The Spring Season has been one with an end date left open by the League, to give time for all the Autumn season matches to be completed, and to then see if there was time for home and away legs for each of the Spring League fixtures, or only time left for either one or the other. It looks likely that the Spring League has been decided to be just one match against each team, which means as we have faced all the teams in the Spring Division, the season could be over. This could be why we have been allocated a friendly next Sunday, as the League look as though they will be setting up friendlies to take all teams through to the season end in May.
I have thought about where we are, and how we have done, and am looking ahead to next season. I am pleased with our team, lots of players had not played league football before, so it has been a big learning curve. Other players had played for other sides in Leagues already, but joined us this year, so took time to settle in and for me to find out where best to play everyone. Fitness wise, we are able to match any team we meet, we are as quick or quicker than everyone else, and we can all play sixty minutes of football and not get tired because of our hard training and improved fitness.
But the biggest thing I have been working on since we started training in the summer is for our players to play with head up, looking for passes. When we started everyone played with the head down, held on to the ball too long, and so just ran into tackles and lost the ball. Now we play intelligently, passing the ball quickly and accurately. Injuries and player shortages meant we missed my original target of promotion, but we have succeeded in getting everyone to improve and to learn to pass and move quickly, so I am pleased with how we have achieved that target. And the squad of 16 for next season means we wont be short of players again for matches, so will be full strength all season long now.
The area we need to focus on most is our shooting, we keep getting through on goal, then miss too often with the shot, after having done all the harder work in getting the ball into the attack. So our priority is to move training to a place where we have proper sized goals to train in, to give us proper shooting practice, and a bigger area, so we can practice match formations better.
We had outgrown the Thomas Tallis training pitch, but because we had paid for it to 28 March, we couldnt move to another training ground until April onwards. I wanted to move a long time ago, but we couldnt move til now.
We now need to add skill onto our game, so that we add a new dimension to our play, we are already a hardworking side, I now want to add skill to this, as the combinaton of hard work and skill will make us a greater challenge to score against. We didnt beat the top three sides in our Autumn Division, or the sides we met in the Spring Division, so we need to add skill to our game to close that little gap. The addition of shooting practice, at the new training ground, plus skills to beat the opponent, will make us overtake the other sides.
The sides that beat us were hardworking, and had a clearer focus on our goal, they attacked us more directly than we did in return, sometimes we were too casual in attack, or wanted to bring it too close before having a shot, or didnt place the shot well, whereas other sides shot more quickly and unexpectedly, so we will work on that in training. But none of the sides we have played struck me as very very skilful, so us learning to take on and beat opponents will put us on a much higher level of football than our opponents. Already Cian and Sam are doing this a lot in games, Ben is adding it to his game more and more, and Donny is adding it in attack. All players have to do this, yes, sometimes you will try it and lose the ball in a tackle, but the more you try it, the more natural it will become,and the more you will get it right. So don’t worry about making mistakes, they are all part of learning.
It was exciting to watch Friday’s training, and see the players using their new dribbling skills, beating tackles that before hey would have lost the ball to, but now able to beat the opponent, it means our football is reaching a whole new exciting level.
When we were regularly winning matches before Christmas, it was sometimes done through our hard work and effort winning the games for us. The losses since then have been a blessing in disguise, as they have made me realise we need to add things to our game, rather than just keeping on with everything staying the same. The addition of skill and shooting practice will add goals to our games. We drew against All Stars and Eltham Town, and have lost several games by just one or two goals, so adding the things we need to add to score two or three more goals a game, will improve our results.
In defence, Billy, Sam and Luke are looking a great defensive unit in the making, we need to get two more defenders to add to them, to build a regular back four. But I want our defenders to be skilful too, rather than just kicking the ball out all the time for throw ins to the opposition. When we started I told our defenders to kick the ball out and not take chances, but that stopped them from developing match skills, so I am correcting this, by now encouraging the defence to play their way out of trouble. I know while learning to do this, some mistakes will be made, but these will be learned from, and we will end up with classy defenders. Then we will have class all over the pitch - defence, midfield, attack!
Up to now, we have had 14 in the squad,, which left us short if players were unavailable or late. I dont want this to happen again next season, so I want us to have a 16 player squad. So I am looking out for two more defenders, or possibly one defender and one midfielder, so we have lots of cover for defence and midfield. Recommendations welcome. I will also be advertising in the summer for additional players to join us, so there will be just a couple of new faces in the summer. Last summer I looked at players over a long time before deciding who to sign on, so had a look at players including Callum, Connor, Chris and others, but you guys set very high standards for any new player to meet before I would sign them on, so this summer will be the same, as I will only be signing top players.
One thing to mention is that swearing always seems silly to me, it is most of the time showing that someone has a poor vocabulary that they need to use swear words when they cant find normal polite words to make a point, so swearing is very unimpressive. So I was annoyed with myself that I had used the word “bloody” at a match recently, when frustrated by the lack of attention from a player who needed to concentate on the pre match talk to be properly prepared for the game ahead, as that word was the sort of language I find so silly when I hear other people use it. So I know it hardly happens in the team, but no swearing!
