Friday, February 1, 2008

Soccer Training Tips

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There are certain soccer training tips that the coaches usually overlook. One of such important aspect is to drill to help the players on their way.

  • Make Variations
  • When it comes to teaching about the drills to help the players on their way, it is very important for the coaches to make variations of the drill and put rules on themselves to make it more difficult. One of the greatest drills is simply weaving in and out of a set of cones.

    In this method, you need to first set up a cone. For this, to start with, you can place about 10 cones in a line about three yards apart. Now, have the players dribble in and out of each cone without touching or knocking over the cones.

    Make sure that the players are not trying to touch the ball too far away from the line of cones either. When the players are going back through the line, instruct them to make sharp turns.

    Keep your watchful eyes open. It is only after you find that the players have mastered this, you should have them vary the way that they dribble through the cones. Tell them to just use the right foot and try dribbling.

    After they have practiced it, tell them to just use the left foot and try dribbling. Then, tell them to use alternate feet, where they should try to touch or pass the ball to the left and then to the right as they weave through the cones.

    It is also very important for the coaches to teach their players how to combine a shooting or trapping drill with a dribbling drill. The coaches must keep in mind that the key to such training is to keep it flowing and not have a lot of stops and starts and too many people standing in line. The most obvious reason is that no coach would like the players to get warmed up and then get cold and bored waiting in line.

    Make sure that you run the training blended with these Soccer training tips because this is one of the best ways to prepare a winning team.

    Andre Botelho is a recognized authority on the subject of soccer training tips.
    His web site, Youth Soccer Drills, provides a wealth of informative soccer articles,
    resources and tips for soccer coaches, parents and players.

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    Soccer Lessons You Need to Know

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    You are probably reading this because you are interested in coaching soccer lessons. Well, you have reached the right place. Here, I am going to present some important factors when you are considering individual soccer lessons.

  • Concentrated Format
  • Every coach must keep in mind this important thing, while teaching individual soccer lessons. He should keep the session in a concentrated format. By concentrated format, I mean you must be brief but clear in your instructions.

    One to one soccer coaching proves very helpful, especially for Soccer players between the ages of 8-14. If you teach them technical ball skills in a nurturing 1 on 1 environment, they are very much likely to benefit more.

  • The One Hour Session
  • The session must be in a concentrated fo0rmat, but make sure that you are dedicating the session?s attention to your student for approximately one hour.

  • Specific Lesson
  • Each session must include a specific lesson. Furthermore, it is important for the coaches to make these sessions tailor-made for the individual.

    To start with, the coaches may focus on the skill sets, such as Ball control, passing and receiving, dribbling, shooting, defending, balance and coordination.

    After a few such sessions, once you find that the players have developed a strong grasp of these skill sets, continue to the more advanced focus. The more advanced focus may include specific skill sets, such as Juggling, dribbling moves, finishing, plyometric strength training, and heading.

  • Written Player Evaluation
  • A written player evaluation is very important to keep a watch on the individual player?s progress. An expert coach always completes a written player evaluation.

    What is more, it is not enough to complete this progress report, but it is equally important5 for the coaches to mail this written player evaluation to the students so that they could get an idea with the statistics that how impressive are their skills.

    Last, but not the least, it is also a great idea if the coaches give the student a "take-home" skill assignment. The coaches must design these assignments for the Soccer lesson with the player's improvement in mind.

    Andre Botelho is a recognized authority on the subject of soccer lessons.
    His web site, Youth Soccer Drills, provides a wealth of informative soccer articles,
    resources and tips for soccer coaches, parents and players.

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    Is Manchester United The Greatest Soccer Club?

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    The Manchester United Football Club is an English Club that was formed in 1878 and was formally known as Newton Heath LYR(Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway). They have been nicknamed the ?Red Devils? and ?United?. Their home ground is the Old Trafford stadium located in Greater Manchester. The capacity of this stadium is 76,312 and is of only two stadiums in England, which have been given the UEFA 5-star rating. The current chairmen of the club are Joel and Avram Glazer and Sir Alex Ferguson has been the manager of the club for the past 20 years and the current captain is Gary Neville.

