A Ball and a Wall

“I also played about 500,000 games of ‘Spot’ against the front wall of the house. You had to hit a particular spot and if you missed you got a letter and started to spell out the word ’Spot’ You were out when you finally got the ‘T’.”
Phil Thompson – ex Liverpool & England

It is important that children learn the game, not just at organised training sessions but also on their own. Training sessions cannot be a substitute for the fun we had as kids with a ball and a wall, for that is where you learn about yourself and indelibly stamp your own identity of the player you want to be

Waterloo

After the battle of Waterloo in 1815 when the Duke of Wellington’s allied army defeated Napoleon, the Iron Duke uttered the immortal words, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

Fast forward some one hundred and fifty years and another English legend, Sir Bobby Charlton said of England’s one and only football achievement, “The World Cup wasn’t won (in 1966) on the playing fields of England. It was won on the streets.”

This probably says more about the class system than anything else, but at least it got the same result for the country albeit with vastly contrasting tactics.

The 1966 side won the Jules Rimet trophy playing a 4-3-3 formation, (Sir Alf’s wingless wonders) where as the 1815 squad won it using a few more players, in fact some 55,000 infantry, cavalry and cannon.Playing fields v the streetsThere is a point to all this waffle and I know only too well that I have managed to bore many coaches who have logged onto the website’s discussion forum about the sorry demise of street football and the fact that all the greats in the game, Pele, Maradona, Zindane and Cruyff all learnt their trade on the streets and were polished and finished off on the playing fields of pro clubs. Children still practice on their own and play street/playground football, but nowhere near as much as the last generation.

There is only so much you can do at group training, even if you have a ball per player and lots of small-sided games and touches. Then when they are older and you are doing more tactical work, they will spend less time on the ball.

An hour a day keeps the defender away

It is often said that after the golden age of learning, which I think is up to about 14 or 15 years of age, the improvement in technique from then on is negligible, codswallop!

I am over half a century and my technique is better now than when I played (admittedly at the very, very bottom of the playing pyramid) because I touch the ball more now, with the odd kick about at training with the boys, staff football games, with my son and doing demos.

My son is fifteen and over the last couple of months he has gone alone to a nearby car park for a minimum of an hour a day, nothing new there, but he does what he wants to do, with his favourite music playing through his ear piece. I would say that he has improved more as a player in these last couple of months than over the last three years. And it is not just his touch that has improved, but also his speed, his power, his co-ordination, his vision, his accuracy, his balance, he has quicker feet and naturally his confidence has grown.

Of course I would expect him to improve but not by so much.I think the key is not just the amount of touches but also that every single movement and every single touch is created because the player wants to do it that way. There are no interfering coaches, showing a better way and also no judgemental remarks from teammates. Everything is off the cuff and helps the player understand who he is and stamps his own individuality as a player away from both the team and coach. Sure football is a team game, and that is the part he learns on the playing field.

Games

If you give a child a ball and a wall he will inevitably make up his own games, whether it be, knock it against the wall with the right foot, one bounce and then against the wall with the left foot and so on. If there is a wall behind as well, it could be volleying a ball against the wall, taking the return with the thigh before flicking it over your head and volleying the ball before it bounces, shooting style, against the other wall, perhaps while you are listening to your favourite music on the ipod, be it The Who, Britney Spears or Perry Como, whatever takes your fancy and whatever works for you.

There are countless games and little drills you can make up, the important thing is you make them up yourself and use your imagination, a word that has all but disappeared from the football language.

Creating the atmosphere

So what can you do as a coach to encourage your players to practice individually, away from the playing field?

It is too negative just to set some homework and tell the kids if they don’t do it they won’t improve.

The first thing is to create an atmosphere and culture of experimentation and creativity. Make it fun, make it beautiful, and make this game mystical. Yes we need to know about the 4-4-2 and the 4-3-3 and closing down an opponent but equally we must talk about the soul and rhythm of our beautiful game.

