Keep the Ball Rolling
The FA have recently produced a plan to improve top level the performance of football in the country, including that of the national team. Part of it refers to how the team will be coached. This will be “as far as possible” through the medium of games, and with an aspiration of 70% “ball rolling” time. Whilst these concepts are not unlike those of other National Governing Bodies , this is a relatively radical – maybe novel - attempt to define proportions.
This is presumably because these two qualities – games and “ball-rolling” times – are regarding as characteristics of effective coaching. If this is how high performance players are to be coached, then it must be assumed that engagement is not the only ambition of these sessions, but that technical development is best achieved through these.
Why are these coaching features so difficult to achieve?
Firstly, time allocated to games is conventionally regarded as a light-hearted relief, or a gentle session opener before the real business of cone bound “coaching” begins. This often confuses the concept to coaching with that of instruction, and is accompanied by a fairly unpalatable diet of single-outcome practices in which creativity and challenge would be unwelcome intruders.
“Games” are regarded suspiciously. They are for children, and the community game. Those not driven by the serious business of elite performance. For the latter, learning is a duty, not a pleasure. They must work harder, be more accurate and eliminate error. Despite the fact that it is not these qualities which win matches, but rather the moments of magic and creativity that produce defence-splitting passes and line breaks.
Secondly, an undue amount of player activity with a ball squeezes out the dominant activity of most coaching sessions – teacher talk. Research shows that coaches can spend up to a staggering 66% of sessions addressing groups of motionless players, under the deluded impression that everyone is listening. If the ball needs to keep rolling for coaching to be effective, then opportunities for coach intervention become restricted. This would presumably mean a focus on making such communications optimally effective. So, what would good look like in coach talk?
How about the following guidelines more maximum coach talk?
Introductory Instructions (to get the first activity rolling) 30 seconds
Instructional intervention: maximum one minute
Questioning intervention: 30-45 seconds
Whatever the optimal numbers are, one thing is certain: as soon as measuring coach talk is on the agenda, it radically changes behaviour. Long orations dispensing coach wisdom are replaced with short, sharp instructions, comments or questions. The ball keeps moving.
But the ball mustn’t keep moving for its own sake. There must be development; the aim is progress. The issue is whether this is best achieved through structured player activity, or through listening to technical information. Certainly, feedback loops can be shortened through coach interventions; the fascinating question remains – how long and how often do these need to be?