    Manchester United have had to fight their way to the top to be the best soccer team in England. They have had their share of hurdles in the past like the bombing on Old Trafford during the Second World War and the Munich air disaster which claimed the lives of eight players of United when the British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on take-off at Munich, Germany. Manchester United were recently defeated in the semi-finals of the UEFA Champions League on the 2nd of May 2007 by AC Milan where Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite A.K.A Kaka scored the opening goal of the match only to defeat United by 3-0 at San Siro. But one should not forget that Manchester United is the first and only team to win the Treble. They did this in the year of 1998-99, when the Red Devils won the Premier league on the final day by defeating Tottenham Hotspurs 2-1, which was enough to put them ahead of Arsenal who defeated Aston Villa 1-0. United won 2-0 against Newcastle United in the finals of the FA Cup. United also went on to win the UEFA Champions League by defeating Bayern Munich in the final 2-1 during injury time. This was considered to be one of the greatest comebacks ever witnessed in the history of football. The Red Devils have won the English Premier league 16 times, the FA Cup 11 times (a record), the League Cup and the UEFA Champions League Cup twice and the Intercontinental Cup and the European Super Cup once.

    Sir Alex Ferguson tried to sign Ronaldinho in the year of 2003, but the deal fell through. This was because the Manchester United and PSG could not agree upon the fee and lost the bid to FC Barcelona who signed Ronaldinho for ?50million. Manchester United?s current first team line up consists of goalkeeper Edwin van der sar; defenders Gary Neville (captain), Patrice Evra, Gabriel Heinz, Rio Ferdinand; midfielders Michael Carrick, Cristiano Ronaldo, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs (vice captain) and forwards like Wayne Rooney and Luis Saha. Their current starting line up has skilled substitutes on the bench comprising of players from all over the world. They are the Premier League Champions of 2007 with only one match to go in this season and Chelsea six points behind them at second place. Manchester United is to face Chelsea in the finals of the FA Cup on the 19th May 2007 at the new Wembley Stadium.

    Considering The Red Devils achievements in the past and the way they have grown as a soccer club and the way they have handled the difficult situations, they can be considered as the greatest soccer club of all time.

    Bob Zenoti is a freelance writer of various on-line content. He has recently provided content for a soccer fan site for Cristiano Ronaldo.

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    The Uefa Champions League Is The Ultimate Soccer Competition?

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    L?Equipe a French sports journalist initiated the ?European Cup? in the year of 1955. The tournament was formally known as ?The European Cup? and was renamed ?The UEFA Champions League? during the 1992-1993 season. The competition is now managed by the Union of European Football Association (UEFA). It is a seasonal competition where 32 of the best clubs from all over Europe compete to become the best soccer club in the whole of Europe. The clubs compete to achieve the most coveted title in football, ?The European Champion Clubs Cup? as it is now known. The matches take place on Tuesdays and Wednesdays all around Europe. The winners of this tournament qualify for the International Cup, which is played against the winners of South America?s official league ?Copa Libertadores?. Real Madrid CF was the first team to win the European Cup, since then they have won the league eight times. This includes the five consecutive wins from 1955-1956 to 1959-1960.

    So what is it that makes the tournament so special?

    The top domestic clubs of every European country that are members of the UEFA are allowed to play the game. The only country not participating in the competition has been Liechtenstein, as they do not have a domestic league.

    The game has evolved a lot since L?Equipe initiated it. He wanted to have an all-European club competition while the UEFA?s founder members wanted to have an all-European national competition. In 1992-1993 not only did the name of the tournament change, the way it was organized was also different. An initial group stage was introduced in addition to the knockout matches, and a qualifying round was introduced. This was done so that more teams from other nations of Europe could participate. The number of teams participating shot up from eight teams to thirty-two teams. Now, even clubs that finish from second to fourth in the most competitive domestic leagues are also eligible to participate in the tournament. UEFA coefficient is the basis on which the associations are ranked. This is done to obtain the number of places in the competition for every association.

    The tournament is divided into stages:
    The group stage: qualifying stage.
    The knockout stage: second round, quarter, semi and the finals.

    The group stage consists of eight groups each comprising of four teams. In the group stages the teams have to qualify against three other teams to make it to the top of the group. The first and second teams in each group qualify to play the second round, which is a knockout round. Each team has to play twice, (once at home and once away) at every stage except the finals. The final does not have the two-leg system. The venue for the final is decided by UEFA two years in advance.

    The introduction of the group stages helped clubs and players alike to learn and understand the way clubs and players of various other nations played soccer.

    Why do people love to watch the UEFA Champions League?

