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0:00 Well, hello coaches, welcome back. Coach K W here. Hope you're all well. We're back in our 7v7 series. If you missed the first few on playing out from the
0:08 back, uh please go back and watch that cuz now we're going to deal with the fact of what's next. What do we do once we've got that ball played out of the
0:15 back? Well, we're now into the attack phase. And so, we're going to look at three attacking principles that really is what should be a focus in 7v7 for the
0:24 next 2 years and one tactical principle that goes along with all that to make them much more successful. So, if you haven't hit the subscribe, like, and
0:32 share, if you will, about 30% of you are subscribed, which means 70% of you are not. So, it would mean the world to me if you would hit that subscribe button.
0:40 It really helps me out. So, let's get into the video and look at some graphics and then some real world game footage.
0:46 Let's go. Okay, we've got our graphic board up here. You can see our our 2-3-1, our 1-2-3-1. We just played out of the back. Our seven has the ball and
0:56 we're playing against this green team going forward. And the first main tactical principle that's going to make all the other technical things we're about to talk about is using the width
1:06 of the field. So many games I referee or watch, the entire game is practically played within the width of the center circle or maybe the width of the 18. And
1:15 if the ball goes out wide, it tends to be by accident and the whole team slides over there. I got a little video footage here. You can see this girls game week.
1:23 They're practically all within the center of the circle. Never mind the width of the center of the circle. Um and that really difficult. The 7v7 field, you can stack players in front of
1:34 the net, in front of the box, and it's almost impossible to get a ball through.
1:37 It's almost like creating a fence. If you don't use the wide areas, you'll never stretch the teams out. So, while we can talk about half spaces and
1:45 everything else in terms of thinking about session design with 7v7s, it's sufficient really with your players to get them to understand the central channel and then the two wide channels
1:55 as marked by the edges of the 18 with imaginary lines. Now, my trick, I've told you before, you need to make a solid line to help your players use that. 100-ft ropes from
2:06 the Home Center is your friend, is an easy way to make a solid line to make these field markings really stand out for your players and get them to use the
2:16 width of the field. Using the width of the field is going to help you unlock these three technical things that you can work with your teams over and over
2:22 again in the next 3 years for attacking principles of play. So, if we play this forward, what we tend to see happen is everybody tends to get into the center,
2:31 including the ball carrier, and the next thing you know, you've got almost all of 12 of the outfield players stacked in the front of the box, no room to go, the
2:40 ball can't go anywhere, you can't make any plays. If you try to attack, you just run into a wall after wall of players. It's a really difficult
2:48 situation and your team tends to want to go, as we talked about, it's about psychological safety, they go into the middle of the field for whatever reason,
2:57 and now everything bogs down. So, instead, we've got the defense in the same shape here, but now as we play this forward a little bit, now my player on the ball, the seven on
3:08 the ball in the wide area, they're staying outside in the wide channel.
3:12 Now, what does this do? It forces the defense to react and when they react, that means players have to come out to the ball. And as soon as that happens,
3:21 you can see how much space is opened up in the middle of the field. So, just the simple act of using the width of the field stretches teams out and when that
3:32 happens, it creates more space in the middle for you to provide more options and actions with that ball. No longer is there a wall at the top of the box
3:41 blocking your way. Now, there are holes in that defense that you can try to exploit. With this player here, now they have lots of options to try and get
3:49 inside, whether they dribble with it, whether they pass with it, whether they play backwards, which we're going to look at all those different things. But now, we have room to maneuver inside the
3:59 middle of the field because we've used the width to stretch out the defenses.
4:02 So, using the width is going to unlock these next three technical things that you can work with your teams on the principles of attack. So, the first and
4:12 most basic one of these, of course, is the 1v1. Something you should be doing with your teams all the time in your practices, getting your players used to
4:19 taking players on 1v1 because it's such an effective tool and it's something that they have to learn early. There have been studies shown that if players don't learn and get the confidence to
4:29 take on players 1v1, they have a very difficult time then bringing that skill on board as they get older. It's almost like language acquisition where it's easier when you're younger. For some
4:39 reason, this skill, they found through studies, is easier to do. 1v1s you could do all the time in practice in so many different ways and so many different
4:47 drills. It's so important. But 1v1s, what happens with 1v1s is 1v1s when they're successful, they tend to turn into 2v1s a lot of time. So, 2v1s are
4:58 another skill that could be worked on here. And again, in your exercises or your drills or your sessions, 2v2 and 3v3 are other ways to do this. So, if we
5:08 look at this situation here, if my wide player with the ball beats his player in front of him, that immediately now turns the next play into a 2v1 in front of them. And that's the
5:21 whole point of 1v1s and 2v1s. You're trying to isolate one of the defenders, then play around them, and then find the next defensive player to isolate now
5:30 that you have numbers up. So, 1v1, 2v1s, 2v2s, even 3v2s and 3v3s, any of those combinations of play are really an important part of the game at this age
5:42 to develop. The concept of using the width to stretch out teams so that you have room to play around a defensive player is part and parcel of what you
5:51 need to do here because trying to do a 1v1 in a compacted area like we saw earlier just means usually when you beat the first person, the ball is moved
5:59 ahead into that next line of people that are standing right behind them and you lose the ball. The second area of play that we want to look at at this age is
6:09 the up, back, and through or third man run. But you can see here in this situation, we're utilizing three players. Although the up, back, and through can be used with two players.
