What helps a team when its organised play can no longer find a gap?
The ball circulates. The routes are familiar. The opposition shifts across. What changes the situation when the usual pattern can no longer find a gap?
‘Dribbling as a decisive skill’ makes a clear demand: a team system must make use of individual quality rather than suppress it. The text asks about the place of targeted one-on-one training and how to preserve special strengths.
The purpose is to gain space and create a better collective move. This is a discussion for coaches, players and anyone who also wants to see the courage to make an unexpected breakthrough within organised football.
A playing system should make individual quality effective. It must not weaken the very ability that allows a player to change a situation that has become stuck.
The team needs both
A quick change of direction, a close touch, a won one-on-one: sometimes these create a chance that further circulation of the ball would not have produced. Our argument is therefore that dribbling ability must have a place in the team system and be deliberately developed.
Tactical organisation and individual development are not opposites. A player should recognise when a dribble helps, and teammates need to know how to use the space it creates.
What our examples at the time were meant to prompt
The January 2021 article discussed Julian Brandt, Jadon Sancho and Leroy Sané, among others. We observed that outstanding one-on-one quality was not equally visible in every period. That raised the question of the responsibilities of both player and coaching team.
The question remains legitimate. There is, however, an important limit: fewer visible dribbles alone do not prove that an ability has been lost. Role, opposition, space, decisions and playing conditions can change visible performance. Without access to daily training, a specific failure cannot be established as fact either.
A strength is not a possession for ever
Our demand of training practice remains clear: special abilities should not simply be praised. They need appropriate tasks and situations in which they can be used under pressure. That applies to youth players just as much as experienced attackers.
Players such as Lewandowski and Neymar invite closer observation: how do they connect individual solutions with benefit to the team? This does not imply a claim to know their entire training programme.
Three questions instead of a list of tricks
Did the action actually gain space? Did the ball remain reachable for the player or a teammate? Was an appropriate solution chosen afterwards? Looking this way means judging dribbling by more than applause.
Not every ball needs to be taken into a one-on-one. But a team should not lose that ability when it needs precisely that solution.
Authors of the original article: Matthäus Wdowiak, Andreas Wdowiak, Agnieszka Czerwińska.
