Steven Poacher with one of the winners from their recent sevens blitz

LAST Friday I was responsible, for the fifth consecutive year, for organising and coordinating the prestigious Peadar Barry Cup Schools 7s competition.

The competition has been in operation for well over four decades now and is seen in Down as the Kilmacud of schools’ football.

It is for U-15 pupils (Year 11) and I had a total of 16 teams with squads of 10 players participating in the competition, 13 different schools in total, and it was a real festival of football.

Nearly every post primary school who positively promotes GAA in Down attended along with St Paul’s, Bessbrook and the tournament was kindly hosted again by the An Riocht club, who do a fantastic job in lining out and marking four pitches. Huge thanks must go to the club secretary Joseph Donnan and also to the four referees on the day, Neil, Paul, Declan and Turlough.

The format of the competition is pretty simple; there are four groups of four teams with the top two in each section progressing to the Peadar Barry Cup quarter-finals and the bottom two in each group entering the Pat Doyle Shield quarter-finals.

After a wonderful couple of hour’s football played in testing conditions, St Malachy’s, Castlewellan reversed the result of last year’s final and beat St Patrick’s, Downpatrick in a dramatic final by a single point, 1-06 to 1-05.

There were great performances from Conor McNulty, the St Malachy’s goalkeeper, who was the stand out performer on the day and wong player of the tournament. Team capatain and Kilcoo man Shealan Johnston was also brilliant. The brother of Down stars Jerome and Ryan, he scored a decisive goal in the final.

When I went home on Friday evening I did a bit of reflecting on the tournament and even though games were only seven minutes each way, there was a serious amount of great skill on show.

There was excellent blocking, tackling, passing, handling and a mountain of scores and entertainment and really got me thinking of the benefits of playing 7s football with younger teams.

How many more of these blitz type formats could we use at a younger age to promote the game? I think of Spain in soccer, interestingly, players from u-7 level play 7 aside small-sided games right the whole way to u-12 and it is not until u-14 that competitive full-sided games are introduced.

The early years are spent on the young player’s technical development and their ability to handle the football and the results pretty evident when you consider the country are regarded as being probably the most technically and skilful based senior players in the world.

When we compare this to England and Ireland where players are just not technically good enough, there is a reason. There is too much emphasis on competitive leagues that don’t meet the needs of the children.

There’s no fun with an over-emphasis on winning driven by the pushy parent and the focus is taken away from skill development as a result.

Maybe as GAA coaches, we can take something from the Spain Soccer model, maybe we should be looking at using 7v7 games from an earlier age and possibly keeping them until the young player is at least 14 with the emphasis not on winning but on development and skill enhancement?

The benefits of playing 7v7 games are unprecedented in comparison to 15v15.

Here are just some of those benefits:

• – Players get more opportunities to express themselves
• – 7 v 7 Improves players technique on the ball
• – Helps build a player’s confidence quicker
• – Creates and improves decision making
• – Increased number of touches on the ball
• – Increased number of scoring opportunities
• – Quicker transition from defence to attack and vice versa
• – Really good fitness builder with the ball at the core

Obviously these are just some of the many advantages but it is also important to remember seven’s training alone will not improve every aspect of the real game.

You do need 15 v 15 games to experience for example positional awareness and other aspects you wouldn’t get in a sevens environment.

Don’t limit yourself to playing a simple 7 v 7 game into two goals; there are loads of different games you can use to keep variation in training.

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