West Ham boys of 86

West Ham had a magical season in the 1985 -86 season, where we finished third in the table, finishing just four points off Liverpool in the top spot, and eight points clear of Man U in fourth spot, and thirteen points clear of Chelsea!  I wish the same thing could happen next season!!!

Our home form was fantastic, as we played 21 games at home, won 17, drew 2 and lost 2.  I went to most games that season, and it was fantastic, as the whole team had so much confidence, and expected great results each week, so kept up the passing and pressure for 90 minutes, so turned lots of games round.  The best thing was the team was so settled, with hardly any injuries, so the players stayed in the same position every week, and got to understand each others games so well.

Last season we had lots of changes in the team, and players moving from one position to another while I was finding out where  each player played best.  But now we have got a settled side, with a clear attack that plays well from Cian and Donny having lots of games together now, Ben scoring heavily from midfield though getting experience of playing in the Rooney or Tevez central position just behind the striker ahead.  And Sam T and Luke have combined to make a very solid central defence from playing together consistently.   

So we are now starting to get the settled side just like the one I used to watch at Upton Park over twenty years ago.  I enjoy coaching the team and all our clever skilful players, and am delighted that instead of having the planned break of a month over the summer, we are playing so well in our training games, and building something very strong for the next season starting in September.  

Outstanding breakthrough performance from Enes on Friday

I remember years ago Paul Gascoine was a young player, and some people were thinking he should play for England, others were saying he was still too young and inexperienced.  So England had a friendly game against Czechoslovakia, and Gascoine was selected to play for the first time for England, and all attention was on him, to see if he was good enough for England, or if it was still too early for him. 

And Gascoine played a fantastic game, that was a fantastic breakthrough for him, with him scoring twice, and setting up the other two goals in a 4 - 2 win for England, and that answered all the doubts about his readiness for England. 

On Friday, Enes played a similar type of breakthrough game for us.  Enes is going to be written about in full in the player review on the newsletter, so I wont give all the details here.  But on Friday, it was the first time Enes has played in a central attacking role for ages, and he was outstanding.  I loved the way he was able to play so skillfully in the central midfield tight areas,  holding on to the ball, despite opposition players all around him trying to tackle him, Enes twisting and turning with the ball, making great linking passes to the players around him, while also having a very sharp eye for a shooting chance, and scoring two.

Up til now, I had been planning to play Enes on the left wing, but his play in the central midfield spot was sensational, so I am going to carry on playing Enes central midfield.  This play of ours is very exciting, as now we are training properly with full size goals to give us proper shooting practice, we are hitting our stride as a team, and fulfilling our full potential.  Donny got a hat trick two games ago, on Friday he went one better and scored his all time highest scoring of four.  Enes has now scored in successive games.

So I am thinking, “Wow!” about our scoring to come, Many other sides struggle to have ONE quality scorer, we have LOTS!

So well done Enes, a fantastic and exciting performance on Friday, I enjoyed watching the play so much, and I know Mr Tunc will maintain that level of performance for us in the central midfield position alongside Ben.     

Sabres hit SEVEN again!!!

Guys, fantastic performance from you on Friday, with us hitting SEVEN for the second game in a row!  And this is now the third time we have scored seven goals in our last six games!!!! The team we play our Friday games with play in the same level as us in another league, so it gives me great confidence that when we go back to the League games from September onwards we will do excellently. 

If my goalscoring was correct, Donny hit FOUR, Enes hit two and Sam T hit one.  Can I have confirmation about this.  I wanted to even the game up, so lent them Ben who is one of our best players, and he was easily the standout player on their side during the game, giving great passes to set up shooting chances to the players he was playing with, and scored two of their three goals.  I just want to say how delighted I was with our performance, as we were playing with Donny up front as our only experienced striker, and had lent Ben to the other side, so were playing with an inexperienced central midfield set up, and one inexperienced striker, yet still created loads of chances, and scored seven! 

