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0:00 well hello coaches welcome back coach KW here second video in this 9v9 series if you missed my first video in 9b9 basically what I did is I did a survey
0:10 of a whole bunch of different 9v9 formations pretty common ones out there ways to play it more importantly ways not to play them but I said at the end
0:17 of that video I was going to spend a little extra attention on two slash3 that we ended up using and I find extremely useful on the field uh I've
0:27 had my first team doing 9v9 this year in the fall and we started with one in a transitional moment and after four games or so we switched to another but
0:36 importantly when we switched to this second one we made some changes as we looked at what was happening for some of our other teams in my town that were playing the same
0:46 formation and we had come up this year with our first real concrete 9v9 principles of play and we gave the coaches two options so you'll see what
0:53 those two options are and you'll see how we changed the second option the one that we moved to for my team um have way through the year because we got feedback
1:03 and also based on you know just observations we laun video of our games especially games that my team plays because I record them all but I also
1:10 talk to other coaches and so it's really important as coaches to get together and kind of talk about what's working and not working so that we can get better
1:18 for our kids right so let's take a look at the first transitional formation that we used and how it worked for us and then as we go along I'll kind of get
1:27 through this whole process of what we think the best formation is and hint there isn't one it's more of a system of play and that's if anything you get from
1:36 the end of this video I hope that by the time you get to the end of this that you will understand that it's not about the numbers on the page but it's how you
1:44 define the setup of the players and what you do with and without the ball that's the most important when you're coming up with a system of play so let's take a
1:52 look at this first one now okay here we are back at the Whiteboard hopefully you recognize our beloved 1231 from 7b7 so and when it comes to 7b7 I'm sorry you
2:02 can argue with me all day long I believe this is the one and only formation you should be playing because it teaches so many different things you can go back
2:09 and watch a bunch of other videos on that if you want to argue with me in the comments you can't convince me I'm sorry however when we move to 9b9 especially
2:18 if you don't have a lot of time in a preseason or like in my case I had to run preseason for all the fifth grade boys in my town so I didn't have my team
2:28 specifically one of the op that you could do with this is to Simply take the new two Defenders and drop them in behind your existing defenders in 7v7 and now you have
2:41 basically a 2231 and the reason why we suggested this to our teams was a it's pretty natural when you don't have these two players in 7v7 these two players
2:52 naturally moved with the play in the back and that's exactly what we want them to do as midfielders in this formation and now we've got two center
3:00 backs behind them that were going to do the same thing so what this introduced in a kind of sneaky way was the double pivot these two players became the
3:08 double pivot as the ball was on this side of the field and the players slid over just they would in 7v7 what you'd end up with was this strong defensive
3:18 back three with this player standing a little bit in front of them while you had your width and your play went along as your kids were used to when the ball
3:26 moved to this side of the field these players naturally 7v7 would do this motion the double pivot these center backs would do the same thing that they were used to doing
3:37 in 77 they're just behind this line same thing back three support around the ball with all that and that was very successful for uh my team and a few
3:47 others who tried this because it was familiar if the team played 7v7 in grades three and four and they stepped onto the field it was a fairly easy
3:56 transition for them to move from point A to point B with this formation you can see it here in this graphic it's pretty straightforward right you've basically
4:04 dropped that four and five behind what used to be your 4 and fives now you call those two players sixes because they're holding midfielders you've got that
4:12 Central midfielder that eight and then you've got your 7eleven and your nine all around it so it kind of looks like a big giant star and again super familiar
4:20 with the kids they definitely can really plug into this if youve played your 231 successfully in U10 soccer and it's a great transition IAL moment what we
4:31 didn't love about this formation was that many times the first pivot would happen the two sixes would slide over one would go towards the ball one would
4:39 drop back what began to happen especially as you got closer to the goal that you were attacking is that when the ball went to the other side the pivot
4:48 didn't happen yeah I'll show you here just as an example so as the ball might progress its way to this way we'd get the pivot coming across like this so now
4:58 this player was in alignment with the back two to make this so here are the two attackers from the opposing team kind of hanging out near the halfway
5:06 line as it plays on here if the ball would switch around what would happen is instead of the pivot happening like this this player would just kind of go like
5:15 this and the next thing you know your field started to kind of look like this and it did two different things it made it really difficult to
5:23 get through this basically block of sometimes four five six players and also it left these players kind of hanging out here One V one with these two
5:33 Strikers because now this pivot had gone too far so if the ball turned over and it was just booted up now it's a foot race and now it's 2v2 in the back with
5:42 no real support which is not what it's not ideal it's not what you want in a defensive situation you always want to have one extra player if you can for
5:50 that cover we look at a few Clips here you can see if it wasn't for the speed and the ability of some of the kids that I had on my team being good players in
