Chelsea Training

Last Tuesday and Wednesday the two boys completed a Chelsea training camp at Forest Glade. These football camps are great for keeping the kids active and are an absolute bargain in my opinion when you consider it cost £20 for the 2 day course which ran from 9am to 3pm! Brandon was being a bit silly when he first arrived and was clinging to Mummy not wanting her to leave. However once she had gone he soon settled into the football training and seemed to really enjoy it. I felt so sorry for the boys on day 1 as the weather was appalling and it pretty much bucketed down with rain all day long. Its no wonder Brandon wasn't keen to go back for day 2.

 

I was hoping the boys might pick up some tips or some good drills that I could steal for our Saturday training sessions. However when I asked them what they did all day, all they said was play football matches. Slowly they are letting out little snippets of information and as it turns out they did practise a lot more than just straight forward football matches.

 

At the end of the 2 days all of the kids were awarded a Chelsea training certificate and they were given a little Chelsea bouncy ball toy as well.

 

Brandon wearing his Rooney England kit and showing off his Chelsea certificate.

Joshua with his bouncy ball and certificate - looking a bit red faced as the sun decided t come out for day 2.

 

Staying with the football updates today our Forest Glade Tigers played a couple of pre-season friendly matches over in Rush Green, The first game was against their Tigers and was a humiliating thrashing / white wash. I had already warned our boys that they were good and that they were Lion standard with a couple of Academy players, so they were always going to be up against it. Joshua was captain and played in defence which just didn't work for him. He could be a good defender but he just doesn't enjoy playing there and boy did it show in this game. None of the kids really listened to the coaches and after the match their morale was an all time low with heads held low.

 

We had a bit of a stern chat with them before the next game and changed the formation a bit bringing Joshua up in to midfield and dropping Alfie back into defence. The hardest thing we had to do as coaches was to try and lift their morale and get a smile back on their faces. They need to learn to enjoy their football regardless of win, lose or draw. Anyway the new formation worked great, the boys listened to our every word and put in a much, much better performance winning comfortably by about 8 - 3. Its good that we are learning all this before their first league game in 3 weeks time.

 

So we left the event with 1 win and 1 loss. Fortunately the win was the second game and so everyone left on a bit of a high.

 

All smiles after a great performance in the second match. Front row L-R : Lorne, Joshua, Ethan, Alfie and Ryan.