OVER the last month, the GAA has been excellent at providing coaches with ongoing learning opportunities through the GAA Coach Webinar series.

So far nearly 2,000 coaches nationwide have registered for the events and just last night, over 1,000 coaches tuned in to listen to Stuart Lancaster.

One of his key messages for the coaches was, “be yourself, and consistently follow your passion.” You can find out more about these webinar’s through the @gaalearning handle on Twitter. They have some excellent resources for us during these days of home isolation.

I have viewed these days as opportunities to be productive and also an extended opportunity to enhance and grow my learning.

Last Thursday evening, I tuned into Ger O’Connor’s webinar and picked up some invaluable coaching nuggets on transition play in Gaelic football as well as key messages from him on principles of attack, principles of defending, components needed for effective transition, the importance of turnovers and the effective use of analysis. It was top quality stuff and really enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Shane Stapleton of ourgame.ie and he asked would I do four short tactical shows with him via Skype.

The second of those came out yesterday morning and was titled the “Art of Defending.”

I used the tactics board to show the different defensive formations a team might employ but, most importantly, I spoke about the key messages needed to coach good, effective defensive play.

For me, defending in Gaelic is like building a house. You start at the foundation and build out. It’s the same in football, you start at the back and build out.

One of the first points you must consider is where is the first line of engagement going to be. Whether it’s a high press, a middle third press or you decide to drop deeper in a zonal type defence, you still must decide where your players will be engaging first.

If you decide to plump for the high press, everyone must be responsible. The high level of work-rate and discipline must start at 13, 14 and 15 in your team.

If you decide to plump for the middle third press, flooding bodies into the opposition’s set-up zone, you must have high levels of contact and intensity in this area and tracking runners are key.

You will have heard the terminology of match-ups, tagging or spoilers – personnel used to disrupt or negate the opposition’s most influential players. They could be the biggest scoring threats or the players most likely to make things happen.

The good teams and top teams in the country will get their match-ups spot on, they also have the personnel and resources to do this.

Mayo were the closest team to beating Dublin over the past five years and one of the main reasons people felt this was the case was their ability to find quality defenders to negate the influence of Dublin in the final third and in key areas.

Personally I feel we aren’t developing the art of defending during our training sessions enough. A lot of teams now will train with extra defenders to simulate what their forwards might be faced with in a game with most teams operating with plus one or plus twos.

You must, however, ask yourself the question, how many times are we exposing our defenders in training to cope with a one v one situation? We should be doing this a lot more often in my opinion and that doesn’t mean facilitating a tackling exercise in a small grid, one v one. That’s unrealistic, go with more exposure, more space and end it with a scoring opportunity.

Defenders are terrified of two things, space and pace. Expose them to more of this in training and watch the confidence, composure and control of your defenders improve.

This is a wonderful time for us all to skill up as coaches. Keep searching for those little nuggets of coaching advice or information that might give you an added edge when we all return to what we love doing, coaching on the training field, and making a difference.

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