6:19 Um and I'll talk about that in a second.
6:21 But what we're looking for here is at this point, this player decides they can't go forward anymore. And so, what did they do is they played backwards.
6:29 One of the key concepts that I like to say is you play backwards to go forwards and this is the start of that idea with your teams. So many teams that you wait,
6:37 that it's unidirectional even at U10.
6:39 The ball goes in one direction until it's either out of bounds, in the goal, or lost and then it turns around and goes in one direction the other way. You
6:46 need to start get your team to understand if they get to a point where they can't go forward and the easiest pass is backwards, then make the
6:52 backwards pass. The backwards pass here can turn into the up, back, and through.
6:56 And so, from here, if we consider this, the ball is gone up when this player got the ball on the lap. When they have pressure coming, when the ball comes
7:05 back here, the natural inclination of all the players on the field, especially defensive time, is to watch the ball and/or to chase the ball. Now, what you've noticed here is there's a player
7:16 off to the right that's making a run that's completely away from the ball.
7:19 That's the third man run of the up, back, and through. And many times in this situation, that player is completely ignored. The space from the action of the ball going up and back on
7:30 the other side has drawn the defense towards it cuz remember, the ball is like a magnet. Everybody gets drawn that way. That player tends to be running
7:37 into empty space and it's super successful. Now, you can do an up, back, and through with two players. When this player plays the ball back, they could
7:46 at this point decide to take a step and go beyond their player cuz a lot of times this green player is going to chase the ball. And so, this
7:53 player just return in the ball back to this player either by playing it over the top or playing it in a different angle so it goes in behind, that is also
8:00 an up, back, and through. But at this age, this is a great place to start to work on this. I will tell you in practice, I might see this attempted
8:09 three to five times in a season and that's okay. You're putting the seeds in for this attacking process because it is an important way to A, get the whole team involved, play
8:20 backwards to go get forward. But also, as you get older and you get to 9v9 and 11v11, you see this play all the time.
8:26 You see it all the time on TV if you're watching a pro game. So, up, back, and through is the second tactical component that you can work on
8:33 as the attacking principle in your play.
8:35 Now, if I play this forward, you're going to see when that ball goes through, we're going to see the third one that we talk about here. And that is
8:41 the ball going out wide and then playing balls from out wide, crosses into the middle to try and score. This is an incredibly effective technique for, again, two reasons. One, you're using
8:53 the width and once you use the width, you stretch defenses. And then two, once you've stretched defenses, you're making space for your attackers to run into to
9:02 hopefully get onto that ball that comes across. Now, the important part we want to talk about, the kind of bonus part, if you will, is you have to make a
9:11 distinction between crosses from the right and the crosses on the left at this age. Most of us are not blessed with left-footed players and the weak foot, while we want them to develop it,
9:20 let's be realistic. It's not going to be there this early on. So, to expect crosses from the left to look like crosses from the right is kind of folly.
9:28 So, here you can see, players on the right can get much further closer to the goal line and be able to play that ball either straight across or slightly
9:36 backwards across the area for a cross because they can get their right foot around that ball and put that ball in.
9:44 On the left side, because it's their weak foot, you're not going to see that that often. So, this trajectory is different. We have to realize that, right? We have to be recognizing the
9:53 fact that these players are still learning, they're still young. So, it's going to look different. So, from the right, you're going to train this in one direction. But, on the left, more than
10:02 likely, they're going to want to come on to their right foot. So, they're going to want to cut in is the phrase here.
10:07 They're going to come parallel to the goal line, and you can see the angle of that ball is now vastly different. It's like a 30° angle to the back post. And
10:16 so, this is again something you can train with your team to say, "Hey, when we make it down the left side, you now have permission to cut in on to the
10:25 right, come parallel to the goal line, and try and swing that ball to the back post where either there's a rebound or your far winger who has kept their width
10:34 is now coming in through the side of the box has an easy tap-in at the back post.
