Tosh Farrell Soccer Magazine June 2020 | Page 10

How did you decide to get involved? Well, I went away, gave it some thought and decided the best approach would be to do a survey. Lets ask players and coaches what do they think. Not just coaches at the grassroots clubs. We spoke to a lot of the ex pros and top coaches asking what their experiences were growing up on the streets and how they developed. The biggest factor that came back was the amount of informal games that they played back then and the amount of time they spent at it. Most of the top players we spoke to mentioned playing every night on the street most playing up to 16 hours a week. 2v2, world cup, kerbie etc, lots of variations of the game, sometimes with a goalkeeper sometimes without. What were you seeing at grassroots practice? Drill, drill, drill ! With a game being squeezed in maybe with 5 minutes of the session left. This was a culture across the board. Coaches felt the need to coach rather than set up challenges that would make the player go away and say I want to be good at that and motivate them to self practice. The kids don’t play anywhere near the hours their predecessors played. In fact our survey showed kids were playing about two hours per week informally. When you compare that to 16 hours in years gone by it’s frightening. We also ask the kids questions like, would you prefer the coach to give you the answer to a problem or would you prefer to find the solution to the problem yourself. The vast majority said they would like to try sorting out the problem out themselves. But the big one to which 95% were in agreement was answering the question, would you want to be told what you can do better, or would you want to be asked what you could have done better. 95% said they would like to be asked.