Weekly Review 3rd – 9th May 2010

Seeing Chelsea win the premier league today made me want to be a football star more. Who gets the chance to win something and share it with tens of thousands of fans in a packed stadium and millions around the world with the same passion for the team as you do. Football brings people happiness, joy and a smile on people’s faces and if I could do that to people then all the hard work is worthwhile for sure.

This week has been the first week where I video analyse players, try to understand why there so good and apply it to my game. I have a book here which I write all the things I see so I don’t forget, I have about a good page and a half written so far. To be honest, sometimes I prefer watching videos and writing things down than going out and kicking the ball around. In the weeks before I’m training roughly 10 hours by myself and it gets lonesome, but probably the main problem is that there’s no structure to the training. I will go out in the garden, put some cones out and dribble, shoot and just do what I feel. Every single day doing that, you go a little crazy so I really need to plan ahead.

By planning not do these things last week:

– Do homework before I do anything else (work on website, play games, etc only exception is football training).
– Go on facebook no more than once a day (includes on my phone)
– Get into bed by 10:30pm each night. (except weekends)

Really helped me be more productive, except next week, I’ll keep my bed time to 11pm so I can do a little bit extra.

First of all here’s the top 5 things that I found through looking in a lot of youtube videos this week:

• The top players are always trying to find space in between opposing players.
• At the edge of the box, an attacker always tries cutting inside and shooting.
• Messi: Runs straight at the defender, makes a move to put him off balance but at the same time leaving sufficient space so the defender cannot make a challenge. Messi doesn’t use tricks, but just runs straight with a simple fast change of direction.
• When running at a defender with speed the defender has to stop, so it’s easier to beat him.
• Messi: When the direction of defenders off the ball is moving in a clear direction (either right or left), he dribbles in their opposite movement which makes it much easier for him to go past defenders.

So my football intelligence has probably taken it’s first step this week to becoming where it needs to be (really good), in the weeks to come I will hopefully see and my coach will see some improvement.

I’m not sure that it’s relevant any more to post what I’ve been training like because I’m better than everyone else in the team now. If I were with a better team, then I think my weaknesses and strengths would really show and be true of me. Anyway here it is:

This Week

Tuesday:
– High speed dribbiling through longer separated cones not very good.

Wednesday:
– Did great with dribbiling through small cones, got good at this through practising at home.

Thursday:
– Left foot passing has improved significantly, I can actually lob the ball with it now! Wouldn’t even dream of that a year ago.
– I can tell Janos really wants me to be a leader in the team.

Saturday:
– I’m almost always out of breath in games because I run alot. I need to learn to conserve my energy more, so I can properly make runs and stuff instead of being too tired to. This is what caused me to play bad in trainings game.

Next Week

Video Analysis Sports