Playing From The Back - Game Realistic Practices

We can split these practices into three parts, that allow us to step from completely unopposed, focusing on the technique of playing from the ball, through an opposed practice and finally into a full game situation:

Playing From the Back - Unopposed Practice

This practice simply gives your players an understanding of what you're expecting from them in terms of their positioning, movement off the ball and movement as a unit when playing from the back. It's completel;y unopposed and it isn't the most exciting practice in the world, but it's key to run this if you want your players to have a picture of what's expected before we introduce pressure, opponents and more game-realism.

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Playing From the Back - Opposed Practice

Moving on from our unopposed introduction to playing from the back, the natural progression is to keep the same setup, but give the players the pressure of opponent attackers trying to close them down as well as a challenge of trying to actually work the ball out to a certain point on the pitch. You can manipulate how easy the practice is by changing the numbers on each team.

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Playing From the Back - Conditioned Match

Once the players have an understanding of the key points when playing from the back and have practised (and shown they can do it) under pressure from opponents in an opposed practice, like any skill, it makes sense to now try and execute it in a match situation. This is a normal match, with the one condition that every time the ball goes out of play, we restart from one of the goalkeepers.

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