Auto-generated captions — may contain the odd mishearing. Click a time to jump there.
hello welcome back this is coach Kevin soccer coach KW here and today we're on to episode two episode two we're going to go to the tactics board and we're
going to look at all the different sorts of formations that you could do at 7v7 and ultimately I'm going to show you the one that I think and a lot of people
think is the best one to use as it's the best going forward for your players as you migrate from 7v7 all the way to 11 V1 so without any
further delay let's go over to the tactics board and we go through it all all right so here we have the tactics board uh I made this out of a uh
old whiteboard I had you can make your own you can buy one um lots of different ways but I found this super handy bunch of magnets from Amazon and some
waterproof stickers with all the numbers on it so we're going to take a look at the different formations that you may run AC cross and then we'll get to the
one that I think is the best one to use so the first one that we're going to look at here is very common in town soccer I find and that's the 3 three or
the 1 three three because remember keeper is always there and now we have six field players so it's easy to coach in terms of it's easy for a lot of um
volunteer coaches to understand it's two lines of three makes sense you got players in the middle you got a nice strong defensive block you got two lines
of three so if you're nice and compact it's hard to play through the middle here but it's got a number of weaknesses first of which is it doesn't offer you a
lot of passing options the angles really are square or diagonal and there's not a lot of options there that ball comes out to here and you've got a player or two
defending it really limits what you can do with this ball moving forward because you don't have a ton of options the other issues it has is that it doesn't
train any Central midfielders right you've got a line of attackers and the line of Defenders and we'll get into that in a minute it's very shallow there's no
depth to this formation so it either gets pulled apart as your attackers go forward and your Defenders lag behind leaving huge gaps between here which is a no no that's definitely not what what
you want to have happen because if this ball gets turned over and they've left the player just hanging out waiting they've got all day to turn and decide
what to do against you what also happens is it becomes very narrow your players start to stay in the middle leaving out both sides of the pitch making it easy
for teams to go around you especially um as you drop back because they're all clumped into the middle and again it may be very difficult to get scored upon
when you play like this however you're not going to have a lot of fun you're not going to really be teaching anybody anything and the other team's going to
have a lot of opportunity to knock on your door and this is Youth Soccer mistakes happen it's going to happen ball is going to end up in the net we
off in the night your team's going to have a difficult time getting out because it's so shallow and because it becomes narrow if teams start to stretch
out to go after the ball then because there's no depth to this formation at all your team starts to get pulled apart because now if the kids start to chase
the ball over here you have these huge gaps that happen open up in the middle and it becomes VI very disruptive so that's the first one the
next one you may see as a town soccer coach is the same but turned on its side the 222 the one two22 they basically now yes we have
three lines of attack we have a defense we have a Midfield and a forward line but I think after we just talked about you can see some of the weaknesses here
again it leaves huge swats of the field open and uncovered and if the ball goes out wide and your players start to pull out here to get
it starts to open up huge gaps for the opposition to just put players into and run through you additionally if your players don't if your players do become
compact it just compounds the issue with the width now opposing teams have all this space to play around you and then as again as your teammate start team
starts to run after the ball that ball comes into the middle here and there's just no support going forward it's the same problem that should go forward with the
if you pull out wide to try to attack to get a ball into the box now you've only got one player in the middle your team is very
narrow you don't have any width if you one of your Midfield players decides to come up or maybe even both of them again now you're exposing this whole middle
area there's lots of room there's no cover here and it's difficult to attack because you have to throw So Many Bodies forward you leave yourself open all the
up so less common ones uh I've seen at the club level I've seen I've seen a which has some interesting quirks and again this may be a there may be a
reason the club coach may do this depending on the style of play their older teams play but for a town purpose the problem with this is you've got a
one Central Defender you got two midfields you got three lines which is great but what happens is these players are tasked with doing a lot of running
and if they have to do a lot of running here they're eight nine years old that they're not going to be able to keep up to the demands this is not like a pro
who trains to run up and down the field all day so what happens is is while you've got a nice width across here and you have basically almost like a sweeper
back here one thing is you play a lot of teams on side because remember in 7v7 offside is a thing and again these players are a little bit more
complicated for them if these guys are tasked with the attack then what do they do they pull in in do I pull out if these are meant to stay back these folks
go forward you've got three lines going forward and backwards which is great but now is this line supposed to drop off and now look we're in a 33 so it's a
little bit more complicated to coach I've even seen a one one3 one kind of an Avant God sort of method of doing that now you have four lines of attack or defense
which is interesting but again what happens a lot of times is these players end up flattening out and these players end up pushing forward and it doesn't
look like this and again these players are now tasked with getting up and down the field and this is supposed to be more like a number nine and a 10 a 10
and a nine supporting attacker and now you have that one that's common more common uh and more used is the 1321 or the Christmas tree if we flip this
upside down right that's the trunk that's the tip so it's got some advantages here where again it's defensively strong you've got a bank of three with two screening players in
front of them that really makes it difficult to play in the middle you've got a bit of width here um you've got three lines however the issue then
becomes in the wide areas how do you cover those usually the idea behind this is you're asking these players to come out wide but now you're back to the same
situation where they're being tasked with playing out wide running the up the field as we attack but then when the ball turns over you've got a single
defender back here and now it's all hands on deck trying to get back into some sort of defensive shape and a lot of times these players just are not
going to make it back like you've pushed all the way up you're trying to get a ball into the box so if you're looking for a defensive sort of situation you
might morph into this um late in a game perhaps so maybe um you know you're looking to play maybe you're playing a really a stream team that's much much
stronger than year for some reason and you need to like hold on and then hope that you can get maybe a Counterattack or two maybe have a really fast Striker
