Evening.

I put a post out this week on How to Analyse a Football Match as a Coach. It did what a carousel can do, which is give you the shape of the idea in seven slides. This is the longer version, because the shape is not the useful bit. The useful bit is what you actually look for at each point in the game and what you do with it afterwards.

If you coach, you will know the feeling I am talking about. You come off the pitch knowing something went wrong. You can do a great job at describing it. They kept getting down our left, we could not get out, the second half was better for some reason. What you cannot do is explain it, so the team talk is a description of the match with some encouragement attached (which can be useful of course, but we also need to be specific).

I do not think the difference between that coach and one who can explain the game is what they saw. It is the order they asked questions in.

The objective of the game does not change from a Sunday morning under-9s pitch to a Champions League final. Score goals, stop goals, win the match. I wrote about this in How Football is Simply Complex and I keep coming back to it because it is the reference point for everything else. Every principle, every shape and every instruction should be traceable back to one of those two outcomes.

A coach builds that chain downwards. You start from the objective, decide what you believe about how goals are scored and stopped, turn those beliefs into principles and take them down to what each player does. Analysis runs the other way. You see the action, but that’s where many stop. Did you understand the action in the context of the game? So again, you have to work upwards from there to the intention behind them.

So I believe a match has been ‘analysed’ when you can explain four things:

Every team wants to score goals and stop goals, but there are different ways to go about both. Intent is the way this team has chosen. With the ball, do they want to keep it and move the opposition until a gap appears, or do they want to attack quickly the moment they have it? Without the ball, do they want to drop off and protect the space behind them, or step up and win it back as early as they can? When it changes hands, do they go forward or reorganise, do they press straight away or recover? And at set pieces, is there a routine they keep going back to and who is it built around?

You can have a decent guess at all of this from the line-ups before a ball is kicked. Two big centre backs and a target man tell you something. A full back who is really a winger tells you something else. Write down what you expect for both teams. Then watch the first ten minutes with the pen down.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The most common mistake I see coaches make is starting to analyse in the first minute. Something happens, it looks like a problem and it goes down as one. Ten minutes later it happens again and now there are two problems on the page, when in fact there is one thing the team is doing on purpose that has not been given a chance to work yet. You cannot judge whether something is working until you know what it is for, so the first ten minutes are for correcting what you expected rather than for judging anything.

A useful test for whether you have found the intent or only the shape is to finish the line with "in order to". ‘They are keeping both full backs deep’ is a description. ‘They are keeping both full backs deep in order to have four players behind the ball when they lose it’ is an intention. Now you have something to check the rest of the half against. If you cannot finish the sentence, you have found the edge of what you understand about that team, which is useful to know before you start telling your players what to do about it.

Now you look at how those intentions are actually being carried out. This is where most people stop at the formation. A 4-3-3 is not a method. It is a starting position for a method. Two teams in the same shape can be trying to do completely different things with it. Of course structure is important since an optimal structure in a specific moment can cause the opponent problems. E.g a 4-4-2 high press against a team who are building with higher Full-backs and wider CB’s might work better than a 4-3-3, because it means the pressing team has clearer reference points and have closer pressing distances if the ball goes wide (shown below). But it’s not the be all and end all, because your players still need to perform specific behaviours within that structure to ensure it works the way you want it to.

What you are looking for is the repeated behaviour. The thing that has happened three times is the plan, whether the coach drew it up or not. In attack, that is where the build-up starts, who the spare player is and who they are trying to find with the ball. Does every attack go through the left centre back? Does the six drop between the centre backs every time the goalkeeper has it? Is there a winger who never comes inside because his whole job is to keep the full back wide? In defence, it is where the press starts, what triggers it and what they are protecting. Do they engage at halfway or wait for the ball to go wide? Is the trigger a backward pass, a heavy touch, a pass into the full back? When they drop off, is the middle closed and the sides open, or the other way round?

You do not need all of it. Two or three behaviours per team, in attack and in defence, is enough to describe how a match is being played. It is a great deal more than most coaches have at half time.

Which is the other reason this question sits where it does. Half time is when you write it down. What you write is what your team talk should be built from. Not what went wrong in the first half, but what they are trying to do and what we are trying to do, because that is the thing your players can actually change in the next forty-five minutes.

The second half is different, because now both teams know each other and the game becomes a series of problems and responses. One team keeps finding the same space. The other changes their press to stop it, or does not. A substitution changes a match-up on one side. A shape changes and something that was working stops working. This is where you look for what is changing rather than what is happening. It is also where you can still do something about it, because a pattern you spot in the fifty-fifth minute is a pattern you can change in the sixtieth.

At full time, pick the two or three moments that best explain the result. Two or three is deliberate. If you write down everything that happened you end up with a list of events and no idea which of them mattered. The moment the game turned. The pattern that kept producing chances, for either side. And at least one thing that went well, because coaches analyse problems and almost never analyse why something worked, which is why they cannot make it happen again on purpose.

For each one, freeze the picture. Where was the ball, where was the space and where were the players in relation to both. Then ask why it happened there rather than somewhere else.

This is the step most coaches skip. It is the only one that changes anything.

Identify. Compare what you wanted with what actually happened. Say your intent without the ball was to stay compact and keep the game in front of you. What actually happened was that their winger got behind your full back four or five times in the first half.

Diagnose. Explain why it was a problem and why it kept happening. It was a problem because every one of those runs ended in a cut back into the box, which is the chance you least want to give away. It kept happening because your winger was not tracking back and your six was being pulled towards the ball, so the full back was left one against one with nobody behind him.

Solve. What could you do differently. Ask the winger to track the run every time. Ask the six to hold rather than press. Drop the whole line five yards so the space behind the full back is smaller. Or change the full back for one who can run with him. Each of those fixes the problem and each of them costs you something, so pick one rather than all four. Asking the winger to track costs you his running in attack. Dropping the line costs you territory. Knowing the price before you pay it is what separates a decision from a reaction.

Coach. The session that trains it and the one coaching point a player can act on. If you picked the winger tracking, that might be a wide two against two where the attacking team scores double for a cut back, so the defenders feel the cost of not tracking every time. The coaching point is "when he goes, you go".

One problem, one reason, one change, one session. If you finish your analysis with five things to fix, you have just written a list. Pick the thing that you believe impacted the result the most and go and fix it.

Before you put the notes away, you should be able to say, in a few lines, what they wanted, how they tried to do it, where it worked or broke down and what you would do about it. If those four lines come easily, the match has been analysed. If one of them is missing, you know which question to go back to.

I have put all of this on a two-sided A4 sheet, with the four questions, the prompts for each and small pitches for the bits that are easier to draw than to write. The front is for during the match and the back is for after it. The link is at the bottom.

Fill in Intent before kick off. Pick any game this weekend, on the touchline or on television. Write one line for each team with the ball and one without it from the line-ups alone. Then check it after ten minutes and see how much you had to change.

Write one sentence per team at half time. Not what went wrong. How each team is attacking and how each team is defending, from the behaviours you saw repeat.

Pick one moment that went well. At full time, choose something your team did that worked and ask why it worked, in the space, the shape and the trigger. Most coaches have never done this once.

Which of the four questions do you find hardest to answer about your own team?

Reply and tell me. I read every one and I would be interested to know where it breaks down for you.

Until next week,
Lucas

p.s: the Template is free and it fits on one piece of paper. Print it double sided and take it to the next game. Get the Match Analysis Template.