Individual Training and First Team

The U-18 team didn't train today since they went to college for their prerequisite education. We therefore didn't train with them, but that didn't mean that we didn't do much football today. In the morning, we worked on shooting and shooting technique individually. We did drills such as passing with a back spin and a curl to begin with. Then, we moved on to some accurate shooting by having to shoot from different angles at tiny goals. Following that, using the same goals, we volleyed the ball. Finally, for that training session at least, we did some passing, overlapping and shooting all at once.

Personally, I believe that shooting is something I should improve on, despite being a defender. I therefore found this training session very good as it gave me new ideas of how to practice my shooting. Perhaps I can even introduce them back in Hong Kong.

After lunch, James and I had a very lucky opportunity to watch the first team play a "friendly" game against Wrexham. It was brilliant watching professional players from the sidelines. The amount of communication is tremendous and it's no surprise why the coaches in Hong Kong keep telling us to communicate more. I watched the right back of Blackburn Rovers, Bradley Orr, to learn from his movements and positioning. After the game, we got even luckier in that we got to take a picture with Blackburn Rovers manager, Steve Kean. We even exchanged a few words afterwords.

After the game, we came back to the Academy to do another hour of training. This time, it was much less physically demanding. We started by doing some more passing, overlapping and shooting. Then we calmed down and did some free kick practice. We tried shooting from different angles with different types of kicks such as curves, top-spin, etc. This session was good as well as it helped me learn new exercises as well as practice different ways to kick the ball.

The football training didn't end yet. We went to the Senior Training Centre, just like yesterday, to play with the U-13 and U-14 teams. Most of the time we played a match or keeping possession of the ball so it was good practice for skills training. Some of my passes were slightly bad but overall it was a fun experience.