5:59 the back there are a number of times where they could have been one-on-one towards goal towards my keeper and all they had to do is beat one person um and
6:06 so we knew that but when we start to play better teams this could be a liability and so we thought perhaps we need the change much of the time our
6:16 players did a great job with this with the pivot but as the ball got here and as games went along we saw more and more this crowding across the top of the box
6:26 no depth to the attack and one of the worst things you could is have this separation between your lines is my defensive line my Midfield line is gone
6:35 and everybody's on the front having that disconnect between the lines can spell real danger because it gives lots of space for the opposition team to get balls into especially on the
6:45 Counterattack so what did we do well the other formation we told our coaches that could be usable for them was the 323 and I'll show this to you right now here's
6:57 the diagram for the 323 it's pretty simple to understand um what was interesting for us and I'll show you on the whiteboard in a second is the
7:05 instructions we gave to our coaches we were very much focused before the season started about that Midfield triangle and one of the reasons for that and having
7:14 that double pivot as be the central tenant of what we're doing is what our town does at 11v 11 we play a 42 31 and that two in front of the back line of
7:23 four is the double pivot and we were focused on how can we train those kids to be ready for that as time went forward so that Midfield triangle of the
7:32 three we approached a little bit differently I'll show you on the Whiteboard so here we have the 32 three in in the attacking phase so we're going
7:40 this way right and so we were so focused on this triangle Ming maintaining to be intact with the double pivot sliding around to attack and also providing a back four almost a screener
7:54 in front that our instructions to our coacho was to treat this nine as basically a false 9 without actually calling it out to maintain that triangle so that they withdrawn from going
8:06 forward and then we instructed play to look for diagonal runs in from the wide areas playing balls in as the primary mean of attack and while that is a sound
8:18 principle especially if you're looking to be defensively responsible maybe it's late in the game whatever else the struggles were twofold one was just having your players have the discipline
8:29 to do that and make those passes in but perhaps the more practical reason is if you tell a kid that they're the striker they're the nine fifth and sixth grade
8:38 boy or girl they have one idea and one idea only and that is they want to get towards the goal as fast as they can because their job is to score goals
8:45 right nobody wants to be you know Philip coutinho from Liverpool playing in here everybody wants to be the earling Highland of Man City going straight forwards the goal that's what a number
8:54 nine a striker does and so our coaches had some difficulty getting our players honestly naturally to follow those instructions so what we did is we took a
9:06 look at that feedback as well as looked at some of the videos of what we were seeing against teams we were playing when it came time to try it with our
9:14 team so here's that 323 and that sort of generic form that you would see all over the place that we talked about this isn't how we decided to attack what we
9:24 did was this so what we did was this we took that Center quote unquote Center back and we turned them into a six and when we did that we basically said to
9:35 them when we have the ball you're going to step forward from the two center backs so now that relationship is very much like it was in 7v7 with the two
9:44 center backs and the eight we're now just calling this player a six because it's a bigger field and they're not getting as far forward they're more defensive minded we've now taken the
9:52 importance away from the triangle we had which was the nine and the two eights in front of them and we flipped it on its head so so if we flip back to this we
10:01 were really focused on the 28s and the nine being that triangle and the double pivot being there and what we've done instead is we flipped it around and now
10:09 the important triangle is the six and the 28s in front of it so now what we've done is we've pushed those players forward a little bit we've spread them
10:18 out we maintain our width we have our nine who's a true Striker up ahead those two eights now fill in on either side to give ourselves lots of width we have
10:28 this really strong diamond in the middle between the striker at the 28 and the six we still have a really strong triangle in the back for defense but
10:36 when we have the ball we now have a ton of options look at all the angles of support that happened between this formation there's lots of places that
10:43 players can go we'll take a look at the whiteboard in a second what we also did with it but we simply just flipped that triangle around in the middle between
10:51 the focus being the nine and the 28s now being the six and the 28s and the other thing this did is it makes that six kind of like the quarterback of the Team
10:59 every team has a couple of players that just have that ability to see the field have a knack for receiving the ball knowing where the danger is playing
11:09 passes this is tailor made for a player like this it really really helps develop a player like that which is super important as you go up and what we found
11:18 is because we had somebody back there we had so many options as we look at some of these video clips you can see how that kind of just changed the shape of
11:27 the attack and gave us so much width and depth we were no longer piling up on top of the 18 we kept that shape we were wider and deeper which forced other
11:38 teams to not just stand in the line across the top of the box they had to come out they had to spread out and they gave us so much more opportunity to move
11:45 the ball around and through in this formation because we shift around if the ball is over one side even that Center back that's in the back had lots of
11:55 passes that came from the Winger when they got in trouble they were all part of the play so we had lots of options to be able to move that ball around if we
