This session is designed to improve a team’s threat when counter-attacking and it’s all about gaining an advantage by promoting a positive attitude when winning the ball back.

The purpose of this training session is to encourage the team to retain possession and build play from the back. The players enjoy this session because it is competitive, goal-oriented and directional, with an emphasis on our end product and creating chances to score. It’s also very important to involve the goalkeepers in this session because it helps them to work on their ball control and distribution.

In every game, we aim to be dominant in terms of good possession and good movement. So, this session is about players adopting learned and thought-out positions involved in transitions between defence and attack.

This is actually one of the easiest principles to coach – it doesn’t require complex instruction, just players being willing to ‘know a role before playing it’.

This is a training session that incorporates quick combination passing, positional awareness and intelligent decision-making. It’s important to practise this because receiving and passing are core skills, and they are fundamental to the success of every football team.

Preparation is essential, as is practising what we play and how we play. Players must have seen the situation before it occurs – in this instance, that means always looking up before passing and receiving.

This session is about the creation and application of the counter-pressing moment as an offensive weapon. It looks at recovering possession in the shortest way and time, by creating ‘hectic situations’ in the opposition formation. We want to attack the opponent non-stop when we have the ball, when we lose it and when the opposition have it…