    The UEFA Champions League is the best place where millions of people get to watch their favourite players like Cristiano Ronado, Ronaldinho, Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite, well known as Kaka in action. People not only get to watch their favorite players but they also get to watch the best clubs from all over Europe compete against each other throughout the year.

    Bob Zenoti is a freelance writer of various on-line content. He has recently provided content for a soccer fan site for Cristiano Ronaldo.

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    How To Make A Profit From FREE 1X2 Soccer Picks/Tips

    Click Here To Know How To Play The Best Soccer of Your Life

                    

    Home In On The Best Picks And Tips From Hundreds Each Week. Many football (soccer to our American friends) picks and tips sites provide only a few picks/tips a week, some only one, with many charging huge amounts for the privilege. In this article I will show you how to get the very best from hundreds of free and low cost picks and tips every week by answering these four questions.

    What if you were able to pick the absolute best picks from hundreds of weekly picks/tips greatly increasing your chances of success? What if those picks/tips are chosen based on the past performance of similar picks/tips and those picks/tips are all created using a combination of several tried and tested statistical methods? What if you could know whether draw predictions, home predictions or away predictions are more successful for the English Premier League, the Italian Serie A, the German Bundesliga, or many other leagues across Europe? What if you could do it all for FREE or very low cost?

    Well now you can. If you're interested then read on.

    Some Tips Are Better Than Others. Using well established statistical methods along with automated software it's possible to generate hundreds of soccer tips every week for many leagues, theoretically you could cover all of the major leagues in the world. So what, why would you want to do that? Surely many of the tips will be grossly inaccurate but on the other hand many will be correct so how can you determine which will be successful and which not? It would be much better to just concentrate on one or two matches and predict their outcome by intensive and careful focused analysis.

    On the face of it the above responses that I have seen over the years have some merit and deserve careful consideration, there is a good argument for focussed analysis of a single match with the aim of trying to predict its outcome. However, consider this, when a scientist runs a statistical analysis how many data items do they select as a representative sample? One, two... or more? When carrying out statistical analysis the more data you have to work on the better the outcome. For example, if you wanted to calculate the average height of a class of school children you could just take the first two or three as a sample. But if they are all six feet tall they are going to be highly unrepresentative so obviously you would get all their heights and calculate the average from those, the result is a much more accurate answer. It's a simplistic example but hopefully you see my point. Obviously you can apply that argument to a single match by collecting past results for each side and carrying out statistical analysis techniques using that data, but why restrict your analysis to that one match?

    We know that if we make hundreds of automated tips, based on sound tried and tested statistical methods, that some will be successful and others won't. So how do we target in on the best tips, the ones most likely to be correct, and how do we do it week after week? Well, the answer is to keep a record of how each and every tip performs, some tips are better than others and we want to know which ones. At this stage, if your thinking how can I possibly calculate all of that information for every game, in every league I want to cover, and do it every week, then don't worry I'll show you how it's all done for you at the end of the article.

    Results Are Not Always The Same. Simply keeping a record of how each of the hundreds of tips we make actually perform against the eventual result is not enough, what we need now is a way of analysing that data and grouping it logically to get the best from it. Results are not always the same, in other words a tip that shows one possible outcome for match A and the same possible outcome for match B will not necessarily produce the same result (i.e. a correct prediction or a wrong prediction). Why is this? Well there are hundreds of reasons why and you will never be able to account for them all, if you could you would no doubt be a millionaire. When trying to predict the outcome of a match you may look at such qualitative things as the current injury list of each team, the team sheet, morale of the players, etc. We can also look at Quantitative factors using our statistical methods to predict the outcome of the match, so we may look at such things as past performance, position in the league, or more tried and tested statistical methods such as the Rateform method. We can use all of this information to predict the outcome of match A and the outcome of match B and still not have the same result, part of the reason for this is, as explained before, that we can not account for all the factors in a match, it's impossible. But there's something else, something we can account for which we have not yet thought about.

    When we look at one match in isolation we only look at the factors concerning each of the two teams in the match, but why not expand this to look at how the other teams they have played are also performing? 'Why would we want to do that?' I hear some of you say. Because results are not always the same. Let's say our prediction for match A and match B is a home win (forgetting about the predicted score for the moment). What else can we take into account to improve the prediction of a home win? We can look at the performance of all the home win tips made for the same competition that the match is being played in and then make a judgement based on that new information. This is great as it gives us an extra factoring level to take into account that we did not have before.

