How to Win at 5-a-Side: Take Your Team to the Next Level

To the players of Red Star White City, shame on you all

Contents

Foreword

Preface

1 Introduction: Winning in a nutshell

2 The Rules of ‘Classic’ 5-a-side

3 Defence and transition

4 Attack

5 Goalkeeping

6 Playing as a team

7 Fitness, Psychology, Fun

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Five-a-side is probably the purest form of football, and perhaps the most frequently played, and yet it’s rarely written about – so it’s great to find a book that encapsulates its unique qualities. The beauty is that there is less space, so everyone is more involved in the game, with its end-to-end nature. It’s about technique rather than power, and the small-framed goals help hone finishing abilities. If the legendary skills of Brazilian is down to futsal, then the next-best thing the rest of the world has is the 5-a-side.

When I was 12 or 13, and went to the best clubs in the area, I excelled in training (5-a-sides) but lacked the physicality to impose myself anywhere near as much in proper games. At that age I was quick over short distances, but not longer ones. I was technically excellent, with both feet, having played from the age of eight with kids two years older than me, but I was easily bullied out of what was a very physical game in the 1980s. The beauty of the smaller-sided game was that, if you were a striker, you weren’t starved of service. There were no long periods waiting for things to happen.

I loved 5-a-sides because I could get lots of touches, and have plenty of shots at goal. I could turn in tight spaces, and once away from an opponent there were rarely long races towards goal. As someone who was only average height, and not particularly strong or brave, I didn’t have to worry about the aerial side of the game with the ball kept below head-height. It favoured technical players. And as someone who scored goals by aiming for the corners, the smaller goals benefited my style – as opposed to those who just whacked it with power.

Also, I would have been a terrible central defender at 11-a-side, but in 5-a-side I could hang back and read the game, nick the ball away from an opponent and charge forward.

When chronic illness forced me to give up all sport at the age of 28, the thing I missed most was 5-a-side. Sixteen years later I’d trade all my success as a writer to be able to play football again.

Paul Tomkins,

author and lead writer for the Tomkins Times

Preface

‘What utter nonsense! One might as well say table tennis is the poor relation to Lawn Tennis!’

R. W. Elliot, Know the Game: Five-a-Side Soccer, 1973

Is this book for you?

Yes or probably. And all the best marketing lies you’ve read about the book hopefully encouraged you to think so. Ultimately it’s true. If you play any small-sided soccer/football game, whether 7-a-side on a full pitch, futsal, inter-office indoor soccer, top-level minifootball or classic social 5-a-side in an astro cage, this book will help you think about your game and improve it, because the questions of how to win and the nature of attack, defence, space, possession, teamwork, communication and technique remain the same for all the variants. However, let me cover what this book is not for: 11-a-side.

Small-sided games – which I will refer to as ‘5-a-side’ throughout for convenience (and to dodge the football/soccer quagmire) – are games in their own right. But they exist with a heavy shadow over them. The game from which they all descend, involving a staggering 11 players per side, is considered by those on high, and many of us players, as the real game. Professional teams and academies, accredited football coaches and schools all use small-sided training matches as a method for acquiring skills useful in the larger game. I am not interested in that at all.

This book has higher hopes. It is not here to help you be a better 11-a-side player. It exists for a sport that is in my opinion more glorious than its mother sport. Five-a-side is its own thing, and it’s played by more people because it’s more fun, you see more of the ball, it’s easier to put a team together and it (cough) requires less fitness. Forget the bigger picture for the moment. Maybe you play 11-a-side as well. Good luck to you. Playing 5-a-side will probably help your game. But to win at 5-a-side and get your 5-a-side team working like a well-oiled masseuse takes specific criteria that have nothing to do with the larger (and, OK, more televised) game.

The other thing this book specifically isn’t for is elite players. If you’re an 18-year-old prospect at Real Madrid wanting to nutmeg a galactico in training, please grab your coat and skedoosh. If you are a 35-year-old asthmatic with a strange burst of pace, or an all-the-pies-eating office worker and the owner of a tackle that borders on criminal, read on. This book is primarily for the social player in a social team who wants to improve … not necessarily improve as a human being or even in terms of health and fitness, but to be a little canny and win a little more.

This book does not make the assumptions of many sport guides that your team is evenly populated with outstanding players. Probably you have one or two very handy footballers, perhaps yourself. But you’ll have some liabilities too: one player who hates to pass, one whose first touch is less than predictable, the slow thinker, the premature shooter, the wheezing soufflé with only 30 seconds of fitness. Each will also have their strengths. This book is about making the best of your team as it stands, utilizing the strengths and compensating for the weaknesses, whether a team of supermen or a team of Jimmy Olsens.

Finally, the book does not exist to give you one definitive winning strategy. I have my preferences and I’ll make them very clear. But one of the first lessons of working as a team is that you need to listen to each other and come to a consensus on your approach. Perhaps there is one captain (player-manager!) who everyone follows. Still, it is never clever to ignore the expertise in your team. Your goalie will see the game from one angle; the natural goalscorer and the natural defender will see it differently. Listen to them. Everybody has different experiences and different theories on how to play, and we all have some good and bad ideas. It’s one of the reasons I asked other people and ‘experts’ their views on winning and present them through the chapters. I don’t always agree, but even disagreeing helps you work out what you do believe. This book will help you clarify your own ‘philosophy’ (as Premier League managers are said to have these days) and implement your team’s whole-game approach.