Because of you and the experiences they have with you as a coach, the kids should want to get hold of a ball at every opportunity and dash outside. You can also help practically by perhaps once a week taking any interested kids, never force them, to a car park or somewhere that is safe and has a wall, the outside of a prison is pretty good for that, (joke). Sit in your car, put on the stereo and play your latest CD, sit back and watch the magic show unfold and you will see your players as you have never seen them before

"When I played football," he says, "I just played. I didn't think about it. I found it easy. I taught myself how to play, knocking a ball about, up against a wall. You never see anybody doing it now.
Stan Bowles – QPR & England

Paul Cooper

07875 283093

http://www.footballfootball.org/

Voices from the Playground

The shrinking world of children’s play

The sound is unmistakable, a continuous babble of noise, laughter, screams, shouts and curses. The noise from the school playground is unlike any other and for us adults it is good for the soul. The sound of children playing however appears to become less year on year as restrictions through health and safety, modern culture and the school curriculum eat away at important play time.

“If children don't play, their minds don't grow. Play is where they learn to make their own decisions, trust their own judgement, set their own targets. It's where they learn to get along with other kids, meet triumph and disaster, and then come home for tea. Adults can help by helping them find somewhere to play, sorting out the boundaries, being handy with the plasters if something goes wrong. But otherwise we should leave them to it!”
Sue Palmer (author of Toxic Childhood)

By Paul Cooper

The lunch hour myth

The length of time that children now have for break is diminishing.
In a study by Peter Blatchford & Ed Baines between 1990 & 1995 and later updated in 2006, lunchtimes have been reduced by around 30% and afternoon breaks have been scraped altogether in many schools.
A further 5% of schools quizzed in 2006 said they were planning to make further cuts in ‘play time’.
A recent report in the Times says that the standard lunch hour is now down to forty minutes in schools.
By the time children have eaten their lunch that leaves very little time for play.
Many of the top footballers learned their trade in the school playground and took steps to maximise playing time.
Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool and England midfield player in his excellent award winning autobiography explains;

“School held limited appeal: I sat in class, longing for play-time because there was always a match on in the playground. I loved dinner-time because it lasted an hour, which meant a longer match. I abandoned hot dinners as they wasted precious minutes. Eventually I asked my mother for packed lunches. Speed was vital at dinner- time. I ate the packed lunch while playing or wolfed it down running back into class.”

This incident would have happened in the late 80s, so if he had been born twenty years later the playground match would have been twenty minutes less or an hour and forty minutes less footie time a week.
The Irish international Paul McGrath who played for Manchester United and Aston Villa was brought up in an orphanage and their meanness with food meant there was more football time, “At school, the other kids had lunch; we just brought jam sandwiches from the orphanage. We kicked a ball while they ate.”

Playground games

Children have been playing street games for centuries, and many of these have found their way into the school playground. Games from the medieval times are still being played, handed down from one generation to the next. Some are modified, some forgotten and new ones invented.
Peter and Iona Opie in the 1960s travelled throughout the UK making a note of all these many games that children played and put them into the classic 1969 publication ‘Children’s Games in Street and Playground’.
Many of the games are still played today, although some have been banned on health and safety grounds. Favourites include Grandma’s Footsteps, What’s the Time Mr.Wolf, Stuck in the Mud, Tag and British Bulldog.
There are even pre-game games for picking sides such as Rock, Paper Scissors, One Potato - Two Potato and Dips.
There are also numerous ball games played in the playground with football the most common.
Some games have seasons while others are short lived by some sections of the playground. “When a tremendous craze for Jacks swept the playground in 1973 I asked the boys if they had tried playing. All of them nodded. ‘Did you like it?’ ‘Not enough fun in it,’ said one, ‘not enough action.’ Iona Opie observed in her delightful book, The People in the Playground.
It isn’t just the games, as there is also a rich culture of language, rhymes, jokes, riddles and sayings.
With less children being let out to play in the streets, the play time in the playground becomes very significant.

