FAI...June 2024 Friendlies v Hungary and Portugal

[Billys Boots]

I think coaching is the answer, but unlike AZ I don't think it's too much coaching, I think that it's a particular type or style of coaching.  I think we've been coached with a 'goal' in mind (object-oriented), score goals/avoid conceding in the easiest, most effective way - long ball, play the percentages, don't get caught on the ball. 

The middle-europeans were traditionally coached to look for flaws to exploit in the opposition - this is an inherently different tactic, in that each 'game' was approached differently on the field.  It also meant that it became possession-based, so the tenets of the 'percentage game', i.e. long ball, play the percentages, don't get caught on the ball, didn't apply.  Players had to become comfortable in possession, have time to assess their surroundings and make clinical decisions.

Other styles were recognisable - Italians developed catenaccio; sitting back, dragging the opposition into attack and counter-attacking effectively ... once. 

I think our style has derived from the British style - there's no doubt that it's out-dated internationally.  All the UK academies recognise this, but they haven't really been effective in changing it.  Changing the style starts with children - it's a long term project.  For example, the current Spanish 'system' is completely different to how Spain played up to ten years ago - it's really the culmination of the impact Johann Cruyff had on the Barca academy system (La Masia) from the mid-1908s, starting with the 5 yr olds.

There's a very good book on the way styles of play and football philosophies developed - Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (I think). 

[AZOffaly]

I think coaching is the answer, but unlike AZ I don't think it's too much coaching, I think that it's a particular type or style of coaching.  I think we've been coached with a 'goal' in mind (object-oriented), score goals/avoid conceding in the easiest, most effective way - long ball, play the percentages, don't get caught on the ball. 

The middle-europeans were traditionally coached to look for flaws to exploit in the opposition - this is an inherently different tactic, in that each 'game' was approached differently on the field.  It also meant that it became possession-based, so the tenets of the 'percentage game', i.e. long ball, play the percentages, don't get caught on the ball, didn't apply.  Players had to become comfortable in possession, have time to assess their surroundings and make clinical decisions.

Other styles were recognisable - Italians developed catenaccio; sitting back, dragging the opposition into attack and counter-attacking effectively ... once. 

I think our style has derived from the British style - there's no doubt that it's out-dated internationally.  All the UK academies recognise this, but they haven't really been effective in changing it.  Changing the style starts with children - it's a long term project.  For example, the current Spanish 'system' is completely different to how Spain played up to ten years ago - it's really the culmination of the impact Johann Cruyff had on the Barca academy system (La Masia) from the mid-1908s, starting with the 5 yr olds.

There's a very good book on the way styles of play and football philosophies developed - Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (I think).

I never said there was too much coaching I said it was the style of coaching.

[Billys Boots]

So we agree - there's a first! 

[Milltown Row2]

We'd bring zilch to the tournament

We'd bring the famous Irish fans though.

They will be there, MoN green and white army

[ashman]

Soccer in Ireland is a branch office of Britian .  Most underage coaching is geared toward getting results (like GAA) and this is reflected in lack of technical ability. 

[seafoid]

I think coaching is the answer, but unlike AZ I don't think it's too much coaching, I think that it's a particular type or style of coaching.  I think we've been coached with a 'goal' in mind (object-oriented), score goals/avoid conceding in the easiest, most effective way - long ball, play the percentages, don't get caught on the ball. 

The middle-europeans were traditionally coached to look for flaws to exploit in the opposition - this is an inherently different tactic, in that each 'game' was approached differently on the field.  It also meant that it became possession-based, so the tenets of the 'percentage game', i.e. long ball, play the percentages, don't get caught on the ball, didn't apply.  Players had to become comfortable in possession, have time to assess their surroundings and make clinical decisions.

Other styles were recognisable - Italians developed catenaccio; sitting back, dragging the opposition into attack and counter-attacking effectively ... once. 

