Street-wise players are winners

Many of the top coaches and players in modern-day soccer will tell you how they grew up playing in the back streets with their friends. Playing back street soccer means you try your hardest or your friends will soon get on at you. That means constantly trying skills, techniques and ideas that you wouldn't normally do at soccer training - there are no grown ups to tell you not to do it. But it’s a dying trend so you have to create an atmospere and give them coaching sessions that bring out those skills.

Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester Utd coach, talks about how he grew up playing soccer in the shadows of the Scottish Govan shipyards; Marcello Lippi who led Italy to World Cup glory in 2006 played soccer on the Italian beaches and in the pine forests using trees for goalposts. Even Sven Goran Ericsson managed to play soccer in the parks when the snow had cleared in Sweden.

Kids no longer have the space to play, or worried parents keep them inside after school. But what they do have in place of this are coaches like you and I. Never have there been so many coaches at grassroots level. And the pitches you train them on are a substitute for the back streets of old.

So the onus is on you to give them the skills and fun they no longer seem to be able to get on their own. My favourite street soccer exercise is this one but look out for more in future issues of this newsletter.

* Player A passes to Player B following behind his pass;
* Player B lays the ball off to Player A who passes to Player C.
* Player C plays a long ball to player B who has moved into the position of Player A.
* Player A ends up where C was and C where B was.

Key coaching tip: If you keep shortening the distance between the cones you can get up some fast passing and running to mimic
the way players would play in street soccer. Move the outside cones towards the middle cone a couple of paces each time.