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Neil Dewsnip is England U18s Head Coach and The FA Technical Lead for for the 17 to 21 age group responsible for both player development and Coach Education.
The Road to Destiny The task
ND: Firstly, the candidates were organised into six groups of four and assigned a Champions League team with the task of preparing for a hypothetical Tuesday night fixture.
Each group was challenged to plan each aspect of preparation that their squad would follow from a Saturday fixture ahead of the midweek European game. The group had to put together a presentation that included the complete process of game preparation, giving consideration to the methods they would use to communicate the plan to their staff and how they would deliver to their players.
Each candidate in the group had a specific role: project manager, presenter, media spokesperson or practical deliverer on the training pitch.
The learning objectives
Rather than encourage the candidates to research and copy how the clubs actually prepared for the fixture, we wanted to get their personal thoughts and ideas about how they would approach the fixture.
The candidates could have looked into the approaches of Arsene Wenger or Jose Mourinho but we wanted to know if they would do anything differently. How would they prepare a team to play against Real Madrid, for example? How were they going to attack? How would they stop Marcelo bombing forwards? How would they deal with Ronaldo? The task was very much designed to challenge the candidates thinking about the game at the elite level.
The challenge was also very much philosophical in its aims. The coaches had to be clear about their footballing values and beliefs and what they stood for. The task challenged the candidates to understand what they wanted from their players and how to achieve it.
FA Professional Coaches Course candidate and Bristol Rovers Academy Manager, Tom Curtis, provides an insight into the thought processes and detail of his group's presentation designed with fellow candidates Richard Horner, Jeremy Newton and Dave Horseman.
The objective The challenge was to devise a strategy as the manager of Real Madrid for a Champions League fixture against Manchester United delivering the strategy as a team briefing, a practical coaching session and at a mock media conference.
The research As a group we looked at the way that Real Madrid had played in previous games, considered their current form and researched what they had done in the build- up to other Champions League games.
We were fortunate enough to have Richard Horner in our group who had accessed information from an FA study visit to Real Madrid gaining an insight from Madrid's assistant coach Paul Clement about how they prepared for a Champions League game having played on the Sunday night.
So with regards to our approach, we were able to combine a little bit of what they did already with our own thoughts on what they may potentially do.
Assumptions We made a number of assumptions to assist us with our strategy. The first was that Real Madrid were on a bit of an up, playing well and that Manchester United were on a bit of a down and so Madrid were likely to have more possession.
We also made the assumption that Madrid were at home and that they would probably have more of the ball.
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