or something but that's the 1321 the formation that seems to be recommended the most and it's the one I'm going to recommend as well is this one and this is the one 123
one so we have three lines so we have a Midfield we have a forward and we have defensive line so we're teaching all three parts of the position we have two
center backs which is common once we get to 9v9 11 v11 there's usually a pairing of center backs sometimes there are three but this is the most common thing
is two center backs in the middle of the field we've got two wide players we'll call them wide mid midfielders in this case and we have a central midfielder
and a striker it's this Central midfielder that really is the key to this because what happens in this formation is you're now training all the different types of positions that you
will have once you get to 11v 111 you have center backs Center Defenders you've got wide players whether they're wide Midfield as attackers or in the seven 11 V1 game they may be fullbacks
so you're training players to play outside on the wide areas you've got your Center forward attacker and most importantly you've got Central midfielders if you play some of those
other formations where you don't have a central Midfield at the train when you move up to 9v9 you are going to struggle mightily because you won't have players
ready to assume the role of commanding the middle of the field the middle of the field in most games is the key decider and what happens if you can own
this middle of the field you keep the offense the other team from coming up the middle and it lets you dictate play whether you want to play wide to the
middle or vice versa and so this formation when you go forward it's balanced in that you can attack with three with the support of this player behind you now attack him with a nice
Diamond as you go forward these two players can interchange they can interchange but keeping it straight and simple early on and you've got two Central Defenders that if another team
keeps an attacker up you have a numerical superiority it's 2V1 here so somebody can cover and somebody can block or this player is supporting the play The Wide player maybe has the ball
over here your Defender can slide over and you still have cover as you go across the field as you go back because you've got two Center Central Defenders
and a player that you're not committing all the way up this run back is much easier to do and then as your Wingers recover and your Striker stays High you
can you basically get into almost this Christmas tree where these wide players are basically the job is defined as they marking their wide Player 1 V one and
now you've got a nice Central defense back in where players aren't being tasked to run the full length of the field up and down constantly you also then this Central
midfielder in this type of scenario would be a number eight and we're going not we're going to go over the numbering system in another video but number eight
Central midfielder box tobox their job is to move up and down the field kind of owning this piece however with some simple communication with this player you can very easily change the tone and
shape of your team into a more defensive shape or more offensive shape by just having the players switch roles slightly so it's late in the game you're up by
one or two and you want to hold on to that lead you can tell this player to move to assume a role from a number eight box to boox toing number six a
defensive midfielder so now as the team goes forward they're going to hang back a little bit they're going to start to be more connected to these two Central
Defenders keeping everything in front of them making it much more difficult for a team who's behind to get up and outnumber you because now the other team's going to have to throw four
people forward and if they're throwing four people forward against these three you've got 3v2 down here or 3v3 that's a that's a good sign here conversely if we're behind in the game we can tell
this player to switch from an eight roll to now a number 10 and now they're more aggressive they're not going to come back as far to help these guys because
we need a goal they're going to now partner up with this Striker they're almost going to become a second Striker and now we're pushing forward and this
player is more offensive minded he's going to leave a little bit more space is a little bit more danger but again if you're behind in the game and you need a
goal you need a goal and now this player is now morphed into the number 10 role attacking midfielder so using this formation you really get to train your
kids for two years on how to handle all the different situations that may come to them when they are going forward as they get older you really start that
training process early the other benefit that we have here too is if you look at this formation look at all the passing angles we have triangles and diamonds
all over the P field the ball moves to this side and the striker just simply swings over we have a giant Diamond already made right here ball swings back
over to this side easy over to here player in the middle here because at this age this player is not going to be able to make this pass in one fou swoop
maybe in the last part of fourth grade but even then having this player here and these players here makes it easy to play the ball over and out to switch the
field or into the number 10 and the same deal play the ball out and through so it does balance attack and defense flexible and it sorry about that I just kicked the
tripod so excited what I was saying was it really is a balanced in both attack and defense it lets you train all the different positions that your players
are going to need to know as they get older um and it's it's easy to learn because each player has a pretty well- defined role when they're in these
positions so there's not a lot of complicated thought and interchange at least early on you can make this very complicated this nine and this midfielder and this attacker as you get
into your last part of 7v7 maybe the spring of your last year with them you can almost interchange them depending on which way the ball goes on the field and
other circumstances um same with these folks you know you do an overlap you know this player pulls inside this player can roll around and now they've switch positions but again that's a
little bit more complicated um that's not necessarily what looking to train especially when they're in third grade and they're just coming into this but it has lots of possibilities because it
lets you get to where you want to go when you get to 9v9 and ultimately 11 v11 you've trained all the different positions in all the different major
spots so that when it becomes 11v 11 and you've got more players on the field all of a sudden everything looks familiar Central Midfield Central Defenders got them wide
players in this case two wide fullbacks so they're kind of Defenders but they move up and down trained them when they were outside the side two wide Wingers
attackers got them they also same thing they trained on that side Central midfielders number sixes maybe an eight a 10 again we've trained them already starting in third grade and then we have
our attacker so we've caught all the positions in the 11 v11 game in a simplified manner at 7v s okay well that's it hope you've enjoyed the time
over on the tactics board I'm hoping that it's giving you some insight into both the formations you may play against and the reasons why I really recommend
that you play the one two 31 going forward for your players um we'll do lots and lots more sessions based on this formation as we go forward in these
sessions and these series but until then I'd really like it if you could like And subscribe share this with your other Soccer Coaches around your town or your
league or or maybe another the ones you play against if you want a little bit of an advantage and until next time uh nothing more to say thank you very much
and we'll see you next time