Introduction: Winning in a nutshell

What is 5-a-side?

There are many variants of small-sided football, and all will be referred to with the occasionally inaccurate term ‘5-a-side’ throughout this book. The classic form of the game, if there is one, is described in Chapter 2. Ultimately, the rules of football/soccer apply with a few tweaks. You have five players on each team, you play in outdoor cages with boards at the side and back that you can play the ball off without it going out of bounds, and the goalie is the only player allowed in the demarcated goal area (or D as it’s called owing to its semicircular shape). In some versions any one of these tenets can be untrue. I have recently started playing 5-a-side indoors with a side-wall off which you can kick the ball, but an out-of-play zone behind the goal, resulting in corners and goal kicks. On larger 5-a-side pitches, and in many friendly games depending on numbers who show up, the game can be 6-a-side or 7-a-side, and there may be no walls at all. In the UK, the FA-sanctioned variant ‘minifootball’ has no goalie-only area. The book will generally assume the classic version as played by most social 5-a-side leagues and tournaments, but will refer to the others when pertinent.

How to win at 5-a-side

So how do you win at 5-a-side? Let me get the two easy answers out of the way. 1) Have the better team: a team full of faster, stronger, more skilful, more athletic and fitter players who are just generally better at the game. 2) Score more goals than you concede.

Book finished. Thanks for the money.

If only. Easy is good, but real solutions are never so simple. The facetious answers above only address the abstract question, not the real world of the team facing you across the halfway line. The truth is you have your squad, and it is what it is. The question most 5-a-side players really want answered is: how do we beat today’s opposition? If you turn up to play and the team you’re facing resembles the team from the first answer – fitter, stronger, taller and with better haircuts – how do you win that game? Is it possible? This is the job that this book takes on. How to beat a team that on paper you should lose to, and – the flipside – how not to allow a team worse than you to squeak a win. Maybe you will never beat Handsome Haircut Utd, but you can be smart about it, control the controllables and do everything in your team’s power to make it as hard for them as possible.

Five-a-side games are short and, to be frank, a little random. If you can just smuggle in a few lucky goals, who knows how things might end up. Any team can be beaten, and, within reason, any team can beat another. If you go in believing you can win, this is half the battle. The stupid half perhaps, but it really helps. (We’ll discuss how to bend your mind for the cause later on in Chapter 7.) The remaining 50 per cent, however, is a little more complex.

Nevertheless this is where facetious answer number two comes in – score more goals than the opposition.

Understand, organize, destroy

To win at 5-a-side you have to understand the game, and this involves breaking it down into its elements. If you have a team strategy that takes in every element, a strategy you can all understand and work together in honing, you will be better equipped than most teams. What are these elements? They come in four categories:

1. possession-related elements (phases of play)

2. field-related elements (space)

3. role-related elements (tactics)

4. skill-related elements (technique)

One of the key mistakes in 5-a-side is squashing roles and positioning into one, without considering the phases of play. For example, ‘Let’s play with two up front and two at the back.’ How does this really pan out? And what does it mean over the course of the game? Talking about formations in 11-a-side is a useful way to bring the many roles and phases of the game into one intelligible whole. We all know that no shape is static, and when the left back ‘bombs on’ he doesn’t suddenly become a forward, or when forming a wall for a free kick, the team hasn’t suddenly changed formation. The 4-4-2s and 3-1-2-4s are simplifications that are useful, useful for the players and especially for our armchair punditry. But this simplification isn’t necessary in 5-a-side. When in possession you can have two men further up and two behind, sure, but in defence your shape will change to counter the movement of the opposition, and it’s helpful to consider that and have a strategy for both. That is, a strategy for both attack and defence in terms of roles and in terms of positioning (which differ).

Let’s take each of the element groups in turn.

Possession-related elements (phases of play)

There is more to a game than attack and defence. These are two very important phases of play, certainly. But look a little closer. There are periods during every game when no one team has the ball under control. Possession is a continuum:

the other team may have the ball under control (defence)

the other team may be trying to get the ball under control (transition)

the ball may be loose (broken play)

your team may be trying to get the ball under control (transition)

your team may have the ball under control (attack)

And, being a continuum, there are points in between. It’s important to note straight off the bat that the middle three bullet points show the phases where teams are most vulnerable to errors. That is to say, if you can be smarter than the opposition in these phases, you can craft a distinct advantage. In the style of play I will advocate most strongly, transitioning smartly from defence to attack is key. In a nutshell, get the ball fully under control before trying to launch into attack. The other transition, from attack to defence, is the mark of a truly organized team. Knowing your roles in the transition and clearly communicating will make it simpler (see Chapter 3 on defence).

There are other phases of play worth considering in terms of an organized strategy:

when a free kick or penalty has been awarded to you

when a free kick or penalty