Banning ball games

Sarah Thomson from Keele University compiled a study in 2000 on playground games. Of the schools she surveyed, half had banned football from the playground.
Other ball games have been banned across the countries as well as tag and even just running in the playground.
In Bracebridge Heath Primary School near Lincoln, kiss-chase, along with other games that involve physical contact has been banned. Children are no longer allowed to even link arms.
Meanwhile a new ‘state –of- the- art’ city academy, school in Peterborough, costing £46.4 million, has no play ground.
Headmaster Mr McMurdo said the main aim of not having a playground at the school was to help children’s learning. He told BBC news: “This is a massive investment of public money and I think what the public want, is maximum learning.”

Mile Delap, the project manager for the new school said, “For a school of this size, a playground would have had to be huge. That would have been almost uncontrollable. We have taken away an uncontrollable space to prevent bullying and truancy.”
Meanwhile a mum whose fourteen year old son is about to attend the school, said that he was devastated he would not be able to kick a ball around at lunchtime.
Another city academy, built without a playground, the Unity on Teesside, and was reportedly modelled on a Tuscan village (?) was found by Ofsted to be failing.
The lack of a playground was contributing to ‘the negative attitude of the pupils’ so one was hastily built.

'However much children may need looking after, they are also people going about their own business within their own society.'
Peter & Iona Opie


Give Us Back Our Game conducted their own survey and found that out of one hundred primary schools across the UK, a third had banned football and other ball games from the school playground.
Of those schools that let children play football, many restrict children to a rota system so most classes play just once a week on a designated part of the play ground.
One has to understand that the playground is used not just by children wanting to play football, but more provision should be made for those that want to run around.
With obesity at alarming rates and one million children in the UK diagnosed with some kind of mental illness, the importance of play can’t be emphasised enough.

Playground voices

There is such a wide range of experiences from the GUBOG survey, some children are very frustrated with their school’s lack of understanding while other schools bend over backwards to give the children what they want.
Nine year old Jack from Scotland brought a small ball into his school playground last year and started an impromptu game (football has been banned from his school’s playground)
“I lost 15 minutes of Christmas Party time for playing football in the playground”
A double whammy for the unfortunate Jack.

One incident that highlights the passion children have for playing games on their own terms happened at a primary school in Gloucestershire after the headmistress banned football in the playground.
The children staged a demonstration one lunch time when over seventy children marched around the play ground chanting “We want our football, we want our football.” while swinging their school sweat shirts above their heads, the same way South American football fans swing their scarves.
The headmistress was furious and gave the ring leaders detention.

‘On the big wall the girls were playing two-balls and donkey in a lackadaisical fashion, and round the corner the boys were playing football in the traditional football area with whatever vaguely spherical objects they could muster: chiefly rolled-up gloves.”
Iona Opie – The People in the Playground




For others the playground experience was a positive one. Charlie Cooper now studying a degree in sports science at Exeter University says of his days at primary school, “We played football every break time in the school playground with a small ball, but Friday’s was the special day. As long as we wore our football kit, the school would let us play on the field, all year round. We would pass each other notes in class about what we thought would be the best teams. Those times were very special.”

Tony Whelan, Manchester United’s assistant academy manager U9s-U16s tells how important football in the playground was for him.
“You could not bring a ball into school but you could hire one, so all the kids would pool their threepenny bits, knock on the teacher’s door, pay for the ball and a game would begin. A typical day at school would be a session before the bell rang more football at lunch and break-time, followed by an hour after school before the school gates were shut.”

Children’s play
The school playground is probably the last bastion of childhood and childhood culture and should be maintained. We all have our own stories and memories of games that we played and mostly those are happy ones.
Now play and sport is led by adults for children. There are many very good coaches but they are not children anymore and can very quickly forget what it was like to be a six or ten year old.
You know it’s not working when a child tugs your sleeve and asks, “When can we play a game?”
Children can be brutally honest and we may need to give them more responsibility and empower them to think for themselves, give them space so they can be creative.
We don’t always have all the answers.