12:03 couldn't go forward and we needed to turn around it just gave us that stability then when it was time to defend it kind of morphed into a 341
12:13 which if you remember in that first video I kind of mentioned briefly and said we're going to come back to it because what this basically did was very
12:20 much like the principles of Defending that I have in 7v7 is that the Wingers are just responsible for their wide Wingers so they basically Play 1 V one
12:28 the ENT entire time out there and if you look at the middle of the field all the way to the striker you've got a triangle that basically Force play to one side or
12:37 the other so usually it was one Winger that was involved in defending while the other Winger didn't have to track back as far they kind of just kept an eye on
12:45 their opposite Winger to make sure they didn't sneak in On The Backs side and more importantly because we had all those numbers in the middle and we had
12:52 forced the play to one side when we won the ball it was a very easy transition so many times that wide opposite weak side wing or the striker would be wide
13:01 open to reive a ball after we won it in the middle and could turn around and go away the other piece when we were on the tack that was so important and was so
13:10 evident is because we had so many numbers around the ball because we were playing between our players in all these spaces is that if we lost the ball the
13:18 counter press was incredibly effective it clogged the middle we had lots of players around the ball to try and attack that if they made a pass or two
13:26 it ended up going outside which is exactly where we wanted them anyway and because of that shape that wedge shape it drove them into the sideline it
13:33 limited their ability to get the ball back into the middle because that's where the numbers were and we could usually win that ball back and come back
13:40 the other way the other important piece that I wanted to show over here was if you go way back in some of my videos you'll find my video on dividing up the
13:48 field ways for coaches to think about the field you may not explain it necessarily to your players but I feel it's an important concept for you Soccer
13:55 Coaches to get to understand because it's drives so much of what the modern game does especially in the attacking and defending sense and that is in this
14:04 formation the way that it gets shaped up is we end up with players in all five of the vertical channels the wide channels the center channel and the two half
14:13 spaces are occupied by those two eights and those half spaces as you do any research on any sort of soccer those half spaces are so valuable because
14:23 they're they're in between that's the whole point of a half space they're in between the space a fullback or a center back might take up in a defensive
14:31 position and it makes them make a choice these center backs are around the striker if a player comes into this half space they have to make a decision am I
14:38 coming out here or am I staying with this player and that's what you want is you want them to be in two minds you want them to have to decide this or that
14:47 and that's kind of the whole point of attacking soccer right is getting to think this or that if they step out it gives this player space to operate or
14:54 perhaps another player to step in if they stay in now this player has a free operation through that space and having players move in and out of channels into
15:05 and out of the half space does the same thing perhaps this player has a wide marker they cut in and come this way and this player overlaps and goes this way
15:14 this player again is stuck in to having to make a choice it's all about the simple tenants of attacking football we've now made a 2v one out of this
15:22 situation and have to make this player make a very difficult Choice by maintaining that with if this player all cheated over it gave room for these players to come around the back so that
15:32 line across the top of the box didn't exist anymore if we were playing centrally and they did kind of push into the middle then we had all sorts of room
15:40 to be able to play this ball out and get out into the wide areas and again stretch those teams out so it really gave us sort of the best of all worlds
15:50 when we had the ball with this player really kind of providing that overview they could get the ball back and find this player or this player because this
15:59 pass for a 9v9 player is not that difficult to do fifth or sixth grader can make that pass reasonably well in most conditions so if they didn't play
16:08 the short ball they could get that ball out quickly and really unbalance a team effectively so I hope you found this video useful on number fronts one you
16:19 know having the awareness as a coach to see something not working as well perhaps as it should and making Corrections on the Fly hopefully you've also come to the conclusion that a
16:30 formation is just a starting point it's just a set of numbers but what's important is your principles of play what do you do with and without the ball
16:37 is what counts is this a 323 is this a 341 is this a 2131 is this a 25 one it doesn't really matter the point is you have a clear
16:51 sense of what to do when you have the ball and what you want to do and what your players should do and when you don't have the ball the same things
16:59 but I think you'll see that at least in the 9v9 game if you can morph yourself into that last 323 whatever you want to call that it
17:08 really does give you that balance of attack and defense so that when you go forward you've got a strong presence you have lots of players and you can possess
17:15 the ball you can maintain possession you can win it back and when you lose the ball you've got that strong solidity in the middle of the field to push play to
17:23 the outside keep play there with the numbers that you have in the shape and have an outlet when you win the ball I hope you enjoyed this video I hope it
17:30 was helpful I have more 9v9 content that I want to put together and bring out there so stay tuned share like subscribe it really helps the channel has made a
17:39 huge jump in the last oh month or so really thanks to all of you we're getting close to that thousand subscriber limit that I'd love to celebrate so until next time thank you
17:50 so much we'll see you on the field bye now e
