Day 68

Day 68

A pretty bland, short day today! We started at 2:30 and our instruction was to meet Joe and Dourrey at Goodwood college! A school which we had visited before and one which wasn't far from the learning centre! Dourrey is unemployed at the minute but he has a keen eye for coaching and joe has invited him to shadow us for our remaining few weeks! Both Joe and I said that we should have asked him to do that at the start of the programme, then he would have 3 months of shadowing us under his belt! He helps out a lot in our session and it's great to pass on our knowledge to him and it's nice to know we have another pair of hands to help set up and coordinate etc.

The session was an hour and a half long and we decided to work on quick reaction time and a three touch, power play tournament  with them. We worked on reaction time by the using arsenal vs Kaizer chiefs warm up to get their brains alive and ready to react to different stimuli such as my commands and actions. They loved the warm up and it always goes down a treat for getting the boys energetic, warmed up and in a positive mood for the session. The second relation time based exercise was called 'switch'. After our warm up we gave the two non bib teams a number from 1-5 and the team in bibs a number from 6-10. In essence, two games would be occuring and when Jeff, myself or Dourrey blew our whistle and shouted a number the boys of the number we shouted would have to switch place with the person in the other team with the same number. So for example if I shouted "6!" the two boys who were labelled with the number 6  would have to switch pitches. It's pretty easy to start but once the amount of numbers I shout out increases, the quicker you have to be. The reason it gets harder is because your opposition team will take advantage of the lesser amount of players and therefore it would be your responsibility to quickly switch and react to the command to help your team out on the other pitch!

After this exercise, we went into a three touch power play tournament which means you can't take more than 3 touches at a time when you're on the ball. The power play aspect means that in the last minute, any goal scored counts as two goals! So the value is doubled. We had four teams and the winners were eventually the team who called themselves Real Madrid!

To finish off we did a match which jeff, Dourrey I took part in seeing as the group were under 19's! The game finished 5-5 after my team came back from being 4-1 down. Highlights of the game was jeff doing a Zidane roulette turn on me and doing many powerful pacey runs, where as I was spreading the ball like clover (butter) and consequently being labelled Gerrard! The game went to penalties and Jeff's team won! Gutting.

A really good session, soccer seems to be gradually growing at the school after a pretty slack attitude from the school towards it when we first came! I think Dourrey is going to volunteer to take their school football sessions which should really kick things off! Without blowing our own trumpet, I'm glad we've made a big impact on the school!

A decent day today!

Just came back from watching united smash Olympiakos 3-0 in the Uefa champions league! Jeff was BUZZZZZING!


All the best

Luke