I was recently invited to observe a training session of the Ajax Under 15s. The event was part of Ajax's outreach and there were about 100 coaches from local teams present, mostly from Ajax's partner clubs. It was nice to see that in terms of timing and content there wasn't much difference between the sessions I run and the sessions the Ajax coaches were delivering. That's not to say there weren't differences, there was a phenomenal attention to detail, an extremely high tempo, and of course the players were of a fantastic quality.
Among the various exericses they put on, two stood out to me, and here's one of them.
Ajax Wave Game
This is a simple wave game. The coach plays a ball to one of the teams, they try and score. The other team tries to take the ball and if successful, they try to score.
If a team scores, they stay on and their opponents are immediately replaced by two new players from the other team.
Done right the tempo becomes very high, most 'games' last less than ten seconds and the exercise is high intensity.
The magic in this drill is in the two players who I've put boxes around. These players are subect to the following constraints.
They have to stay in the marked area
They can't score
They don't swap out when their team concedes
Effectively these players are acting as classic 'target men', the most common way to score in this game is to play the ball in to one of them and make a run so they can lay it off back to you for a tap in. In this way the game generates a good mix of one v one ball skills, passing and movement. I really liked it, and I'll be trying it out with my team this evening.
For a little over five weeks I've been doing half an hour of yoga a day, following the introductory lessons from Manflow Yoga. I've repeated each class daily for a week before going on to the next one. My new plan is to cycle through the classes as a set of five.
Today was the first time in a month I've tried workout #1, and it was a lot easier!
So far I'm enjoying yoga, and I'm pretty sure I'm feeling stronger. One thing that's definitely the case is that my breathing when running has improved. I breathe deeper, and with more control now, which I assume leads to some running efficiency gains.
These Yoga routines target a lot of the muscle groups that the physio has me work on when I acquire one of my semi-regular running injuries. I'm hoping these will stop if I can get into some habits that keep these bits of my body permanently strong.
Will this become part of what I think I'm supposed to call my daily practice? Well, I'm now serious enough about this that the home gym setup has been expanded with a yoga mat and some yoga blocks. We'll see!
Kaos is another entry in Netflix's recent wave of prestige dramas. The basic premise is that the Greek Gods are still with us in the 20th century, living on Olympus and interfering in the lives of mortals. Plus Zeus is played by Jeff Goldblum.
If that sounds like your kind of thing then you should watch Kaos because it delivers.
This isn't the first bit of big TV to deal with old mythology and the modern world. Ian MacShane played 'Mr Wednesday' (spoiler, he's Odin) in American Gods. But that was a series/novel about old beliefs struggling to cling on in the face of modern society. That's not Kaos, Kaos is set in a world where, it is implied, everyone worships the greek gods, because they're real.
And just like the gods as portrayed in Homer, they are jealous and passionate about each other, and largely unconcerned about the affairs of mortals, unless their own interests are involved. Indeed, as the story begins it is implied that the gods haven't been taking much interest in mortal doings, a state of affairs that changes when some Trojan dissidents deface a monument.
As the series unfolds we get reworked versions of a few key myths. King Minos, Theseus, Ariadne, Daedalus and the Minotaur all appear. So do Hades, Perspephone, Orpheus, Eurydice and Medusa. We briefly meet some Trojans, and poor Cassandra. The whole thing is narrated by Prometheus, who sees all from his vantage point chained to a mountain.
Except for the scenes in the underworld, which are filmed in black and white, Kaos is a visual feast, reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. The Greek deities dress and live like modern day meditteranean millionaires; Zeus mooches around Olympus in a tracksuit, with his wishes attended to by a cadre of attendants in tennis uniforms, while an open shirted, medallion wearing Poseidon lives it up on a luxury yacht and Dionysius spends his life in night clubs.
The story focuses around a single prophecy, which impacts three mortals - Eurydice, Ariadne and Caenaeus, all of whom have their own narratives. Indeed if there's a criticism to be made it's that it takes a while for these strands to come together, but by episode four or so things are pretty well joined up, and the plot rattles along to a conclusion that more or less manages the difficult task of resolving enough to be satisfying, while also setting up season 2.