07875 283093

giveusbackourgame@gmail.com

http://www.footballfootball.org/

A Simple Game

Premier League for Tots
Football is meant to be a simple game and that is why it has such global appeal. You simply need a ball, players and something for goals. You can play a version of it just about anywhere.
In the Premier League for Tot’s however we have made things rather more complicated with formations, tactics boards, plans for defending corners and lots and lots of jargon picked up from the experts on Sky. ‘Second ball’ shouts the coach and looks around for appreciation at the parents, failing to notice one of his track-suited players throw one of the spare match balls onto the pitch. One team is playing with the original ball while the other team scores a goal with the second ball that has been thrown on the pitch by the obedient sub. The more the under eight’s set up resembles the professional game we see on TV, the better the coach, in some parent’s eyes.

Some more examples of jargon shouted at children’s football matches and possible interpretations by the children.
· “Find space” – Build a one man space rocket and travel in a vertical direction until you leave the earth’s atmosphere. (may take a while)
· “Man on” – Sounds as if a strange man has wondered onto the pitch. Do not accept any sweets from him and find the nearest policeman. (may take a while)
· “Hit the channel” – Nip down to Dover with a large stick and start thrashing the sea.
· “Hold” – Grab the nearest opposition player and don’t let go.
· “Relax” – Sun lounger + strawberry milkshake + Gameboy.
· “Gamble” – Poker, 3 card brag, snap, old maid?
· “Get rid of it” – Stick your fingers down your throat and bring up your breakfast.
· “Work” – Help mum with the dishes, dad wash the car and knuckle down in Maths.
· “Travel” – Pack your suitcase were off to Spain!
· “Close down” – Bring in the washing for your mum (may of misheard instruction)
· “Do we want it?” – Oh yes, a new bike for Christmas please.
· “Spread yourselves” – Cover yourself from head to toe in chocolate spread (something dad occasionally does with mum on a Saturday night – unknown to the kids)

The simpler the better
Brain Clough has had the greatest impact on the club game in England by taking an unfashionable provincial team from the bottom of the old second division to two European Cup triumphs. As well as his incredible achievements at Nottingham Forest, Clough was equally as impressive in his time as manager of Derby County. The greatest manager England never had!
But what did Clough attribute his amazing success too? Well it would probably have many mini soccer coaches spinning in their monogrammed bench coats. How on earth could he send out a team so ill prepared?

Nigel Clough on the ITV DVD simply called ‘Clough’ explained his father’s philosophy.
“Very simple, you have 10 friends, 10 team mates out there on the pitch, look after them. Look after the ball and give them the best possible ball (pass) you can. I can’t remember one time, in 9 years or even watching training before that, what you would call a tactical session. Stopping it, working on the back four or pattern of play - you just played 6, 8 a side or however many it was. A bit of possession, a few games and everything came from that - very simple. We never talked about the opposition; you just went out and played.”

That philosophy won them two European Cups, - Brain himself explains further;
“I tried to make sure of one basic thing in management. Educated people would call it a fundamental but I’m not sure what that means. I know what basic means and my basic was that there should never ever be the slightest sense of complication in my dressing room. I would rather have my players rolling about the dressing room floor laughing than have them trying to fathom a list of instructions and tactics before they went out to play a match.”

The more complicated we make it the bigger the smoke screen we can hide behind and the more important we become. The more coaching we do the more the players will rely on us and the greater power he will wield.
It is time for a reality check and to make the game fun, accessible and simple for children to understand and see it for what it is - kid’s football.

Grassroots and academies
Clough had his theories too on how children were being treated in both the grassroots game and academies.
“Our Simon used to run a team called FC Wanderers and I’ve never seen so many up- and- coming Alf Ramseys in my life – parents on the touchline thinking they were coaching their kids. There were about twenty of them, the same twenty every week, shouting their heads off. The mothers were the worst offenders and they hadn’t a clue what they were shouting about. They’d heard some self-styled expert trotting out the same phrase on telly.”