The one concerning point is defensively, we still all focus on the ball, and ignore the movement of the opposition off the ball, so let them move unmarked into good shooting positions, which helped them score three against us.  So I will be dealing with this on training on Friday, as we have improved a great deal in defence, and need to correct this one side to become even more solid in defence.   

 

Importance of training

I was interested that Ben scored twice in a match that took place several days after an extra training session I had held for the strikers that Ben had attended, following our move to the full size pitch and full size goal training ground.

That shows the importance of training, as the more you put into football, the more you get out.  This is something I believe in very strongly, and I have released players during the season who didn’t train often, and so who didnt play well in games.  Now we have a squad of players who train very well, and that carries on into our games.    

Form in football

Form in football is such a strange thing. 

The more we play, the more we will realise that.  We started off really well last year, winning three of our first five games, and went into the new year just one point off a promotion spot. 

Then we had a spell where we didnt have many games, and although we did well in the ones we played, with a couple of draws, and a couple of defeats by just two goals after we had gone ahead, we just couldn’t get the luck to get a win.

But we were always playing good football, even when we were losing, so I knew the results would turn our way again.  Even so, it made me laugh that when we finally won again, it was by a massive 7 - 2 win, against White Oak Wanderers who are a very good team who only missed out on promotion to the A Division by four points.  So beating a team like that so heavily was a very satisfying reward for all the commitment everyone has shown, even in our spell of not winning.

And now we have got over the not winning spell, we have arrived at our winning spell!

 The benefits of our settled side are very clear now, as players get to know each others way of playing.  Thanks to Ben for letting me know the scorers in two of our recent wins.  Now I have those, I can see a very good clear picture.  Cian has now scored in our last SEVEN consecutive games, which is excellent consistency.   Donny has maintained his goal a game ratio, scoring seven goals in these same seven games.  Ben has got six goals in the last seven games, and I can see that Enes is starting to regularly contribute goals from the wing, as he gets more and more used to playing there.

Just as importantly, Luke and Sam J have been doing an excellent job in defence, as defence is just as important as attack, so I enjoy watching their excellent play in defence, so conceding thirteen goals in our last five games is a fantastic outcome for us, while we scored twenty three goals in these games, so I am delighted that overall we have sciored ten more than we have conceded.  Well done defence and attack!

And the midfield dropping back to help defend has been the thing that has made the big positive change to our play, as last year the four midfielders  always pushed up and left all the defending to the defence to do, whereas now the whole team helps defend - even our strikers!  That is why we are tighter in defence now.      

20.4 Supersabres 7 White Oak Wanderers 2

27.4 Supersabres 4 Junior Reds Knights 7

2.5 Supersabres 3 Eltham Progress 0

11.5 Supersabres 2 Junior Red Knights 4

16.5 Supersabres 7 Eltham Progress 0

 

Sabres! Sabres! Sabres! 

Scorers on our 3 - 0 and 7 - 0 wins

When we had our poor run of results it was easy to keep track of who scored.  Now we are scoring so many it is hard to keep up!

Can the team tell me who the scorers were in our 3 - 0 and  7 - 0 wins against Eltham Progress, so I can update our records. 

We have scored 44 goals in 2007, 48 goals so far in 2008, for a total of 92 goals which is fantastic, so just think, whoever scores the eighth goal we next score will have scored our 100th goal in the 2007/8 football year! 

Sabres! 

Substitutions: don’t worry, be happy

With just seven minutes of the match left on Friday, I substituted Sam T, as he had mentioned he had done lots of running and sport at school, so I didn’t want to overload Sam.  I know Friday comes at the end of a busy week for the boys, which is why I am pacing our training sessions, mixing the effort used in the training game, with the less demanding heading practice.

Sam was understandably disappointed to come off, so I want to explain about substitutions so others aren’t too disappointed to come off when it is their turn to be substituted.

Because of numbers in games, we have quite often been playing all match long without being substituted.  Over the summer I will be having a look at various possible new signings in our games, which means there will be more substitutions than players are used to from recent times.  But don’t worry about it, the substitutions will be spread around the team, and I find watching the game from the side of the pitch gives a very educational view that players may miss when they are concentrating in the actual game.   

