Football

For the next sport in this series of ‘the sideline scoop’, I will be covering football. Football is a sport that I manage to play 1-2 times a week. I often train during the week and play 5 a side every Monday night.

Midweek Training

Our midweek training session kicked off with a series of dynamic stretches to warm up and loosen our muscles. This routine typically mirrors professional warm-up exercises, ensuring we're properly prepared for the intense drills to follow

I feel this video is a good example of dynamic stretches that we carry out at the beginning of each session, we often follow a routine very similar to this either adding on or swapping out a couple where possible. Once these stretches are finished we moved around with the ball at our feet just going in and out of cones to get a feel of the ball at our feet, once we finished this we moved in to the main session:

For the first drill we carried out it involved receiving the ball from the coach and keeping it within the cones with your first touch, from here we released the ball aiming for the set up goals. We did this from different angles with different passes getting fired in to our feet. This was about getting a good first touch and the pass off at game speed.

In the second images we can see that there are hoops and cones set up in front of the net. This drill was set up to revolve around weak foot finishing. For the coaches the cones are just standing points but for the players these cones help the player to create an angle to get a shot off. We would start off at the cone and take 2 steps back, We would then open our body up to receive the ball and get a shot away with our weak foot. We did this drill at all of the different cones as to practice getting the shot away from all different angles.

We then ended the session with a game of football tennis, this adds an element of fun to the session whilst at the same time keeps our touch and control of the ball sharp.

This was quick round up of my midweek training session.

Monday night 5 a side:

Every Monday night i play 5 a side football with my friends in a student league at powerleague in Glasgow city centre. Playing under the team name Sub Standard Liege FC. We use this league as a way of just being able to relax whilst playing football with my friends, we do not take this too seriously as we see it as a fun activity. We often show up 10-15 mins before kickoff just to warm up and we then play. We normally bring around 7 players so we can do rolling subs to ensure one is too tired.