“The introduction of youngsters to the professional clubs today has gone from the sublime to the bloody ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with competiveness. All kids want to win and have to learn how to lose, but these days too many parents put too much pressure on little lads who should be enjoying every second on the football pitch. They’re grabbing kids almost before they’ve lost their milk teeth and although these places no doubt produce some good players at the end of the conveyor belt, I’m not sure they will produce enough to justify the investment and expense. Call me old- fashioned but I think some of these good players would emerge anyway without the need for such intense teaching processes. I’m scarred the kids are being brainwashed and by the time they’ll all be walking round in the same way like robots. There will be nothing natural about them because their individuality will have been coached out of them.”
Games

What we don’t have at present is enough alternatives to the current children’s league structures -alternatives that focus on inclusion, fun, encouragement, plenty of touches of the ball, games and simple instruction that the children can understand.
Games are very important to children as that is exactly what they would do if left alone. Coaching is fine, but we do far too much of it, sometimes for the sake of the parents, to let them know just how knowledgeable we are. Better then we give nuggets of information, as and when it is needed and of course Keep It Simple!

“A good coach coaches joy. Ask Wayne Rooney, the last of the backstreet footballers. That's what saved England's bacon in Kazakhstan on Saturday - not Rooney's lust for victory but his soul-deep joy in the physical action of sport.”

By Paul Cooper

07875 283093

http://www.footballfootball.org/

Simon Barnes – The Times
References
Brian Clough – Clough the Autobiography (1994) Corgi Books ISBN: 5791086
Cloughie (Walking on water 2002) – Headline Book Publishing ISBN: 9780755314300
Clough (DVD) 2009 ITV Sport

Kids Football & Failure

The one consistent factor in England’s 0-0, World Cup group round draw with Algeria was the fear in England’s play.

When the Three Lions failed at the World Cup again and England was once more gripped by the inevitable heart-searching, analysis and post mortems, did anyone remember the words Sir Bobby Charlton spoke after the 1966 triumph:

“The World Cup wasn’t won on the playing fields of England. It was won on the streets.”
It was street football that created those World Cup icons – kids with their backsides hanging out of their shorts, kicking a bald tennis ball about with their mates for hours on end, learning how to play and how to love it.

Speaking as a youth football coach for fifteen years, unless we can revive street football, or something very like it, I believe we can kiss goodbye to world supremacy in the beautiful game, because football’s not beautiful for our kids any more: it’s ugly.
In a world where children can no longer play outside without supervision, parents and coaches have taken over, and the competitive drive adults bring to the game means that youngsters no longer have time to fall in love with football, to play for fun and thus to truly develop their skills.

The late, great Alex Stock, manager of QPR & Fulham got it spot on when he said about the modern youth game:

“Everywhere I go there are coaches. Schoolmasters telling young boys not to do this and that and generally scaring the life out of the poor little devils. Junior clubs playing with sweepers and one and half men up front, no wingers, four across the middle. They are frightened to death of losing, even at their tender age, and it makes me cry.”

Those street-bred footballers Bobby Charlton spoke about had fewer distractions than modern children. They weren’t kept holed up indoors by parents terrified by traffic and the possibility of predatory ‘strangers’. Kids in those days not only played football but climbed trees, rode their bikes, built dens and explored their neighbourhood. The self-confidence, social competence and risk-taking skills these experiences bred made them better able to enjoy their play.

In street football, every child in the neighbourhood was involved. You might have the embarrassment of being the last to be picked but at least you played, and if the game was too one-sided and lost its fun, ‘Billy the dribbling wizard’ swapped with ‘two left feet Larry’ to make it even. Children also learnt to play in different positions. You might be in goal one day and playing as a striker the next. One thing for certain was that you got a complete football education.
You also played against older kids, and if you couldn’t match them physically, you had to use new technical skills and insight in order to compete. Children learnt from each other.

