/Putting our warmup drills into practice

This weekend was the first time that I’ve been able to get myself to a game. Unfortunately I am not able to commit to football at the weekend’s (which is part of the reason I stopped playing), so I’ve not been able to get down there so far this season, but having worked with the goalkeeper on a comprehensive match warmup routine, I was keen to see it put to practice – as well as to watch the game, of course.

It was a local derby. 6th (us, now 3rd) vs 9th. A game with a lot of pride riding on it and a few rivalries thrown in too.

We had around 30 minutes before kick-off to work on the warmup, a time when traditionally the subs kick the ball at the goalkeeper for a while, which is commonplace in the amateur game of course, but far from the ideal preparation for the match.

Credit: I make no secret of the fact that this warmup routine was very much inspired by Conor O’Keefe. Be sure to check him out.

We started by working on footwork, some short-distance one and two touch passing, eventually introducing increased distances and directions. As well as warming up the keeper’s feet, this exercise also allows them to get a feel for the ground that they’re playing on and suss out any bobbles or divots that might be hiding under the grass.

After a few minutes of footwork, we moved on to warm up the hands. Starting with simple volleys to hands, we again progressed this to include volleys from different angles, half volleys, clips from the floor and finally some more match-realistic volleys – essentially hitting it with more power.

Now in my playing days, I always found it tricky to motivate myself to dive in the warmup (again, this often just involved 15 balls being whacked at me at once, so it’s no real surprise), but I think it’s really important to get into the mindset of throwing yourself around a bit before the game starts. If the opposition fire in a shot 30 seconds after kick off, you need to be mentally and physically ready to fling yourself across the goal to keep it out.

With this in mind, the next phase of the warmup was to work on diving. We started with some softer, low dives to alternating sides for the keeper to smother, before increasing the lateral range of the shots and eventually the height to get him jumping off the ground as well.

Next, we moved on to crossing. For this we used a variation of a drill that we often run at training, whereby the keeper will start at the near post with me to the side of the goal, I will do a very simple volley to his hands, he’ll throw it back and I’ll then throw the ball high over his head, encouraging him to back pedal across the goal and claim it as high as he can. On one hand, this drill doesn’t necessarily replicate the power of a proper crossed ball, but it still tests their ability to claim balls from the air and with the added bit at the start, requires them to think and adjust quickly to do so.

Finally, we moved on to the other main area of the game in distribution. This started with some throwing work, followed by ground kicks (from both sides of the goal) and then some kicking from hands to complete the set.

This entire warmup process took around 20-25 minutes, which I think was the perfect amount of time and left the keeper 5-10 minutes to recover before the game, whilst remaining suitably warmed up.

The team went on to claim a comprehensive 7-0 victory, and whilst I would love to claim that the addition of a properly structured warmup played some part in the clean sheet, it was quite a one-sided game in the end. That said, he did have to pull off two or three good saves, and also set up a couple of attacks with some quick throws so I’d like to think that the extra preparation was somewhat useful at least!

I spent the game running the line (something I volunteered to do), which actually gave me a fantastic position to observe the goalkeeper as I was required to be close to the goal whenever the action was – perhaps all goalkeeper coaches should adopt this tactic when watching the players they are working with!

As I stated at the beginning, unfortunately I am unable to regularly attend matches, but I really hope that the goalkeeper found the warmup routine useful and a good preparation for his game and that he encourages those players who would normally just take shots at him before the game to utilise some of what we worked on and carry out a proper warmup routine.