The interesting part of this squad is not many of these players have actually gone through the NC steps especially crucially with SAP not sure with Derrick but not Armenakas.

With the next batch i expect to see a sharp increase in players that have gone through SAP.

But when comparing with the world's best we still have got some work to do, especially whening identifying and solving football problems that's the big thing i have learned when comparing ourselves to the world's best teams.

Edited by Barca4life: 10/11/2015 12:32:13 AM

This is what the SAP curriculum writer was emphatic about.

What pleased him, since the days of Kewell, he has rarely seen any Oz underage players beat players 1v1 in attacking duels. The fact Derrick and Armenakas were doing this, was an improvement.





Edited by Decentric: 10/11/2015 12:24:35 AM

The arguments advanced are that there is a problem because they have not been dominant against what - some of the best teams in the world. I've said this before, but where were the European powerhouses at the end of this tournament?


Where were Germany, Italy, England, Portugal, France, Spain and Holland?

In fact where were Belgium?

I can't remember the results but this team (I think, unless it was the younger under 17 cohort?) played two close games against the USA and England not too long ago that were streamed via the US Soccer Federation. The English team were supposedly European champs or runners up to Holland at the time.

They will say they follow the NC philosophy. ;)

Well i guess its put into some perspective then, in fact also not every kid in that team has gone through that phase in their development at most 6 or 7 players in that squad have gone through the SAP coaching which funny enough actually doesnt reflect on the NC given the players have come from many different pathways throughout the country and overseas.

At least every NPL and soon to be a-league club will have a SAP licence so almost every kid will have experienced this type of coaching which is crucial.

But this still doesnt stop discussing the flaws of the team and players ability in terms of their game intelligence and still need to improve technically, but we are least improving slowly but surely.

Given we have made huge changes in the last 6 years its not too bad.



Edited by Barca4life: 10/11/2015 12:13:42 AM

I have an Idea
Why dont we ask the coach in detail how he wants his players to play and what style and his personal philosophy on football. then just sit back and judge if he did that or not.
Wow that would be a new idea.:-k
beats blaming everything and everyone else. age cheats for fxxx sakes

If the coaches aren't winning then time for something new. I've seen a lot of unsuccessful coaches for the youth teams. Ange was one of them, maybe they need a gig at A-League level before they go coaching the younger guys cos they seriously don't have any balls

We are questioning the ability of the coaches and staff not the players and not even peter de roo.

For one or two people who've perplexingly indulged in Shadenfreude about what they deem to be inadequate performances by the Australian Under 17s, I've caught up with one of the FFA SAP curriculum writers in the last few days. He is one of the top youth coaches in the country.

The Under 17s who just played this tournament have only had 1 year of SAP coaching, before their NTC programs.

The next cohort who've just played the Asian matches have only had 1 or 2 years, depending on the state they live in.

The idea is for player to have 4 years of SAP, 1 year of Skilleroos, before they are eligible for the NTC programs.

So in all probability, the players now , even though they've improved on what we've had before, will be much better when they've had 4 years of SAP, 1 year of Skilleroos, then enter the NTC programs.



Edited by Decentric: 9/11/2015 11:35:07 PM

Moral of the story : if you have a talented 5 or 6 yr old move to Mali or Nigeria asap , forget the COE , NC, SAP or any amount of acronyms that make up Aus football ....... Just get outta here :)

Many of these young African players go to European clubs from quite a young age and receive their training in the European club system. That would be the case with under 19's. At under 17 level they presumably are products of local clubs and systems- but are desperately trying to attract the attention of European scouts and agents.

Edited by localstar: 9/11/2015 11:48:32 AM

They mention about the level of coaching and most importantly the level of opposition they receive, Fozz was quite quiet in the end there is a rumour he might be involved with the national youth set up soon.

But fair play to Nigeria, no shame losing to them they are a class act above the rest of the pack.

Fozz and Genc offering their thoughts on the failings of the COE and the FFA curriculum.

Heresy!

Congratulations age cheats. 2 nil victors.

