Along with my friend and former colleague Scott, we decided to continue our leadership of the Wirral Met College Football team for the 18/19 season. As we took over around the January of the previous season, the squad and style of play was already set out then so we were unable to make any radical changes, however this season we wanted to try and put our stamp on the team.
Playing Style
From the previous season we knew we were going to lose a few of the better technical players who had left the college, however we still chose to create a style that would focus as much as possible on shorter passin, being technical and teaching the lads to be patient in possession. Being in the region of the country we are, we looked at the defensive style of Liverpool in terms of the general energy levels and high press, and felt that a lot of the lads would be receptive to learning this style as so many of them support Liverpool, so we aimed to implement this as our defensive style. We also decided to move from the 3-5-2 that was used in the previous season and look to play a 4-3-3 and try and be more offensive as chance creation was the issue in the previous season. From this blueprint, we knew that when we held the trials we would need to look for players with high energy levels, who are able to cover distances of 10-20 yards in a very quick pace. On top of this, we wanted players who were technically sound and able to keep possession. We also felt that from the previous season there was something of a divide in the changing rooms which didn’t help performances, so we wanted to keep a keen eye on the psychological traits of the trialists and how they were able to work together as a team. Another idea we decided upon was to get the players to take the warmups once the team was selected. There were 2 reasons for this, 1. It is a good icebreaker and helps players come out of their shell with their team mates, and 2. Players at all levels now prefer empowerment, and responsibility and this would allow them to have that, rather than me and Scott dictating the entire session to them.
Trials-Trial 1
First thing was to advertise the trials to the college. Scott did this by posting the time and date on the college intranet so all students from all campuses were able to see and attend should they choose to. We had around 26-28 lads turn up for the 2 dates which was great for us to see the enthusiasm around the college for football.
Physical Testing
In the first week, all the lads who attended undertook some physical tests. Scott had seen Jurgen Klopp doing a version of a bleep test which involved the Liverpool players doing continuous laps of the pitch with a time limit set, which resulted in a last man standing type scenario to see who was the fittest in the team. We thought something along the same lines would be good to see who was fit enough to make it onto the shortlist, and also from a psychological point of view, you get to see which lads give up when they’re tired, and which lads will power on through regardless of how tired they are. As our lads are amateurs aged between 16-20 years of age, we changed the drill slightly to make it more relevant for that level. The test was done around half a pitch, and was done in several stages. As we had never done this test before, we were unsure of what time limit to set to begin with. We started with 2 minutes, with a 20 second rest before the next round. This turned out to be far too long with everyone completing this easily. The second time around we brought the time down to 1 minute 20 seconds, again with a 20 second gap before the next round. A few here started to drop out which was a good sign, as this was still a generous amount of time to complete this in, even after having 2 minutes to get around the first time. The third time moved down to 1 minute with the same rest time, then 50 seconds, 40 seconds and eventually ending at 35 seconds. All the lads that got as far as the 50 second limit and below had their name put on a provisional list as players to watch out for.
The second stage of the physical testing was around speed. Scott had found some SPARQ testing sheets for football, so we took the 20-yard sprint test from that, and measured each candidate over that distance, with them performing this test twice. The trialists weren’t sifted from this immediately, as there was a lot of data, so the information was input into a spreadsheet on Excel, and then each trialists average speed was found out. From this they were then divided into 3 groups, Quick, Average, Below Average as shown below. (Includes week 2 trialists)
Technical, Tactical & Social Testing
The 2nd part of the trials was around general footballing ability, and seeing who was capable of playing 11-aside football at this level. The players were asked to divide themselves up into Goalkeepers, Defenders, Midfielders and Forwards. From this me and Scott then chose 2 teams. As we knew a few of the trialists from the previous season, we tried to divide these lads up as much as possible and also put them in an unfamiliar team. The 2 teams were divided up, with the Red Bibs playing a 4-3-3 (preferred starting formation) and the Blue Bibs playing a 4-4-2 (secondary formation for the season). As there was around 13-14 players for each side, we tried to make substitutions every 10-15 minutes to allow everyone a chance to impress, and also in other positions. Occasionally we would swap a Blue for a Red, as we thought there may be certain attributes we could see in them that would compliment each other so we wanted to see certain player combinations playing together. Whilst the game was going on we made notes on a few of the players that we felt would be good enough to make the team.
Changes
As this was the first time we had done something like this we felt this went well. We knew there was another trail day coming up the following Monday so we were looking forward to seeing the players again. One thing I feel I would change from this would be to have numbered bibs as it can be difficult to learn 20-25 new names in such a short space of time.
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