccer.com/survey.htm One of the mistakes that many teams seem to make is one or two players see an opportunity defensively to play high pressure an opponent so they go and the rest of the team stays backs and low pressures. When this happens, the defense gets too spread out which allows the opponent plenty of space to work with. First let’s look at what high pressure and low pressure are. High pressure defense is when the whole team steps up and one player (or more) pressures the ball and the others try to take away all of the passing options. The key to a high-pressure defense is to compress the field as much as possible and taking away the options for the player with the ball. By taking away the players time and space, the defense is adding a lot of pressure to the attacking team. Low pressure is when the defense falls back far so, while the player with the ball usually has time and space to work with around her, she doesn’t have any space to play the ball into in front of her. In both high pressure and low pressure defense, the defending team is trying to take space away from the attacking team to play with, one big difference is whether the space the defense is trying to take away is in the attacking or defending half of the field (high pressure is more likely to be applied in the attacking half of the field and low pressure will occur more in the defensive half of the field. This newsletter is not about whether high pressure or low pressure is better (because it completely depends upon personnel) but rather to emphasize the importance of the whole team doing the same thing. If the two forwards on a team decide to high pressure the four backs on the opposing team, the backs have a large numerical advantage and will be able to get out of this pressure quite easily IF the midfielders from the defending team don’t step up as well to take away the space. If the midfielders and backs step up with the forwards, then the space has been taken away for the four backs to play into. As a general rule, the only time high-pressure defense is successful is when the whole team goes together. If only a couple of player’s high pressure and the rest stay in low pressure, it’s doomed for failure. Either they all play high pressure, or they all stay back but like in most everything else in team sports, it has to be all or none, anything else isn’t good enough Any questions, comments or suggestions should be sent to comments@finesoccer.com or they can be posted on the FineSoccer Forum at http://finesoccer.net To subscribe to any of the FineSoccer Newsletters, please go to http://finesoccer.com/subscrib.htm Have a great day! Lawrence |
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