I think our style has derived from the British style - there's no doubt that it's out-dated internationally.  All the UK academies recognise this, but they haven't really been effective in changing it.  Changing the style starts with children - it's a long term project.  For example, the current Spanish 'system' is completely different to how Spain played up to ten years ago - it's really the culmination of the impact Johann Cruyff had on the Barca academy system (La Masia) from the mid-1908s, starting with the 5 yr olds.

There's a very good book on the way styles of play and football philosophies developed - Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (I think).

the English style is a nightmare for the England team manager. The Premier League is very insular and coaching at younger ages tends to be dependent on the coach rather than systematic.
As in Belgium...


http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/06/belgium-blueprint-gave-birth-golden-generation-world-cup-


Belgium's blueprint that gave birth to a golden generation
The team of stars travelling to Brazil as fifth favourites are the result of a coaching revolution that started in 1998
•   o   The Guardian, Friday 6 June 2014 22.00 BST
o   Jump to comments (21)
Belgian clubs are worried by the growing trend of England's elite swooping for their top young talent. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
Not everything that Michel Sablon writes down goes to plan. At Italia 90, Sablon was part of Belgium's coaching staff, and a couple of minutes before the end of extra time in their last-16 match against England, he compiled a list of the penalty-takers. He had just finished scribbling the names when David Platt, in one of those iconic World Cup moments, spectacularly hooked the ball past Michel Preud'homme. "A great goal by Platt. But I was so disappointed," Sablon says. "I threw the list away."
A little more than a decade later Sablon started with another blank piece of paper, this time with the intention of revolutionising Belgian football in his role as the federation's new technical director. At its headquarters in Brussels, Sablon proudly hands over a copy of the original blueprint, dated September 2006 and titled "La vision de formation de l'URBSFA". He smiles when asked whether going to this summer's World Cup finals as fifth favourites was what he had in mind. "For sure, no".
Belgium's emergence as one of the strongest nations in world football has exceeded all expectations. A country with a population of only 11m, with just 34 professional clubs competing across two leagues, has produced – and there are no reservations in Belgium about using this term because it is widely accepted as the only description befitting of their talent pool – a golden generation of footballers.
Marc Wilmots' 23-man squad for the World Cup is replete with stellar names, players who have changed hands for hundreds of millions of pounds and in the majority of cases belong to Premier League clubs. It is also a group that could stay together for years to come – all but six are aged 27 and under. Daniel van Buyten, the Bayern Munich defender, is the only player in his 30s. "It's excellent," Sablon says. "But when those guys come together in one group, I think it's a little bit lucky also."
Eden Hazard is arguably the most talented of the current roster that also includes Romelu Lukakua and Vincent Kompany. Photograph: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty

