As part of our new campaign #BeTheCoachTheyNeed, we have invited a number of experienced and highly-regarded coaches to review sessions on our platform, and explain why they think the content represents the gold standard in soccer education
Carl Wild is a highly-experienced emerging talent coach who has worked at Manchester City's Academy as well as Chester City, Stoke City, and Manchester United's schools programs. He has also held developmental roles at the Football Association.
In this article, Carl was speaking about Anthony Limbrick's session on Forward Runs to Support Play, filmed at Southampton FC - view the session here.
Carl said: "I like practices that are busy in terms of a bit of chaos, and I like practices with a lot of freedom, so this session was great for all that. There was traffic, in terms of players coming across each other, so the ball had to be manipulated - when to dribble and when to run with the ball, which I thought was fantastic."
"Lots of opportunity for players to practice the topic, which I thought was great. When I looked at the set-up I did get worried that it might be a little bit too structured, but it wasn't, in terms of which mannequin to go for - I thought that was really really good.
"Could we have narrowed the focus even more? He's talking about forward movement with the ball and without the ball, so with younger players maybe I'd narrow it down to one or the other. But the information Limbrick gave was really good and I thought his coaching manner was fantastic. The set-up was perfect."
Carl was originally speaking during a conversation with The Coaching Manual as part of our Coaching Focus series and can be found here.
He concluded: "I'm a big advocate on direction. Practices need to have direction. You need to be able to get to somewhere, it's the whole purpose of having the ball in football, it's an invasion game. There's got to be an end product at the end of it. There's a time and a place for a rondo. We always talk about stretching in terms of the width of the pitch but there's not as much emphasis on stretching the play longer. We're not doing enough work on that."
What do you think about this particular session, or any session on our platform? Take a look around and let us know what you think. You can watch the full session here and come to your own conclusions.