Tag: Patterns of Play

Breaking down the phases of the game

by Rhys Desmond, posted in Coach Education, Coaching, Masterclasses, Most Recent

Chances are, if you're getting into tactics and analysis, you've heard the word "phase" or "moment" to describe the events that transpire across a football match. But what are these so-called "phases"? As part of our Intro to Football Analysis course, we break it all down. This article will give you a sneak-preview into the course, set to be launched in Fall 2022. Here's everything you need to know about the various phases of the beautiful game, and how compartmentalizing the game in this manner can allow you to achieve greater success in your analysis.

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The difference between seeing and understanding in analysis

by Rhys Desmond, posted in Coach Education, Data Analysis, Masterclasses, Match Analysis, Most Recent, Player Analysis

When it comes to analysis, it's no secret that the goal is to think on a deeper level, scrutinizing over the finer minutia beyond what you see at first glance. But it's also no secret that this skill takes dedicated time and energy to learn. A lack of deep tactical understanding about the game often comes at a cost to coaches and amateur analysts. They are adequately able to perceive events on a football pitch, but they may be unsure of how to change what they are seeing for the better, or even fully comprehend what they are seeing to the level required. Coaches in my Mentorship Program often ask me - "How do you go from seeing to understanding?" Well that, my friends, is what we're after today. In this series of notes, I'm going to give you a series of images and videos, where you can go from seeing, to understanding. If you've been doing analysis for years, no worries, this will still be an excellent way for you to practice and refine your skills.

I will change your mind about automatisms

by Rhys Desmond, posted in Coach Education, Coaching, Masterclasses, Most Recent, Premier League, Team Analysis

Off-the-ball movement is, of course, the most important facet to the game. But saying that all passing patterns or attempts to make decision making automatic are "stupid" fails to account for the fact that these things don't have to be trained in isolation. After all, if they were stupid, why would coaches like Jurgen Klopp or Ralph Hasenhuttl deploy them as training methods?

Why patterns and context are so essential to analysis in football

by Rhys Desmond, posted in Canadian Premier League, Data Analysis, Match Analysis, Most Recent, Player Analysis

If you're reading this article, chances are you love to analyze football. So allow me to help with your love for analysis with this call to action. Stop taking information from single-match occurrences, or single-match statistics, even statistics over time on their own, as a mechanism for making inferences about the wider context at hand. Recognizing patterns over time, and the wider context behind those patterns, are the essentials behind analysis in football, allowing you to more accurately assess performance, and improve upon performance problems.

Coaching Automatisms – Rehearsed Patterns of Play

by Rhys Desmond, posted in Coach Education, Coaching, Masterclasses, Sport Psychology, Subscriber Exclusives

In the past few years, I have adopted an almost entirely games-based approach to coaching. Everything is based within scenarios and situations players encounter in the game, and related to rehearsed actions on where to be in different situations players encounter on a football pitch. These are what the footballing world call "patterns of play", and what some top managers in the game have dubbed "automatizations".