There’s a couple of premises which are true in almost every RWTB opportunity:
1) We are more likely to score if we are attacking an area that has no defenders in it.
2) Any area from which we can score is likely to have a defender in it soon enough!
The only conclusion to be drawn from these premises is that our players need to attack an area quickly, giving our players the best chance of exploiting the space before a defender can challenge.
Two of our technical points stem from this detail.
Technical Point
Take an aggressive first touch into the space.
If you stood with your players in the centre of a square yard and asked them to race out and touch all four walls, who would win? I have three natural sprinters in an under-5s group I coach, so I could be sure that one of those boys would win. Or so I thought! When I tried this game in a warm-up one week, a small boy called Jack surprised me by coming back to the centre almost ten seconds before anybody else. I knew he hadn’t cheated because I had watched him touch all four walls, so how had he won by such a margin?
As all the other kids buffered and bumped each other, meandering en masse to each wall. But Jack sprinted to the corner of the room and touched two walls at once, ran to the opposite corner to complete his set and jogged in victorious.
Jack realised that the quickest route was a straight line. This is just as true when dribbling.
Technical Point
Push the ball forwards in stride using your little toe.
When we run our toes naturally point in the direction that we are travelling. This means that pushing the ball with the inside arches of our feet will skew the ball off across our bodies. Dribbling in this manner would take us zigzagging all over the pitch, and we’d rarely be moving towards the space we are trying to attack.
If we compensate for this – by turning our knee outwards as we kick the ball – we break our stride pattern and lose a lot of speed. Not ideal when that defender is sure to be on their way.
The correct technique is to stroke the ball forwards with the little toe at the start of every stride. This will enable players to move quickly in a straight line and maintain their stride pattern, giving them the best possible chance to exploit the space.
