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Getting a Silent Team to Talk

I’ve spent thirty-five years standing on sidelines where the wind cuts through your jacket like a knife, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that most of the “expert” advice on how to coach communication on the pitch is absolute rubbish. You see these fancy tactical manuals telling you to implement “verbal cues”

The Target Man Only Works if Someone Runs Past Him

I’ve lost count of how many “tactical gurus” on the internet try to tell you that knowing how to use a target man requires a complex web of geometric passing lanes and high-level spatial awareness. It’s absolute rubbish. I spent twenty years watching coaches try to implement these fancy, theoretical systems, only to watch their

Why Possession Percentage Tells You Almost Nothing

I was standing on a touchline in mid-November last year—the kind of afternoon where the wind cuts right through your waterproofs and the pitch is more mud than grass—watching a lad’s U14 side dominate a game with 65% possession. On paper, they were the superior team; in reality, they were just passing the ball in

The Complete Guide to Organising Away Travel

I’ve spent half my life sitting on damp plastic seats in coaches that smelled of stale Lucozade and broken dreams, trying to get a squad of teenagers to a fixture three counties away without someone losing a shin guard or their temper. Most of the rubbish you read online—those glossy, over-produced “complete guide to away

Substitutions as a Tactical Move, Not a Rest

I’ve sat on enough freezing touchlines to know that most pundits treat a substitution like it’s some grand, mystical chess move played by geniuses in expensive suits. They’ll drone on about “restructuring the shape” or “altering the verticality,” but half the time, they’re just dressing up a desperate attempt to fix a mess they didn’t

Using Rpe to Track Load Without Any Technology

I’ve spent thirty-five years watching coaches chase the latest shiny gadget, convinced that a £500 GPS vest strapped to a teenager’s back is going to tell them something their own eyes can’t. They’ll show you a graph with red spikes and call it “data,” but they completely miss the point of what’s actually happening on

Teaching Players to Look Before the Ball Arrives

By Desmond FairbrotherJuly 24, 2026Training

I’ve sat through enough coaching seminars in drafty community halls to know that most people treat “scanning” like it’s some sort of mystical superpower you can unlock with a fancy iPad app and a colored cone. They’ll throw a dozen buzzwords at you, talking about “perceptual cognitive load” and “spatial orientation,” while your players are

Watching a Match and Seeing More Than the Ball

If you think you need a subscription to a data-mining site and a degree in mathematics to understand how to watch football more analytically, you’ve been sold a load of rubbish. I’ve spent thirty-five years on touchlines where the only “data” we had was the look on a lad’s face when he realized he’d left

Changing Your Shape Because the Scoreline Changed

I was standing on a touchline in mid-November, watching a lad who’d been untouchable for seventy minutes suddenly turn into a passenger because his team had gone two up. The opposition was throwing everything at them, the wind was whipping through the goalmouths, and my midfielders were chasing shadows like they’d forgotten how to walk.

A Wellness Check That Takes Thirty Seconds

I’ve seen enough “performance analysts” in shiny tracksuits try to sell clubs on expensive GPS vests and complicated data dashboards that require a degree in mathematics just to read a graph. It’s absolute nonsense. If you’re standing on a touchline in the middle of a freezing November afternoon, you don’t need a spreadsheet to tell