For the federation, the watershed moment came in 1998 when Belgium were eliminated at the group stage at the World Cup finals in France. Bob Browaeys, who has coached Belgium youth teams at every level and played a major part in putting together Sablon's blueprint, says there was "no unified vision on youth" at that point. He remembers 30 federation coaches, drawn from the Dutch- and French-speaking parts of the country, meeting to discuss a radical change in approach.
"You have to know that at the end of the 90s in Belgium, they all played with individual marking, sometimes with a sweeper, it was 4-4-2, it was even 3-5-2, we got a lot of results with our A team, because we played very organised. But it was defensive, a culture of counter-attack," Browaeys says.
Tapping into philosophies and training methods in the national setups in Netherlands and France, their neighbours in the north and south, as well as at clubs such as Ajax and Barcelona, Browaeys and his colleagues proposed that every Belgium youth team would play 4-3-3 and that work should begin on producing a totally different type of player.
"It was a massive shift but we believed that 4-3-3, at that moment, was the strongest learning environment for our players," Browaeys says. "We felt that we had to develop dribbling skills, we said at the heart of our vision was 1v1, the duel. We said when a boy or girl wants to start playing football, you must offer first the dribble, let them play freely."
By the time Sablon took over as acting technical director in 2001, there was a playing philosophy but little in the way of structure. Sablon provided that and more. His arrival was also well-timed. Belgium had just co-hosted Euro 2000 with the Netherlands and, although they played poorly and failed to get out of their group, they made a tidy profit off the field.
Sablon made sure a chunk of that money was invested in youth development. A new national football centre was built in Tubize, on the outskirts of Brussels. The number of people enrolling on the entry-level coaching course increased tenfold after the federation made it free. Double PASS, a subsidiary of the University of Brussels, were appointed to audit all the youth systems at club level and make recommendations (the Premier League started using the same company nine years later).
Around the same time Sablon commissioned the University of Louvain to carry out an extensive study on youth football in Belgium, which involved filming 1,500 matches across different age groups. He had worked closely with the clubs for some time, holding regular meetings with academy directors to exchange ideas and encourage them to contribute towards the changing face of Belgian football, but not everyone was convinced.
The university's results, Sablon says, were a turning point. "That's why we started with scientific analysis. If we showed the clubs the figures of young boys and girls playing at under-eight and under-nine, and they touched the ball twice in half an hour, no one can say that it's good. We had the proof. We had the figures. And this was people who were known in football. The guy who made the analysis, Werner Helsen, was a player and a coach in the second division, so he's a professor in university but also a real football man."
Michel Sablon was on Belgium's coaching staff at Italia '90 and became the federation's technical director in 2001. Photo: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
One of the findings in the university research was that there was far too much emphasis on winning and not enough on development. There was also evidence to support the federation's theory that 2v2, 5v5 and 8v8 were the best small-sided games to encourage children to practise the skills – dribbling and diagonal passing – that were central to their philosophy of playing 4-3-3.
Determined to get the message through at all levels of the game, Sablon delivered more than 100 presentations. "I gave an explanation with videos and everything. And then I went to the pitch with the coaches who were preparing the boys. It was about four hours in total," he says.
"On one occasion I said to a president: 'I don't start [this presentation].' He said: 'What's happened?' I said: 'I asked the clubs not to put up the rankings for the small boys, from under-7 and under-8.' Can you imagine what it was like with 300 people in the hall waiting? They moved the rankings with hammers and nails. I said to them afterwards: 'Rankings is the wrong way. Make the development of your players the first objective.'"
There were also problems to contend with inside the federation when results suffered. "I was responsible for all national teams and we played 4-3-3 from one season to another," Sablon says. "We lost games, people said: 'Why did we change it?' I was once a member of the executive committee, it was an advantage – I could convince people at the top of the federation. Some would shoot me of course, they said: 'You are crazy.' They said: 'We play European Championship and you pay more attention to the playing system than to be qualified.'
I said: 'Yes, you are completely right.'"
Although Eden Hazard, Thomas Vermaelen and Jan Vertonghen left Belgium as teenagers to continue their football education abroad, crucially the federation was able to have a direct influence on the development of the majority of the country's elite players.
A joint initiative with the government saw eight Topsport schools introduced between 1998 and 2002, with the aim of providing the most talented boys and girls, aged between 14 and 18, with additional training during the normal curriculum to increase their chances of reaching the top. Those sessions – four mornings a week and two hours at a time – continue to be taken by coaches that work for the federation.
The premise behind it is not dissimilar to the Football Association's former national school at Lilleshall, which closed in 1999 because of the introduction of Premier League academies, except the Belgian system has a couple of major advantages. With eight Topsport schools dotted around a small country, the players selected are able to commute from home, the corollary being that they are free to train with their clubs four times a week in the evening.
All of which meant that the selected players were receiving twice as much coaching as they did before. As for the success rate, seven of the World Cup squad – Thibaut Courtois, Dries Mertens, Kevin de Bruyne, Mousa Dembélé, Steven Defour, Axel Witsel and Nacer Chadli – came through a system that many of Belgium's leading clubs have now replicated by collaborating with local schools to increase contact time with their own players.
Jean Kindermans provides a tour of one of the two schools in Brussels that Anderlecht use as part of their "Purple Talents" project, which was launched in 2007 and counts Romelu Lukaku among its graduates. Kindermans, Anderlecht's director of youth, says that the three-times-a-week one-hour training sessions at school, which are exclusively based on the development of technical skills, have made a huge difference.

