Your Football Stats – World Cup and All

Although I never had a son to play in sports, my daughter did play football. She was tremendous and I am not bragging. But, my story is not about her playing antics, and she did some, but about a serious injury that happened to a goalie, if I remember that’s the one that tries to stop the ball from going into the net. Now, football isn’t football, and nobody playing football, wears protective headgear and that is why I am going to try to show the significant need for head protection in the face of a ball being projected at fast speeds.

The game was going on as normal, and most of us were watching our eleven year olds being darn cute on the field when one of them managed to get the ball down within scoring distance of the net. He kicked. The ball hit the goal keeper smack in the middle of his forehead and sent him reeling back, unfortunately right back into pole that held the net. He fell and by some bizarre twist of his body tumbled down onto his shoes. He was knocked out and when he came to, he had a bright red spot on his neck where his shoes, his own shoes, had kicked him!

As a Personal Trainer and football Coach, there are a number of important points that you should be aware of when training your kids to be fit for football. Your first consideration should be the age and current fitness levels of your players. It is very important to realise with your training that kids are not just little adults, and as such adult fitness and conditioning drills are largely inappropriate. Second consideration should be the types of football drills that you are going to use. For children, I always like to make sure that a ball is involved in all of my football fitness and conditioning drills. For this reason I use a lot of small sided games for training my kids, as small sided games keep them involved and moving at all times, incorporating both fitness and ballwork together.

Once you enroll in football training, you must first learn the basic characteristics of good defending, even if you want to be a striker or midfielder. The main aim is to make sure that the rival team will not gain control of the ball.

However, a defense strategy does not only involve keeping possession of the ball from the other team, but also getting full control over the ball itself and using it properly. To fully understand the defense strategy of your team, check out the following qualities that every successful defender needs to have.

The first attribute of a successful defender is that he maintains a strong focus on the ball throughout the whole of the game. By always knowing where the ball is, and determining the appropriate technique and time to take control of the ball, a good defender will make the defense much stronger and harder to break down.

Take note that it is important to be always one step ahead of the opposing team, so you must identify the tactical strategies that they are using as soon as you can. Most teams tend to play to their strengths and play in a similar formation every game, usually only making their formation more defensive when they play away.

A shin perforated by studs in a football game could be seen as beneficical to some people. It’s well ventilated, for a start. And maybe having part of your leg smashed to pieces makes you that little bit lighter, at least when all the bone fragments are removed. So who needs shinpads at all?!

In fact, of course, shinpads are the most important piece of kit any football player wears. Without them, there would be far more injuries to football players, because the shins and ankles are very vulnerable in a football game. Not only is much of the game played by kicking at a ball on the ground, but players wear footwear full of brutal metal studs. A misdirected kick or a bad challenge for the ball could cause a lot of pain if a player wasn’t wearing shinpads.

The scariest fact of all, and one that should persuade any football player to wear shinpads, is that sometimes the shinpad isn’t enough protection. Players have occasionally found, after being on the receiving end of a hard sliding challenge, that their shinpads has been smashed into pieces. That’s what they’re there for. But what if that had been the player’s leg?

Here are tips that can help you protect your kids from injury during the game of football

Football is a physical game that can subject players to potential injuries, some of which can be quite serious. Although physical contact between players is not a planned part of the game of football, the inevitable clashes during a match are as much a part of the game as controlling the ball.

From a spectator’s standpoint, football does not seem like a physically brutal event, especially the way some players glide across the pitch like gazelles in the open range. Sometimes football players merely glance off each other in ballet fashion. But, for anyone who has been out on the football pitch in competition, the likelihood of getting hurt is ever present and there is probably not one football player out there who hasn’t hit the ground or bounced off of an opponent or has had cuts and bruises.

These minor incidents pose no real threat to a football player’s physical well-being. As all football parents can attest, physical contact while playing football is unavoidable. The obvious question, then, is – how do we keep the unavoidable contact from causing more than a few aches and pains?