1v1 Wednesdays: a well-rounded test for your players

I do something with my groups called 1v1 Wednesdays.

It is 20 minutes to half an hour and is pretty brutal, if I’m being completely honest. It’s really good for their tactical understanding and they’ll work on a bit of technique - but psychologically is probably the bit, for me, that really stands out.

On the next page is an example - a 20x20 grid with five gates inside it. For the gates, you would have two cones that are maybe two yards apart.

You might have three or four pairs within that session – essentially, the idea is that every gate you go through, you get a point. Obviously, if the other person wins it, they then try and get through the gates. If you dribble out of the grid, it’s the other person’s ball.

A little added stipulation is if you can do a hook turn back through the gate, that gets you two goals – and you can’t go through the same gate twice.

What you might say as a player is, ’I’m going to go round this gate, do my hook turn back through, because I’ve sold them on where I’m going to go, and that’s going to get me two goals’.

That might last for 45 seconds or [up to] two minutes. It is really hard work – it sounds quite easy, but actually to play for that period of time in a 1v1 is really hard work.

You then say stop, on the whistle. My next job is to say ‘winners find another winner, losers find another loser, go again’. That’s essentially what that practice looks like, for 20 minutes. Maybe start off with it being 10 minutes, and work it up as their fitness gets better.

What you are essentially asking the players to do is understand the tactical elements of the game – how are they going to get through all these gates as quickly as they possibly can?

When are they going to use their hook turn? When is the right time? Because if they just turn into someone without looking, they’re going to lose it.

And when you do ‘winners find another winner, losers find another loser’, you end up with two individuals that haven’t lost yet. They eventually keep finding one another.

Psychologically, [it’s about] ’when I lose, what’s my next action?’. Are they going to get really upset by the fact they’ve lost this game? Or are they going to go, ’You know what, I’ve got another game in 20 seconds. I need to go and find another partner, reset, figure out what their strengths are and we need to play again’.

That for me is a really nice way of them quickly understanding the game, identifying strengths, psychologically testing them and physically testing them.

My job within that as a coach is obviously to manage the fouls so it doesn’t get out of hand.