I was not in the mood of being playful today. Our below average (by my insane standards) performance against German school trigger the alert in me that we may be accommodating, relying upon our past laurels. Ok, I am being a bit overdramatic. Let’s recap how was it.
We had two illustrious participations in this practice. One from our Defensive Rock Katy Ni and from our one and only MartaMessi. We started with basic passing drills using the inside of the foot and trapping the ball. While the team was doing that, I’ve practice with Franziska shooting some balls at a specific spot at the goal. Franziska is shooting extremely well and the whole team rely upon her skill as a striker whenever she is in the field.
After the passing drill, I asked them to do the changing directions drill. they sprint to a cone, have to immediately change direction to another cone, change direction again and shoot at the goal. THIS is our weakness now, in my opinion, we take too long to change direction and to actually shoot at the goal.
The last drill was the funnest to watch. It was one-on-one. One attacker against one defender. The attacker has to dribble the defender and the defender has to avoid the attacker to shoot at the goal. Actually the previous drill of changing directions would be of great usage here. If you are able to quickly change directions, you will drive the defender insane and the defender must avoid the striker to reach the middle to shoot at the goal. To make things more interesting, I put Marta against Mikayla and Tehillah. If you can stop Marta, you probably can stop anybody else. It was an excellent drill for both defenders and forwarders.
For the following 90 minutes we had a scrimmage. We played a match of two 20 minutes halves, like what we will face during SISAC. For a long time it was 1 x 1 until by the end, Marta scored 2 goals for the Red team. We played one more segment of 20 minutes and this time the yellow team won, 1 x 0. It was important to see how hard it’s to score when you have the time pressure that SISAC can impose us.
Finally, we practice penalty kicks. Each one of the girls shot 4 times to Bella and 2 times to Mikayla. I have to say I was super impressed with the performance. Most of them were shooting really well. Considering that probably the goalies from the other teams will not be as good as Bella nor Mikayla, I think we are pretty much well set on penalties but we must work hard not to allow a match to go to penalty kicks. Now there is not much we can practice or do to SISAC. All that we could practice or learn for Saturday is done. Now it’s just step onto the field at SAS and show why we are the undefeated Amazon Warriors and show Shanghai the “jogo bonito”.