Not a criticism, but perhaps a source of some slight disappointment is the rather limited cast of gods. We get Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and Hades, plus the demi-god Dionysius. We don't get Athena, or Aries, or Nike, or Haphaestus or Artemis or ... Basically, there's a lot of Greek myth and only a small portion of it makes it into Kaos.
Still, that means there's plenty to look forward to in Season 2.
If you've got Netflix you've probably seen the trailers for The Perfect Couple, and the images of Nicole Kidman and a bunch of rich, successful looking people dancing on a beach. Well, I have now watched the series, and to be honest, I'm not sure you should bother.
For five of the six epiodes the show varies from pretty good to excellent. Kidman is superb, tension is built, and in best whodunnit style a mysterious death occurs and is followed by all the principle suspects being contained in one space. In this case not a single house, but the island of Nantucket. The mysterious death happens the day before ordinary girl Amelia Sacks is to marry into the wealthy Garrisson-Winbury clan, and the victim is Merrit Monaco, her best friend, maid of honour and a fashion influencer.
The death is capably investigated not just by an out of town state detective, and the local Chief of Police, but also by Amelia - who starts to ferry evidence and information from the Winbury residence to the authorities. As events unfold the secrets of the Garrisson-Winbury's are dragged into the light, the family start to betray each other, a variety of suspects emerge and tensions rise. It all looks set for some kind of spectacular last episode melt-down.
So far so good. There's no reason why this couldn't have been excellent throughout, a kind of star studded version of Death in Paradise, but in the final episode the writers drop the ball badly. If you don't mind a wave of spoilers this Vanity Fair piece summarises the differences between the novel and the series. Watching the finale, none of the changes worked, not the new characters, not the extra backstory, and not the changes to the big reveal. The end result felt kind of flat and contrived. It didn't help that the episode was built around a series of police interiews in which the principle members of the rich and powerful Garrisson-Winbury's all agreed to talk to the police without their lawyers present, something which seems completely out of character, not just for them, but for anyone involved in a murder inquiry.
But now I know how things panned out in the book I can see why the changes were made, I can't imagine the original ending proving more satisfying than the one we got. And, in the end, none of these characters are going to stay with me. Most of them were unpleasant, but none of them were memorably so, or particulalry villainous. The ones who weren't unpleasant were bland, believable, certainly, but not interesting. In the end, I barely cared about them.
TLDR: If you want a stylish murder mystery about rich people on an island, watch Glass Onion instead.
Nothing makes a training session easier than a good drill that the players enjoy, and this is one of my favourites. It started out as a drill intended to work on shooting and blocking, but evolved into something that's good for passing and positioning as well. Here's how it works.
Objectives
The objective is that all the players involved take a lot of shots in a somewhat realistic situation. There will be a defender, there may be a keeper, there will certainly be limited time. They'll have to move to create their own shooting opportunity.
Setup
Set up a pitch about 16m deep and 10m wide, with two medium size (5m by 2m) goals and a centre line.
Divide the players into two teams of three to five players.
Keepers are optional
Keep a supply of balls in each goal
Rules
Players can only score from their own half
Only one player can go into the opposing team's half at a time
If the ball goes out, restart with a ball on the goal line
Play
The team with the ball have a simple task, create a shooting opportunity for one of their number. The defending team can send one player into the opposing half to put pressure on the ball, effectively turning the game into a rondo. The other defenders can position themselves to block shots.
Adaptions and variations
Limit the number of touches each player can take (3, 2 or 1 depending on ability)
Shots have to be hit first time
Triple points for weak foot shots
With this setup players will usually be shooting from about 10-12m, if you want them to shoot from further out, make the pitch deeper.
You could add more players, and potentially allow two defenders into the opposing half, but it might be better to set up a second drill
Coaching points
This drill provides plenty of opportunity to talk to players about their shooting technique. It also creates opportunities to talk about how you can best lay the ball off for someone else to shoot, and how you can work together to create opportunities to do that.
On the defensive side, there's a lot of transitions, with one player having to quickly choose to 'go' and press the ball, while other defenders can get in position to block shots being taken from near the half-way line.