I am not going to be making any quick new signings, so some possible new players will be coming for quite a few weeks before I make the signing decision.  This gives inexperienced players time to get up to speed and then I can decide.  The key positions to fill remain defence, and a keeper as cover for Long, though I will be training John in goal over the four months of the summer break.   

Suggestion: using £300 money towards soccer tour

A suggestion for the use of our grant could be for it to be used towards the costs of a team trip to take part in a soccer tournament bank holiday weekend next May.  I think this could be a lot of fun, as I have heard about another team who used their money in this way, and had a great time holidaying and playing football.  Now our team is settled we can start to make long term plans and this would be a very good one to do.    

Sunday friendly can be arranged soon

I went to talk with an under 12s team I saw training, and asked if they would like to play a friendly against us, and they were very keen to.  They could play either on a Saturday or a Sunday, and it would be on a full size pitch with full size goals, so at next weeks training session we will talk more about this.  The team play in the Bexley B league, where we could well be playing next year if we dont win automatic promotion in the Selkent League, so it would be useful to play a team in that Division so we have an idea of the quality of opponent we would meet if moving over to that Division next year.  I know they are a good side, and would be a good test.  Like us, they are training through the summer, so we could have a series of friendlies with them through the summer.  

But I wont arrange any weekend friendlies for a month, as I know the parents and players all dedicate so much time during the season, so I want everyone to have a break over the summer, as I have heard a runmour that there is more to life than football! Can that be true?!   

Something was amusing about the game yesterday, I was watching the opponents warm up, and they were doing a hard working build up, with lots of tackling and passing before the game to get their touch going.  We however went straight into the game after a team talk through the newsletter, but despite all their preparation, they didnt score a single goal, and we got seven!

Well done to Ron on very good training on heading for his half of the squad last night.  Splitting the squad into two works so well, before was a mess for me to have all 12 or 14 player to train in one go, which is why I often had to use matches as the training method as that involved everyone at the same time.  But splitting the team into two groups gives everyone double the time on the ball, and double the individual training, which is also why we are getting such good results.    

Supersabres soar to perfect Seventh Heaven with our 7 - 0 win!

Excellent play in our 7 - 0 win last night against Eltham Progress.  What is so pleasing is we were very effective at both ends of the pitch, with Luke and Sam helping the less experienced defenders beside them to totally shut out the opposition, for our second clean sheet in three games.

At the other end of the pitch, in attack, we played our best ever attacking game, with our strikers Donny always looking dangerous in attack and spreading the ballaround excellently, and our midfield of Enes, Ahmed, Ben and Sam T providing fantastic support to the strikers. 

We got the balance right, with the midfield dropping back to help defend when necessary, and now that I had explained to Donny why we now have Donny back defending corners, he did an excellent job of doing just that, and was so much more involved in the game as a result.

Individual things that pleased me-

I loved the fact that the short corner worked perfectly, with us scoring a goal from it the first time we tried it.  Well done to our players for putting it into effect so skillfully.

Enes tracked back from the halfway line to pressurise an opponent and put him off his shot.  If that player had been given time, he could well have scored as he was through on goal.  But Enes great defensive play stopped that player from having time on the ball, and he shot wide, and that helped us keep a total shutout of goals conceded.

Our scoring is now really becoming impressive, now we are becoming settled in attack and midfield and everyone gets used to playing together.  In our last four games we have scored 7, 4, 2, and 7 which is 20 goals in the four games - wow, that is an average of 5 goals scored a game!    

It was good to have Freddy along for the session.  I am not going to make any quick new signings, as I will be looking at possible new players all over the summer before making commitments.  As this time next year we will be in the B Division, the signings will have to have the potential to play at that level.  Freddy did well, but keep reminding him about holding position during games, as he is new to organised teams, and has the beginners mistake of charging all over the pitch chasing the ball whereever it is, rather than play in the position given to play in.