| Beating a Packed Defense |
Shooting from distance and attacking wide spaces work best
By Sigi Schmid
Whenever a soccer team has a fair amount of success, it will soon confront a unique problem. The opponents will play a more defensive game in order to give themselves a better chance of defeating you. This occurs at the youth, college, senior, professional and internationals levels of play. The question becomes how to still defeat this opponent who is playing with a “packed defense.”
Patience is a vital element in defeating a defensive-oriented team. However, patience is usually a partner of maturity. At the youth and college levels, maturity and patience are hard to find due to the inexperience and age of players. As a result, more upsets occur at these levels.
The key element in defeating any team, and certainly a defensive team, is to exploit the space behind the defense. Exploiting this space versus a defensive team can be accomplished by:
• Counterattacking before the defense gets organized.
• Drawing the opponent’s defense away from its goal by shooting from distance and maintaining possession (passing), causing the opponent’s defense to become impatient and come out.
• Attacking wide spaces and getting behind the opponent to make crosses and create scoring chances.
Shooting from distance
Accurate, dangerous shots will force an opponent’s defense to put pressure on the ball and therefore move forward. As it does this, openings are often created for central combinations (one-two’s, takeovers, double passes, etc.). Shooting from distance can be part of the training.
Exercise 1. A basic exercise to warm up is the shooting box outside the penalty box. Create a grid 30 yards wide by 20 yards long about 10 yards outside the penalty box.
Inside this grid each player has a ball and a number. When a coach calls out a number, that player (player 3 in the diagram at right) dribbles out of the grid into the zone in front of the penalty box and takes a shot.
All the other players continue to dribble and move within the grid until their number is called. Once a player shoots, he or she retrieves the ball and returns to the grid.
Exercise 2. Here we slightly alter the format utilized in the first exercise. When the player’s number is called (player 4 in diagram), they find space and hit a one-two pass to the coach positioned at the top of the penalty box and finish with a shot.
Exercise 3. Shooting against a packed defense becomes very realistic when we add defensive bodies into the drill. A good exercise for this is the long-shooting game. Use an area that is the size of a double penalty box in length and the width of a penalty box. Divide the area in half.
In each half you have four defenders and two attackers. All players stay in their half. The defenders maintain possession in their half looking to free themselves for shots on goal. Shots are occurring in the 18-25-yard range usually. Let’s take the ’s as an example. The forwards are looking to defend or re-direct shots as well as trying to find rebounds. Additionally, a defender can play the ball into a forward, who then plays it back to an defender for a shot on goal. Otherwise, the four defenders try to interpass the ball looking for open shots. When the ball turns over, the O’s do the same. The size of the grid and the number of players can be adjusted depending upon the age and ability of your team. This exercise is realistic and very good for the development of long-range shooting (above diagram).
Attacking wide spaces
In order to have successful wide play, your team must work on the tactics of combination play in twos and threes. The overlap, double-pass, takeover and one-two must all be part of their understanding.
Additionally, changing the point of attack (switching the ball) from one side to the other and dribbling need to be understood.
Here are two team exercises that can enhance your team’s ability at creating wide play.
Exercise 4. In a grid the width of the field and a length varying between 50 and 80 yards, depending upon age and numbers, create a channel on each side along the width of the penalty box. As the triangles attack, for example, two triangles (attackers) are allowed in the outside channel and only one O (defenders). Thereby this game always creates 2 v. 1 opportunities on the flanks, enhancing wide play. When the O team wins the ball, the same rules apply.
Exercise 5. In this exercise, the grid is similar in size to the one above. In each attacking half, two larger cones are placed about 25 yards from the endline and 20 yards in from each sideline. A team can only conclude an attack on goal by first playing around the outside of one of the two cones. This game forces wide play as a means of creating scoring chances.
Shooting from distance and attacking wide spaces are two vital means that can make a difference between successful teams and ones that “pack it in.”
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the September-October 2002 issue of Soccer Journal. Sigi Schmid is the head coach of Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders FC . He was coach at UCLA at the time this article appeared in the Gil Sports newsletter. His UCLA teams were 322-63-33 and three times were NCAA Division I champions during his 21-year tenure.
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