Coaching Attacking Transition Principles – Tactical Theory

This session will aim to create opportunities for players to work on attacking transition principles.

We will encourage them to initially seek to break lines and play forward into players who have support.

However, we will also encourage them to recognise when this isn’t possible and instead have them retain possession and stretch the pitch both horizontally and vertically.

This tactical analysis will provide examples for coaching attacking transition principles.

It will give examples of three practices and analyze how these practices should be run and what coaching points can be derived from them.

These practices are transferable to a wide range of tactics for it looks to bring out learning for basic principles in this moment.

Exercise 1

The first part of this session will allow players to experience a high volume of turnovers and experiment with different approaches, whether through dribbles, immediate passes forward, or using a third player to create opportunities to succeed in playing forward.

Quite simply, the aim of this game is for the possession team to work the ball from one end to the other.

It works well for rotations if there can be three sets of pairs with the two pairs in the middle playing against one another whilst the player on either end acts as the target players/neutrals.

After a number of sets or a set amount of time, the pairs can rotate, giving a new matchup in the middle and different end players.

The practice should start with the ball being played into the attacking team by one of the end players.

The attacking team should be prevented from using a third player to allow them to play through, with the third player only coming live once the ball has been turned over.

Until that point this plays out as a 2v2.