U-19 team Dordrecht: Day 5: against the Dutch and Colombia
12/07/2011
A day with many ups and downs.
The guys had to high expectation for the game against the Dutch, so after the few first minutes they really got demotivated!
They couldn’t deal with the high pressure, and the nervousness that comes with these expectations.
But from my point of view I saw the guys really get to the next step in their game. They not only fought today, but also found each other at some point and they gave passes or did sandwiches!
This finally resulted in a great break through the Dutch defences and some though fights in the Dutch corners. After this big attack all motivation was lost because of being tired, being frustrated and not having any goals to fight for left!
Between the two games moral was at an all-time low. The guys were eating and drinking and thinking about everything they did wrong, so it was time to cheer them up.
I did this with the situation in front of the Dutch goal, showed them how much they improved from their game and talked about setting goals for themselves.
We decided to focus on puck advantages and disadvantages against the Colombians. We also had some small strategic things set up to try to disrupt their game.
This was the first time these guys were able to even think about this stuff, they are now ready to think about movements, positions and moves to do with the whole team.
And with these goals: disrupt their game and do good situations with puck advantage/disadvantage the guys started.
The difference with this and the last game was huge. If they had fought in this way against the Dutch they would have scored.
Puck-advantage was played out really well some times, we even put pressure on their goal two times.
This was so unexpected from the guys for a team so high-up in their minds that it gave them the motivation to repeat this good-spirit fighting and made this a super-fun game.
Not letting the Colombians score their 20th goal was all the award these guys needed.
A quick cheer for our U-23 friends who had a good but though game against the Dutch (3-4 lost) made the team-spirit even higher.
So with a good talk about setting goals and underestimating/overestimating an enemy we went back to the camping.
We will work on our wall-situation this evening and tomorrow!
Geschreven door Bram Vreven
