David Garcia

I will be posting a new article daily to Substack for the foreseeable future.
itsjustasport.substack.com/?r=4riwxt&utm_…

The biggest thing you lose when you copy someone else’s drill isn’t originality. It’s the learning you would have done designing it yourself.

When I design an activity, I’m trying to recreate a small situation from the game that my players need more repetitions of, not repetitions of a predetermined solution.

Repetitions of the whole process: perceive what’s happening, decide what the situation is asking for, then execute that decision.

In the session I break down here, I originally expected a bounce pass. But the defenders started jumping it.

The players noticed, so they started turning and progressing instead.

Suddenly the activity became much more interesting because the defenders’ actions changed the attackers’ decisions. That’s what I want a good training activity to do.

And that’s one of the things you miss when you simply copy drills.

There’s a lot of coaching insight in imagining a game situation, trying to recreate the important elements, watching your players bring it to life, and then reflecting on what actually happened.

You also lose the contextual richness of designing something specifically for your players and their problem.

I broke down that entire process here, including how the activity changed once the players started solving it differently than I expected: itsjustasport.substack.com/p/how-i-design…

The deepest player doesn’t always need to be the one attacking the space in behind.

I think coaches, myself included, often make that assumption because it feels logical. The deepest player is closest to the space, so surely they should be the one attacking it.

But second-line runs can actually be much harder to defend.

Our attention is naturally pulled toward the most salient things: the ball and the deepest, most dangerous attacker. So when a midfielder suddenly breaks forward from deeper, they can very easily go unmarked.

And the player responsible for following that run is often another midfielder. If they don’t see it, aren’t attuned to it, or simply don’t have the legs to recover, the run gets passed onto the back line.

That’s where you can create what I’d call a decisional crisis.

Does the defender step toward the ball? Track the midfielder sprinting beyond them? Stay with the forward already occupying them?

A few years ago I coached a really talented U11 group who reminded me of this constantly. They were so willing to run forward from deeper positions that a huge number of our goals came from midfielders breaking beyond the front line.

For players, I try to label these as Speed Up moments. When the space opens, the action changes from jog to sprint.

I went deeper into why these second-line runs are so difficult to defend, using examples from the Clásico, here: itsjustasport.substack.com/p/the-space-wa…

There are no words for Pedri. In a football world based on logic, he dribbles into six defenders and provokes a whole team.

Simeone is so underrated. His teams defend well and also ball out, especially against ball-oriented opposition.