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29
Fri, Mar

Little time to correct mistakes.
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The eventual re­sult against Ecuador (3-1) was not as sta­tistically awful as it may appear, seeing that teams playing at home usually aim to show their opponents that their home advantage is often judged by a two goal strength in their favour.

This especially after they ensure that the playing conditions, their crowd support and the desire to win matches, players are driven to get the only acceptable result, a victory.

Dennis Lawrence used this exercise to take a closer look at the home-based players so that he can ob­serve the comparison between the overseas-based and those who were on show.

By his own admission, he admitted to simple er­rors made because of the inability of players failure to communicate quickly and accurately at crucial times, especially in defence. He also accepted the fact that his team was outplayed in the second half.

As I mentioned earlier, the desire of two more opponents may well have attempted to correct the errors and bring the quality of soccer closer to what he expect of the team.

However, his comment regarding the fact that the players will now be returning to their local clubs, which meant that he is unlikely to have them at practice sessions until a week from their official World Cup fixture against Honduras.

The acceptance of that arrangement would again deprive the former Everton coach of correction of faults which he mentioned in his interview, leaving the few days of training prior to the match to be difficult to get things right.

Maybe, this is a wonderful opportunity to get the players from the match to sit and view video areas of errors so that theoretically there may be better understanding of similar issues. His aim to explain the problems will be useful to add off the field training to his plan.

Many coaches do not attempt to demonstrate in the replays methods to correct tactical faults. The value for the least experienced players may well bring some cohesive patterns during the match which could be productive.

I have to admit that the biggest problem which confront the coaching staff is time for extensive tactical work on and off the field. My consolation is that the national team has played well at times in their previous matches, a factor which will certainly be expected on September 1 against Honduras.