10:38 I see it a lot, and if it's done well, it's very effective cuz it plays the ball in behind the defense. Your player runs on to it to so that they're onside,
10:48 and the ball's in the back of the net.
10:50 So, again, there's your three different ways to deal with how we want to play here. 1v1, 2v1, up back and through, and then wing play crosses into the box, making that
11:02 recognition that crosses from the right and crosses from the left look different. I actually have a drill in the older video series of just this concept of playing from the left and the
11:10 right where I literally like paint the runway lines of where the ball is going to go, where the runs are going to go, all those sort of things.
11:17 One of my favorite stories from U10 is we did this drill. The next day we had a game. We had about 15 wide crosses. We scored seven goals from the wide areas.
11:26 And after the game, the kids were so excited. They literally were jumping up and down saying, "This is exactly what we did in practice." Which A made me
11:33 happy and B cracked me up cuz isn't that the whole idea of everything we do in practice we should be doing in the games? But, they really latched on to
11:40 it. They really saw it, and they felt it, and they were so excited about it because it was successful because again it's using those principles of maybe
11:46 using the 1v1 to get open into the wide area, and then cutting in either from the right getting deep or cutting in on the left getting that ball in. We worked
11:54 on who's running where to make those runs to tap the ball in into space. And it worked out fantastic. So, let's take a look at a couple of live video clips
12:02 before we wrap up. Okay, in this video clip, you can see here's a player on the right side. The ball's going to come back. We're going to play backwards cuz we're tight. Now,
12:10 watch how this cross comes. It's coming across the back post. It gets deflected, but who scores is my wide winger. The wide They were the widest player on the
12:18 field. Maybe not as wide as I wanted them to be, but you could see they are that ball that comes from the left side across the field has that angle we just
12:26 talked about. In this example here, you're going to see as the play comes down the left, how spreading out pulls apart a defense. If we stop this right
12:34 here, we can see here, here's the ball with my player that's wide. The other team has five players of their outfield on this side of the field where I have a
12:43 player here, a player here, and a player here that's on onside. This player just can't get the ball over to him, but look at how much it has stretched and pulled that
12:53 team apart. It's a third grade team in the spring of their first season. You can see how using the width here opens that defense up. If we're down the
13:02 middle, you'll see all five or six of that outfield team is all in the middle, and there's no place to play.
13:07 You can see here in this example, we start out wide from a corner kick, but then it all collapses into the middle.
13:12 Look how many bodies and legs are in the middle of the field here. There's almost no place to go, and there's no relief valve because we're all within the width
13:19 of the penalty area or even smaller, which would have made it incredibly hard to get that ball on frame. And lastly, we got another here. We start out pretty
13:28 narrow, but we then get our shape, and we move out. Now, you can see this player is out wide. He's standing wide, and the other team is incredibly
13:34 reluctant to come across. It's the wide winger from the other side of the field that picks that ball up and puts it in the back of the net. That was a great
13:41 finish, right? Again, third grade, but you can see this player is so reluctant to come out of the box and challenge this player. And they're not that wide,
13:49 but again, right side of the field, we're going to play that ball across the top of the six.
13:55 Right? It goes backwards, but this player, you can see a player pops back out. He's the wide winger. He's out wide, and he just chips that ball in the
14:03 net. A great finish, but again, an example of playing out wide from the right side and how that cross gets across. And by stretching those players out, it gave that player a little bit
14:13 more room. So, coaches, I hope you can see that once again, I'm really a strong proponent of marrying the technical with the tactical, right? We can all work on
14:22 these skills, the 1v1s, the 2v1s, 2v2s.
14:25 We can do all that, and they can work those all over the field. But, to make them more effective in a team environment, you need to have space. You
14:33 need to find the space, and the best way in 7v7 is to utilize that whole width of the field. And I hope I showed you in this video how using those wide channels
14:42 makes teams who naturally want to congregate in the middle have to stretch out. And as soon as they stretch out, you have all the room you need to be
14:50 successful with your 1v1s, your 2v1s, your 2v2s, your up backs and throughs, playing from the wide area, the crossing. Um those four things should take you that whole 2-year period with
15:01 your 7v7 players. Those are only concepts, honestly, that you really need to work on at this age over and over again because it's going to translate as
15:09 they go through their stages, 9v9, 11v11. So, I hope you found this useful.
15:14 Get down in the comments if you have any questions or have any thoughts of other things you might want to do. And until next time, we'll see you real soon on
15:20 the fields. Bye-bye.