[Billys Boots]

I understand that the FAI Technical people are obsessed with Belgium seafóid - the new FAI technical plan draws heavily on the Belgian plan.  In fact, there was talk of the League of Ireland linking with Belgian and Dutch leagues in terms of 'graduating' the more technically-able young Irsh players to those leagues rather than the second, third and fourth tiers of English football. 

[clarshack]

I understand that the FAI Technical people are obsessed with Belgium seafóid - the new FAI technical plan draws heavily on the Belgian plan. In fact, there was talk of the League of Ireland linking with Belgian and Dutch leagues in terms of 'graduating' the more technically-able young Irsh players to those leagues rather than the second, third and fourth tiers of English football.

that would be excellent for irish football if it happened.  the british coaching system is seriously outdated.

[seafoid]

I understand that the FAI Technical people are obsessed with Belgium seafóid - the new FAI technical plan draws heavily on the Belgian plan. In fact, there was talk of the League of Ireland linking with Belgian and Dutch leagues in terms of 'graduating' the more technically-able young Irsh players to those leagues rather than the second, third and fourth tiers of English football.

that would be excellent for irish football if it happened.  the british coaching system is seriously outdated.

Same for tennis as well AFAIK.
Irish coaching isn't up to much either.

[thewobbler]

I'll wait and see if Belgium produce a second generation of players before joining in the plaudits.

For all of the media talk of their golden generation, and how Belgium are the best thing since sliced bread, their world cup team last year had a number of starters - Fellaini, Mirallas, Origi, Witsel - plus more-or-less an entire bench, who wouldn't get within a fart's whiff of playing for England, had they been born there.

[Esmarelda]

I'll wait and see if Belgium produce a second generation of players before joining in the plaudits.

For all of the media talk of their golden generation, and how Belgium are the best thing since sliced bread, their world cup team last year had a number of starters - Fellaini, Mirallas, Origi, Witsel - plus more-or-less an entire bench, who wouldn't get within a fart's whiff of playing for England, had they been born there.

Did your man Ali play for England last week? Do you really think Fellaini and Miralles wouldn't have played for England?

[thewobbler]

I'll wait and see if Belgium produce a second generation of players before joining in the plaudits.

For all of the media talk of their golden generation, and how Belgium are the best thing since sliced bread, their world cup team last year had a number of starters - Fellaini, Mirallas, Origi, Witsel - plus more-or-less an entire bench, who wouldn't get within a fart's whiff of playing for England, had they been born there.

Did your man Ali play for England last week? Do you really think Fellaini and Miralles wouldn't have played for England?

Those lads are starting in a World Cup knock out game, not getting 3 mins at the end of non-event qualifier.

[Esmarelda]

I'll wait and see if Belgium produce a second generation of players before joining in the plaudits.

For all of the media talk of their golden generation, and how Belgium are the best thing since sliced bread, their world cup team last year had a number of starters - Fellaini, Mirallas, Origi, Witsel - plus more-or-less an entire bench, who wouldn't get within a fart's whiff of playing for England, had they been born there.

Did your man Ali play for England last week? Do you really think Fellaini and Miralles wouldn't have played for England?

Those lads are starting in a World Cup knock out game, not getting 3 mins at the end of non-event qualifier.

Fair enough. But you said "playing" for England.

[seafoid]

I'll wait and see if Belgium produce a second generation of players before joining in the plaudits.

For all of the media talk of their golden generation, and how Belgium are the best thing since sliced bread, their world cup team last year had a number of starters - Fellaini, Mirallas, Origi, Witsel - plus more-or-less an entire bench, who wouldn't get within a fart's whiff of playing for England, had they been born there.

England's population is 5 times that of Belgium.
And the Belgians had a long time in the doldrums.

At least they are thinking strategically.
the job of England manager is a thankless one. By the time the players get to him it's far too late. 

[Billys Boots]

I recently read, though I don't know how true it is - the England manager has a pool of only around 50 Premiership players he can pick from.