As a training and learning opportunity for the girls I was looking for a couple of things from this game. I wanted to see them test their skills against tougher competition and I knew that this boys team would not just give them space to dribble. Rather, the boys would certainly challenge quickly and forcefully on the ball and that would force our girls to be quicker and more creative with their moves. There is a challenge that a coach faces, and that I've discussed here before, when you've succeeded in getting a player or a whole team to buy into our club philosophy that they need to play skillfully, patiently, that they need to be willing to take the long way around to get to goal. The challenge is that when they face really tough competition they'll revert back to their old "kick it and run" style of play and forget in a panic everything they've learned about having a soft, skillful touch on the ball. Clearly that didn't happen in this scrimmage. Our girls showed over and over again their willingness to patiently find open space, working touch-line to touch-line and even back towards our own goal when necessary to find or create attacking lanes. They were challenged fairly vigorously by the boys but they stayed true to their skills.
The second thing I was hoping for though was that the boys' team would challenge the girls hard enough that the girls would feel some pressure to go beyond their dribbling skills. These girls are very comfortable with each other and they do see themselves as teammates, as together in everything. But they don't actually cooperate much on the field. Specifically they are all watching the ball waiting for their turn most of the time and they even get in each others way quite a bit. Ron and I talk with them constantly about this at practice and games and I think that intellectually they get it but in game situations their instincts take over and they just want the ball. So what I was hoping to create with this scrimmage was a situation where their instincts would be challenged in a very concrete way, a situation where they would have to learn that sometimes you can help your team by playing a certain way away from the ball. Some of them do demonstrate some very good field awareness and anticipation throughout the game but that's as individuals. They haven't yet developed the sort of wolf pack mentality that a brilliant team has. And brilliance is the goal. Right now we're a team of brilliant players. Where we want to get to is to be a brilliant team. I'm looking to see them challenged in a way that forces the individual players to realize "if I want to score I need help. If I want the team to win I've got to know how and when to help."
I'm not looking for passing at this point though. What I want to see is that players are aware of what might happen next in a a given game situation. Here's a specific example: You see one of our girls, say Ashley, get the ball and start working up the field. She makes a move to clear one defender then another but just when it looks like she might really break loose you realize that now one or two of her teammates have crept up behind her and are now only a few yards away, if that. Ashley then gets trapped by a couple of defenders and cleverly decides to turn backwards for a few steps to gain some space. She'll want to turn around, get into space and then make another move to go laterally and out-flank the defenders pursuing her. But what happens over and over again is that when she decides to turn backwards to find space what she finds is her own teammates standing right in her way. This happens over and over again with all of our players. It's maddening because you think that given that it happens so consistently they'd be expecting it by now and that the players off the ball would have learned to maintain more space. It's crazy.
I really appreciate the quality of the game the U8 boys gave us. That was a beautiful match on both sides. Hopefully in our upcoming tournaments we'll see more of that sort of competition.
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