Another much needed training session amongst ourselves. After our thrashing the wee before, we were struggling to figure out what was going wrong from that fall out. One thing that came out from the fall out from Westway last week was the idea of the "2nd Game" (the 2G). I think that will make a massive difference to the more competitive games as we would hopefully separate them out from the more relaxed group games on a Thursday.
I'm always saying that there are a number of reasons for our defeats, but the main one is fitness. That's not saying that we don't have ultra fit players, Jan and Billy for two. But as a team, you are as strong as your weakest link in a small-sided game. We had some big discussions and a lot of the team think that fitness is an excuse and that we can't improve as a team.....I completely disagree.
Lemme break it down.
If we are as fit as we say we are, then there's no physical excuse to not track back and not man-mark. So it's laziness when these things happen over an over again. If you're willing to accept that, then there's improvement to be had. People need to track back, we need to stay 100% alert and always man mark their men. I personally think we're not doing those things because we don't have the stamina to constantly run, to man-mark and track back. That's fitness.
Also, when we attack, we have the ball, and when you have the ball, your own ability is on show. But this is about scoring goals. If we park this for the moment, and only think about defending and conceding goals. Then I believe the footballing ability required in defending is very limited. It's about numbers, closing down, and I truly believe that fitness is a major factor. With improved fitness comes improved performances. We just need to be honest about our performances, but not always look for reasons when they are staring us in the face. FC7 is about hard choices. In the direct aftermath of a defeat, we can all get a little too harsh on ourselves, so everything has to be measured. We're a little too black and white at times.
I think 2G, is a massive step forward.
Initially we were looking to try out new things in these training sessions, but it's hard to say if it really works. I think for the players who sign up for 2G, it could be really important, but as a team, we only want to have fun and the idea of improvement tends to diverge from that.
This game was fun, and the result was close but I'm not sure we're getting as much out of this in terms of competitiveness and going forward as a team in that sense. I enjoy these games, its the founding principles of FC7, but we have grown and at our core, we want more. The 2G is important, massively important.
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