Coaches Club – Pairs Gates Game
In this series of posts, we share with you some drills and session plans for you to apply to your training sessions.
Today’s activity is a really nice simple game to use with younger age grouped teams and can work with both lots of numbers and little numbers. Also, view the practice plan below as a foundation to build off of, you could become very creative in your adaption of this activity.
The focus will be on movement off the ball and combination play. These all complement a Tiki-Taka which is a style of play that Barcelona perfected from 2008 onwards. Which brings me nicely to the video I have included below from BarcaStudio that shows some great clips of Barcelona’s Tiki-Taka approach from 2008 – 2017.
How was that video relevant? As mentioned previously the focuses of the activity below should see players focus on their movement off the ball, the quality of their passing – the accuracy and the firmness of the pass, their body position and angles of support. Pick any of the moves in the clip and challenge yourself or the players to picture a coned gate between the two players.
This session below is one that I have delivered with younger age groups although with a bit of creativity and may a competitive edge you could transform this into an activity relevant for an older age group. Maybe you start with defenders from the start and have a much bigger playing space and potentially teams of 3 or 4.
In the activity below, you will notice there’s only a handful of gates, this is purely for illustrative purposes, I would suggest asking players to set the gates up, you’ll notice different sizes and different angles. As I have listed in the progression section, I’d even consider introducing different coloured cone gates that give different points. You could take this a step further and say all blue coned gates are worth 3 points, but you must use your left foot to pass it through and control it. Be creative, I’m sure you will come up with some much better ideas for this, alternatively ask the players to come up with their own challenges for a specific coned gate, promoting player ownership of the activity.
Drop us a message in the comments section below if you’ve used this session before and let us know how it went.
Also if you have any great sessions that you’d like us to share or have found any online, then please let us know in the comments section.
Be sure to follow Half Time Cuppa on Twitter too @HalfTime_Cuppa and you can follow me on Twitter too @DannyCook1996
You can also check out our other Drill Share Sessions by clicking here
Please don’t take the drill sources as gospel, we’ve tried to credit drills, especially those we’ve seen elsewhere, alternatively if that’s not possible, we’ve credited the coach that has put on that version of that drill. Please get in touch, using the comments section below if there’s another source.