When we took over the as the management team at Largs, there was an obvious need to get points on the board as quickly as possible.  Given our League position, that was the number one priority.  Although relegation might actually have worked out better for Arnie and I in terms of managing the expectation of others, it was not what we wanted or were willing to accept.

The overarching goal though which will dominate our time at Largs Thistle is the need to continually develop and progress the players as individuals which will ultimately lead to the enhancement of the squad. As we don’t have pots of spare cash to splash around, Arnie and I try to coach, explain, demonstrate and teach the players what we believe is the right way for them to play. This can be achieved in a several different ways.

First of all, there is the coaching of the players as a main group.  This is generally the main technique that we use as, due to the part time nature of Junior football, we don’t have the hours available to diversify our approach the way we would like.  Unfortunately due to these time constraints, we can only affect a small part of their development in this way and I see this aspect as more of a chance to maximise the player’s ball familiarity as much as we can and also to maintain/improve the fitness levels depending on what stage of the season we are at.

An offshoot of the group coaching is to break the squad down into separate positional groups and coach them on a role specific basis.  I’ve only touched on this briefly so far with the squad whereby I split them into four groups which consisted of strikers; centre midfielders; wide players versus defenders and finally goalkeepers.  The strikers worked on shooting and finishing; the midfielders on passing and movement; 2 groups of defenders and wide players on 1v1s and the goalkeepers worked with Andy Jack our goalkeeping coach. 

I firmly believe that this could be a good way to push the development forward at a more rapid rate however it is a very intensive coaching strategy which needs eyes on every group, all of the time, so it has its drawbacks due to our limited number of coaches.  I am keen to work on this more often when we get the opportunity so it is one for the future really as opposed being useful to us right now.

Like the role specific coaching, I would really like to work on an individual basis to develop each player individually but again time constraints and the needs of the group work against us on this. The best we can hope to achieve here is that if an obvious coaching need is identified then we can work with the player for ten or fifteen minutes after training each night to smooth out the rough edges.

Positional sense on the pitch is a very important need in players, both in an individual sense and as a team and the players have made some good progression here.  We struggled for a while last season to keep our formation correctly on the pitch and too often players were getting caught out of position which left us vulnerable.  This was mostly corrected in the dressing room by explaining to them as a team, and individually, where they needed to be and what they needed to be doing.  I have no doubt that at Junior level, an organised and well drilled team that executes the basics of the game correctly more often than not will win much more games than they lose.

We have worked on our formation on the training pitch a good few times as well so that players could envision what we were trying to get across whilst on the playing surface.  We found that it’s not just enough to tell them what we want, we also have to show them and walk them through it.  We also tried a few drills such as defence versus attack on one half of the pitch but I found that it was very fake in comparison to a real match and therefore the jury is out for me on the benefits of it.

As well as the traditional coaching methods, I went for an interactive approach at the start of the season using a coaching app, the iPad and a TV screen to demonstrate what we were looking for but I’m afraid it went over too many heads for it to be a tool that I would use on a consistent basis at the moment.  It’s apparent that we still need to walk before we can run in relation to that but it is a useful tool which I’ve earmarked for the future.

As important as the other aspects of coaching was the need for us to get inside the heads of the collective squad and change their way of thinking in a competitive sense.  This was one reason Arnie and I had been successful in our Junior careers and it was important that the players started to understand this.  We had to be more competitive in relation to the opposition and also against each individual opponent.  Too often we were standing off opponents and giving them time to hurt us instead of harassing them and forcing them into mistakes.

We tried to achieve this various different ways by asking, demanding, pleading, shouting, etc, and to be honest I’m not sure what it was that particularly worked.  The trigger for it turning though was when Gary Fleming scored with a deflected shot against Pollok just before half time to bring us to only a goal behind.  For the next ten minutes everyone on the pitch started harassing and pressing the opposition and it was like someone had switched a light on.  Having been very comfortable for a while, you could see that Pollok weren’t enjoying it all of a sudden.  We emphasised this at half time and the players must have collectively had the footballing equivalent of a nitro-glycerin explosion as all the information we had been throwing at them merged together because they’ve continued in much the same vein since then, barring a few bumps in the road.

Developing the competitive aspect of the squad, added to the much improved fitness levels, clearly caused us to have a huge jump in the level of our performances which has thankfully continued onto this season.  There is no way that we can take another big step up as quickly as we did last season so the test that remains for us all now is continue exploring in order to find ways in which to add a little quality on a regular basis either individually or collectively.  When the players brains have eventually evolved from primate to human in the near future then I’ll bring the iPad back out and try to drag us into the 21st century!