Some people will push harder playing small sided games than in fitness training, you can't generalise.
If someone is lazy in a game and walking a round then getting them to jog or climb a sand hill means they get fitter.
The other issue if a player is older your better putting them on low impact fitness training

Agree with this statement. Finishing isnt improving while other areas of the game are.

Benjamin in another thread highlighted power as a problem to and this seemed plausible.
power is diagonal long balls to the feet and the speed of passes along the ground to the feet.
vietnamese youth have incredible power and finishing since they have opened their arsenal academy. The ball is moving through their team much faster than ours from what i saw. They had great finishing too and out classed us. These are plausible areas to improve.
as for tactics i think we produce tactically strong players at senior level so not worried about that
as for organization this i think can wait till senior level but only wsw seem to be able to be organized to a world class level. Not sure why
I hope the ffa look at the first two areas highlighted. Personally im not sure how to improve these areas. As a country we are definitely still learning

Quickflick

there is no doubt that a fitter player will have their technique shine through an thatsprecisely what we hope will happen within a 6 to 12 month period when they get minutes for an a league club consistently.
But there is a difference between pure fitness training and technical training.
Pure fitness training involves not having a ball up your feet - sand dunes beep tests etc
all fitness training requires a ball at a players feet by definition.
it is possible to build up some level of fitness with technique building training - a lot of the time you are running in small sided games. But ultimately optimizing for technique will sacrifice fitness levels.
As i said in another post even a small amount of pure fitness training can amount to an entire year less of development during the golden age of learning. Time that can never be recovered.

Innocent until proved guilty.

Not everybody has a birth certificate or has the correct birth certificate. Not their fault. If they say they're whatever age and the scan attests to that then the onus is on the person claiming they're not that age to prove it.

Besides the Nigerians looked about 16 or 17 to me (not that I'm a good judge) so cannot see what the fuss and sour grapes are about.

But having said that, even if some of these players are 20, they are still very good footballers

I guess maybe that some of these players wouldn't have birth certificates, so their FA could get some that say they are a couple of years younger then they are. Countries have been caught out doing it before

You are both arguing different things and you are both right.

They have their own wrist bone scanning, so they can check all their players to see if they can pass the wrist bone tests.
Mali is a lot poorer than Nigeria though.

No, I'm not. grazorblade said that those who think levels of fitness are important to technical ability have lost credibility. I comprehensively rebutted this.

You've missed my point, as has grazorblade. My point- technical ability suffers without sufficient levels of aerobic fitness.

Do you dispute this?

What you refer to has little do with what I'm talking about. I'm talking about levels of aerobic fitness. Puberty (especially after the age of 16) has not got much bearing on this.

Of the people I played with at U15-17 level, the fellas with the best levels of aerobic fitness were some of the smallest.

Also, some of the quickest and most agile in the team were also the smallest and not the most muscular.

I agree with you and grazorblade and you that strength is less important at that age as it will even out later. But what both of you misunderstand is that it's a different story with aerobic fitness, speed and agility. Small kids, white kids are not disadvantaged in this respect. There's no excuse.

So Nigeria and Mali have made the final, both 3rd world impoverished countries with what would seem like limited football infrastructure,

How have they done it ?

BTW I thought the implementation of our technique was also poor and would like that to be reviewed and would not be surprised if people were sacked.

You're missing his point. Players' physical abilities tend to even out as they get older, but at youth level there is a greater discrepancy between the physical attributes of some players compared to others due to puberty. Also some players peak early in terms of physical development and are worse as seniors than say a small kid with great technique who will develop physically later.

Precisely.

Leaving aside misinterpretations of how technique is tied in with tactics and fitness and appalling selection choices, the players did NOT demonstrate the correct technical aspects of play focused on by the National Curriculum for the vast majority of the four matches. Appalling first touch for openers. And tactics were seriously bad a lot of the time.

Yet excuses are made.

