How I Improve Goalkeepers
Is this clickbait? Is this honesty? Only one way to find out.
Good morning! I want to talk about a skill I’ve enhanced in a player and how I did it. This is the newsletter where I get to brag about how great I am.
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Neat Reads
Neat Reads is a segment where I share an article or podcast that interests me and relates to our weekly theme.
Look, finally, something to read!
John Harrison and his genius thread
John Harrison is a fantastic analyst who is sharing new and interesting ways to approach goalkeeping statistics and training!
I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’ve taken what John has shared and applied it to our own goalkeeper training here at Ascent. The image below is taken from the thread I shared above. We’ll talk a bit more later how I trained these types of techniques when working on 1v1s with my goalkeepers.
Every Goalkeeper is Too Small
I improved the 1v1 ability of our goalkeepers at Ascent Soccer. We concede so few goals, but the most common chances we give away are created during transition from attack to defense.
So, our goalkeepers face a lot of 1v1s.
The average Malawian man is 162cm (5’3) and the Malawian woman is 154cm (5’).
How can we make goalkeepers from such a (literally) small population? The key is to play to their strengths:
Agility
Athleticism
Decision making
If we work on playing to these strengths, we can begin to fix the shortcomings that come from height.
All of our players at Ascent Soccer are incredibly agile, so finding goalkeepers who move quickly is easy. Athleticism is similar.
Decision making can be improved through training. That’s where John’s data comes in. His research takes away decisions for our goalkeepers. In the example of 1v1s inside the penalty area, we have just two.
By limiting the decisions we need to make based on the strengths and weaknesses of our players, we can simplify training and really focus on what we’re good at. We can’t make our goalkeepers taller, so we need to improve what we can.
Coach’s Corner
Coach’s Corner is a segment where I ramble about training this week and answer some questions I get from Substack or Twitter.
Ramblings
Being a pretty bad goalkeeper myself, especially when compared to the Malawian U17 national team goalkeepers, I wanted to use objective evidence to back my coaching points because I lacked the experience to justify them.
The goalkeepers I work with are incredible professionals and take on coaching points well, with data or not. They genuinely just want to learn and that’s all.
I’m realizing this more and more with players - they don’t really care where you’re from. They just want someone who is interested in making them better at football.
To be honest, coaching goalkeepers was the easiest coaching experience for me.
I think it comes down to less moving parts. In 11 a side training there’s 11-22+ players training. Lots of the coaching points are tactical or idealistic, so getting into technical detail like you might with goalkeeper training is hard.
In goalkeeper training you usually have two to four goalkeepers and yourself. Such a small group makes for easier knowledge transfer and more in depth coaching points.
Q&A
Should you sign goalkeepers in a country where everyone is small?
I go back and forth on this question often.
Yes because great goalkeepers help create good attackers and defenders. You need a good shot stopper to challenge your goal scorers. You need a good ball playing goalkeeper to help the defenders learn to play from defense.
The hard part is finding a pathway for those goalkeepers once they turn 18. They’re too small to leave Malawi, so a career in professional football here is still slightly above the poverty line. It isn’t glamorous.
So, in short I think yes because goalkeepers make more players better even if the goalkeeper isn’t going to grow or have a playing career.
Thanks Richard for the question!
Questions can be asked directly through Substack (see the button below) or via Twitter DMs!
Exercise of the Week
It’s as simple as this. Identify which locations are your engage and block and engage and spread locations and train accordingly.
Once we identified our key locations, we train goalkeepers to make the saves that lead to less goals scored.
Obviously warm up appropriately for this - don’t make this the first exercise of the training session or else your goalkeepers will tear their groins or something.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading this week! What have you done when coaching a player that improved them? Or did you improve a whole team?
I’m always interested to hear your thoughts and ideas so please feel free to send me a message on Twitter or leave a comment above in the Q&A section.
Share this newsletter with a friend or every single person you have ever met.
See you next week!
Where to find me:
Medium: https://medium.com/@cameron-herbert
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CamH___
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-herbert-football-coach/