Today’s children learn from the grown-ups. Without the freedom of the streets, their early experiences of football are organised, supervised and coached. They have no real say in what happens, and they don’t have time to develop and learn. Just as there isn’t time any more for families to make a proper meal and sit around the dining table together, there’s no time for coaches to waste developing children at football.
Development is long term and takes years of patience, but in today’s ‘win at all costs’ society coaches need success now, so they pick the biggest kids and get a giant to whack the ball up field as hard as possible to an even bigger giant who wallops the ball in the back of the net. 10-0, we are the business and the other team is rubbish

Watching the youngest age groups play today is like watching a Premier League for tots. Seven-year-olds with David Beckham haircuts and the latest Adidas boots pull on their ‘Dudley Tyre Care’ sponsored shirts and raintops sponsored by ‘Boothroyd, Cripps and Pottinger, Family Solicitors’. They totter up and down the pitch in front of a full house of mums, dads, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandparents, second cousins and all.
This enthusiastic gathering can become very rowdy and explodes into sheer ecstasy when their team scores, but rarely applauds either goals or skilful football from the opposition. What do the children learn from all this? Not that football’s a beautiful game, that’s for sure. They learn you’re a hero if you win and go home with the Man of the Match trophy and a Mars bar, your dad telling you how one day you’ll play for England. But if you lose you’re a villain – and it’s a frosty car ride home with your dad analysing every mistake.

I once watched an under 9s game where one team had the coach and assistant coach standing by each goalpost continually barking orders to the keeper. Meanwhile, a parent on each touchline ran up and down shouting other instructions. When they won a corner at the other end their coach hollered “Wait” and trundled the entire length of the field for a minute’s discussion, cupped hand in the ear of the poor flustered corner-taker who knocked his corner kick straight out.

The next game I saw was an under 8s. The team came out for a 30 minute warm-up which would have exhausted a crack team of US Navy Seals, involving running around the pitch, shuttle runs, sit ups and press ups with not a ball in sight. The substitutes weren’t used as, according to the coach, the game was too close, and the kids were all kept in the changing room for 30 minutes after the game for a debrief.

If we want to breed ‘winning’ footballers again, we need to give the game back to the children. In 21st century, traffic-infested Britain, street football may be a thing of the past, but at least we could try to provide something equivalent in a safe, fun environment at children’s clubs and elsewhere.

It’s all a matter of backing off as coaches and letting the children play. In small-sided games, such as 4v4 and 5v5, where children can learn through play and different types of goals and features can put emphasis on different skills and insight. To the children it is still just a game and most importantly fun. They need to learn to solve their own football problems on the pitch, to work it out for themselves before we give them the solution.
Parents, coaches and kids need to work together. Grassroots clubs should have pre-season meetings with the parents and children to discuss rules and agreements so that everyone understands what their contribution is. In the club I coach at we’ve had fantastic results using this philosophy.

We’ve found that by putting the children first and making it their game, they’ve not only had great fun and developed better as people, but they’ve also developed a passion for football. What surprised us most was we also saw almost instant results on the pitch. The kids expressed themselves, had no fear of failure (no one shouts at them) and they played with imagination and skill.

We’ve also seen improvement in the less naturally gifted children who would have been thrown on the scrap heap years ago by many ruthless coaches. It’s as if the kids are back on the street again, everyone playing with smiles on their faces, watched by beaming parents and coaches.
There also needs to be alternatives to leagues and clubs especially in the inner cities where, as in the case of London children’s participation in football is 50% less than the national average.

We should be looking at giving children a life-long love of the game and a return to the values that made it a fun game to play and an environment where there is no fear of failure

Maybe, if this message can spread, we could rear a generation of footballers who play with creativity and without fear, who solve their own problems on the pitch, and who enjoy the game. Footballers who play to win, instead of losing through fear.

Paul Cooper 07875 283093
http://www.childrensfootballalliance.com/
giveusbackourgame@gmail.com