    Looking across all the home win predictions in a single league will give us a percentage success rate for home wins for that particular league, but we can improve on this even further. We can do this by doing the exact same exercise across many different leagues and obtaining a percentage success rate for each league. This means we can now look for the league which produces the best overall home win prediction success rate and look for home win predictions for the coming fixtures. By default we know that that league is more likely to produce a successful outcome for a home prediction than any other. Of course we can employ this technique for away win and draw predictions as well.

    How Tight Is The League? Why does this difference between the leagues occur? As with trying to predict the outcome of a single match there are many factors that make up this phenomenon, but there are just a few major factors that influence why one league should produce more home wins through a season than another. The most obvious of these could be described as the 'tightness' of the league. What do I mean by 'tightness'? In any league there is often a gap in the skills and abilities of those teams consistently at the top of the league and those at the bottom, this is often expressed as a 'difference in class'. This difference in class varies markedly between different leagues with some leagues being much more competitive than others due to a closer level of skills throughout the league, 'a tight league'. In the case of a tight league the instances of drawn games will be more noticeable than with a 'not so tight league' and home wins will most likely be of a lower frequency.

    So, let's say we are interested in predicting a home win, armed with our new information about the 'tightness' of leagues we could make predictions for matches throughout a season for as many leagues as we can manage, and watch how those predictions perform in each league. You will find that the success of the predictions will closely match the 'tightness' of a particular league, so where a particular league produces more home wins then we will have more success with our home predictions. Don't be misled, this does not mean that just because there are more home wins we are bound to be more accurate, what I am taking about is a success rate in percentage terms of the number of home predictions made which has nothing directly to do with how many actual home wins there are. For example, let's say we make one hundred home predictions in league A and one hundred in league B, and let's say that seventy five percent are correct in league A but only sixty percent in league B. We have made the same number of predictions in each league with differing results, and those difference are most likely due to the 'tightness' of each league. League B will be a 'tight' league with more teams having similar levels of 'class', whereas league A has a wider margin of class when it comes to the teams within it. Therefore we should pick out the best performing league concerning home wins and make our home win selections from that league.

    We Have To Be Consistent. Of course there is more to it than that. It's no good just taking each tip and recording how it performed we have to apply the same rules to each and every tip made. You have to make sure that the parameters you set for each predictive method you use (e.g. Rateform, Score Prediction, etc.) remain constant. So choose your best settings for each method and stick to them for each and every prediction, for every league, and for the whole season. You must do this in order to retain consistency of predictions within leagues, between leagues, and over time. There is nothing stopping you using several different sets of parameters as long as you keep the data produced from each separate.

    If you are wondering what the parameters are then take the Rateform method as an example. Using this method we produce an integer number that represents the possible outcome of a match (I'm not going to go into detail about the Rateform method here as that's the subject of another of my articles). You can set break points that represent a home win and an away win, so if the resulting rateform output for a match is higher than the upper breakpoint then that match could be deemed a home win. Similarly, if the resulting rateform output for a match is lower than the lower breakpoint then that match could be deemed as an away win. Anything that falls in-between is deemed a draw.

    Do It For FREE Or Very Low Cost.

    So how do I get all this information without having to calculate it all myself?

    Footyforecast.com has been delivering this kind of information, week in week out, on its website since 1999. It covers eighteen leagues across Europe including; English Premiership, Scottish Premiership, Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga, Dutch Eredivisie, Spain, France, to name but a few. A total of seven different statistical methods are used to determine the outcome of each game played in each league, and a comprehensive record of how each method in each game performed is kept. A lot of this information is totally free to site visitors but for a small subscription fee you can gain access to the data from all eighteen leagues. Apart from how each tip performed within its respective league Footyforecast also provides the league tables of how each league has performed in successfully predicting outcomes of games. The league tables of prediction performance are produced for home win predictions, draw predictions, away win predictions, and for overall predictions and are invaluable tools to the soccer punter when deciding where to target their European soccer predictions. You can visit the Footyforecast website by using the link below:

    http://www.footyforecast.com

    So there you have it. Hopefully I have shown you how to target in on the best leagues in order to raise your chances of success when predicting 1X2 results, and, although I offer no guarantees, I'm fairly confident that this method will improve your profits.

    Malcolm Nossiter MSc is the site owner of the popular Footyforecast website which has been delivering hundreds of 1X2 tips since 1999. Footyforecast has a large following of satisfied subscribers and visitors. You can visit by using this link: http://www.footyforecast.com

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