Edited by quickflick: 7/11/2015 11:01:10 PM

A couple of points.
Saying that just because Germany/France/Holland etc didn't make the final that we are some how in a comparable situation is strange. These are countries with proven track records at senior level and therefor with a proven youth development pathway. We are not. We are finding our way with the first generation under this curriculum and have yet to discover if we have implemented a successful strategy. It may be based on what those countries do, but we don't know yet if we have been smart enough to unravel exactly what it is that helps them produce star teams. As such people will analyse and criticize and call for reviews etc

It is great we made the final 16. However, losing does not prove we are improving just because in the past we won, with what some consider regressive football. There are lots of reasons about why you lose, technical teams can also lose to technical teams, physical bullies can lose to technical teams and visa versa dependent on multiple factors. We did not lose to Nigeria because they were bigger and scarier than us

Finishing is technique. This is something that we are seemingly poor at at all levels. Inability to perform technique at some kind of speed or under pressure is still a failure of technique. Controlling pace is great, but if you can only slow a game down, then we're pretty one dimensional. How we performed had flaws, and I don't believe that playing 'Our game' means that we should cop 6 goals. Getting sunk by that much is the sort of thing that gets national coaches sacked, even if by World Champs.

A lot of my criticism has been centred around what I consider a failure of technique and smarts. A team with good technique and good organized pitch smarts will have little issues with a team of giants who will simply be left grasping at shadows. Teaching a smarter, tactical game right from the get go is easier than trying to retrain the game mentality of kids when they turn 18. The tactical aspect of the game was sorely lacking at times. A lot of these guys train together at the AIS, as a team how did they perform, not simply at the individual level. There were other technical aspects of the games that were lacking, I've mentioned them before.

I don't mind that we didn't win the thing. Our performance could have been better, that is the thing. I don't expect them to play like seasoned seniors, just that there were flaws in their game compared to other teams

Christ, grazor!

With all due respect, you really don't get it.

Technique doesn't exist independent of tactics or fitness.

Let's break this down even further.

If you can't walk (an aspect of fitness), you can't possess the technique to trap a ball in a tight space and to use your next touch to take it away from your opponent, can you?

That's the extreme, but it has been necessary to draw it out that far.

If a player has really piss poor aerobic fitness, he cannot execute technical application of various moves.

FACT!

grazorblade, please tell me how you expect a lad who can barely stand up straight to have his head up, to trap a difficult ball perfectly, to weight his passes correctly? How does he magically do this?

Do you know any swimmers? A number of my friends are swimmers, or did well at high school level swimming at least. They'll tell you that as soon as your fitness is exhausted, you lose your technique. Watch a bloke with great technique but appalling levels of aerobic fitness. After a hundred metres his technique will look crap.

Why do you expect this to be any different in football?

I also suspect you don't get how easy (time-wise) it is to get to the required levels of fitness. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is the go. It takes no more than twenty minutes to do a good sesh.

I can accept your idea that, because Germany has thousands of full-time players, they have a bigger talent pool and thus access to better athletes.

But did you notice that Germany's players were fitter? This means that Germany's coaching staff probably had comprehensive fitness programmes. Did the German players' technique suffer? I doubt it. You say that time spent on fitness is time wasted on technique? How is that Germany have managed to spend enough time on both fitness and technique? Why grazorblade can we not focus on having adequate levels of fitness?

We admire the German, French, Dutch football systems. Do you think their youth players are unfit? I should fucking think not. I don't see any of their players moving around lethargically.

And don't forget, we're just talking about how inadequate of levels of aerobic fitness limit technical ability.

Have you considered that certain aspects of technique require high levels of athletic ability?

Speed and agility are part of the equation for more advanced technical things. As is co-ordination. Do you think somebody with no athletic ability is going to be adept at 1 vs 1 maneouvres (which are part of TECHNIQUE!). Look at players like Benzema. Look at the co-ordination they possess and the turn of speed. These things are necessary for the execution of technical maneouvres.

grazorblade, I've been coached by blokes who've coached at a very high level in places like Holland and England. I can promise you they punished us in terms of our fitness training. It was torture. But it was worth it. It meant that for the entire match we could execute our technique properly.

Anybody thinking that technique exists on some abstract plain independent of fitness, tactics or (and for some parts of technique) athletic ability, is kidding themselves.

Edited by quickflick: 7/11/2015 10:29:03 PM

Edited by quickflick: 7/11/2015 10:52:13 PM

Germany , I'd say as a guess ?