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On this week's Play Development Project Podcast, we answer a question from our community. Hi everyone, welcome to another Play Development Project Q&A. Please be joined once again by PDP technical advisor Dan Wright. Dan, how are you this week?
Yeah, how are you? Mate, I'm good and looking forward to another testing question. It's come in via the PDP Facebook page from David and he has said, my son is in the 99th percentile for height and 85th percentile for weight. He is a top 50 sprinter in the 100 meters for his age group, which is under 12.
What can he do to focus on technical skills other than play to neutralize his physical advantages? So I would suggest that we have a very early ripe or physically mature young player here in the under 12 group who's potentially dominating the game due to the size. So we often focus on how we can help the small players navigate that challenge, but it's easy to forget about the big boys who are potentially having it all their own way and not getting the technical benefit. So Dan, what's your advice initially to David on this one?
Yeah, this is a really good question. I think the main source of content would be Math to Pledge is Masterclass around Bio-Vanding and Growth in Matrasion. That would be where I would start. I think what we're looking at is basically virtually an adult at 12.
And like you said, we'd quite often talk about the later developers, the small players, how will they survive. But I think you've also got to use that same mentality for the big strong players because what you've got to try and understand is what will that player look like near the end of the journey. So if he's going to be big and strong and if he's going to be able to hold the ball up or to use his pace or to use his power or whatever kind of attributes he's using at 19 and 20, I think that's a different question. So if he's going to be 5 foot 11 and be average, or 5 foot 9, average, I'd hate to think 5 foot 11 to come struggling.
Probably isn't the problem. But I think how do I articulate that they are two different things? Because if you're going to be a powerful player, then what we need to do for your development journey is different. If you're just going to be average at 19, 20, sure, because if you're just going to be average and you're getting away with things at the moment or able to get success easily, then you're going to fail at 16, 17 when everybody else starts to catch you up and then your technical deficiencies will be highlighted even more.
If you're going to be really big and strong, so an easy example is Lukaku. If you look online, this example is Lukaku, I think at 14 and 15 where he is a man and he's playing in youth tournaments and the guys are foot and half short of them. Now, and Alek did do some things to technically improvement and put him in some positions and played him up on all those kind of things. But they were probably also aware that Lukaku was going to look like what Lukaku looks like now.
And so that's a different journey. They're two different things, I think. Yeah, really, really interesting. And I think the idea, first of all, you know, citing Lukaku as a reference point here, you're looking at what does the player need to get to where he wants to go?
Now, we don't know what the environment is, whether it's an academy environment, a club environment, what this environment is. But the answer to the question in terms of technically improving this player, for me, lies around two things, positions on the park and a variety of positions and being exposed to different challenges, it's very easy to say you're big and fast, go play up front, we'll lump the ball over the top and you can keep banging them in. Now, the kid's going to get good at finishing from a through ball, sure, but he's not going to get a lot of experiences outside of playing with his back to goal and running in behind. If you play that particular individual in the centre of the park and you say today, your job is to link the play X amount of times or play X amount of killer passes, then perhaps that play is getting a different challenge and they're looking at a position where they're seeing the game 360.
You know, central midfield is a very difficult role, you need to be technically proficient. So there's a good opportunity for David, hopefully alongside the coaching team, to suggest that that might be a really good pathway to help the player lift their technical skills to then match the physical attributes. I would also look at what individual playing you could put in place for this player. So what things that might be that we need to improve weekly finishing or receiving skills or passing skills, whatever it is.
And again, matching that up with position and matching that up with what's going on and training. But the final point for me, or not the final point, but a third point there is that it's important to think that every player has different attributes and physical attributes can be a strength. You know, there are plenty of players that have made a career out of the game or got by playing the game socially, just because they're big, fast and strong. And we don't want to deny this player that being their attribute, but hopefully we can create some additional strengths to go with that physicality, assuming it's going to go on and be a real advantage all the way through.
So really fascinating stuff. Yeah, I think Mark-Upter would talk about a rate limiter. So the things that you're good at, that's great. The things you're not great at, are you good enough at them to play at the level you want to play?
So for example, is Lukaku's left foot good enough to play in the Premier League? Well, it must be because he's there. Is his heading, is his whole bit place. So how do you develop those skills that match your character?
You didn't need 12, 13, 14, because he was so, so strong. And then you've also got kind of like guys that are really, really unusual, like if you're a wall coach, you're Michael Owens that were just absolutely rapid, which means they didn't need some of those skill sets because they could always do these things. So that's another kind of thing to look at. I recently was on the Events Youth Award and a guy from Liverpool came in and talked about the games program, which was really, really fascinating.
And they had like a red Amber Green pie chart and he talked about red being like a stress game. So a difficult game, we might lose, it's going to be really hard to be really challenged. A green game being, we probably expect to win this, right? It'd be technically too good or physically too good.
We probably expect to win that. And then a yellow kind of challenge Amber game of, it could go either way. And he was saying that different players will have different pie charts depending on where they are in their journey, how good they are, how physically good they are, how much they are. So we've talked about being the best player in the group, being the worst player in the middle player in the group in games and in training.
And it's a similar kind of message. So is this boy getting enough red games? That would be a way that I would look at it. Like it's okay that he's getting success, because that's the green period.
But is he getting games where he might lose? And if he plays against a good centre back, whether that he goes and trains up two-edged groups or he goes and plays by the side with an age group up or you find a second team and that's his challenge game. But then the red stuff where it's pretty much you know you're going to lose, you know you're going to not get a sniff of the ball, the guy you're playing against is better than you. How's he going to find that challenge?
That's the question for this parent and this club and this individual I think. Yeah, really good. I think I'm working with a player at the moment, I feel maybe similar to this in the sense that this might be something that's just had it all their own weight because they're the biggest, fastest, strongest on the pitch. They've never really been stretched.
Unfortunately, because they haven't been exposed to environments which allow them to go up and down the age groups or get those different experiences. And I think it's important that we look at the player like that and we say look there's still plenty of time for them to work on technical skills or work on their intensity off the ball or whatever the challenge is based on those physical advantages they've always had. So again, goes back to putting a plan in place and understanding what the long term picture is going to look like. I think there's some really good advice there.
We've also got, as you mentioned, some great content on the website around this. The Sports Science and Youth Development video discussion we did with Matt de Plagewoz, fantastic man that really understands youth development and maturation and everything that goes around that now working at British Tennis. Highly recommend it. We've also got two brilliant articles from Steve Lawrence who's a consultant to Corey Football and previously he's a consultant for IACS.
One called BioBanding, Solutions to Relative Age Effects and Matt covers this in the video as well. And also an article called Relative Age Effect from issue nine in the magazine, Wayback Wind. But really good. Steve is an expert on this.
His son, Jamie, was released from a top club in the UK because he was a Q4 child, very small. Again, one of those classics where it was all a little bit tough and perhaps the scouts didn't know what they were looking at in the fact he was Q4 and has since gone on to have a professional career in Europe and is doing very well as far as I understand last time I spoke to Steve. So really, really nice content from him. Dan, any final thoughts on this challenging topic for David?
Yeah, I think it's just another story of this non-linear journey, isn't it? What we're seeing now and what we see in the end and players there are against success or teams, they're against success or coaches, they're against success. Are they future-proofing those players? So are you doing the best by the players in this moment?
But also are you protecting for them to have a journey beyond this age group or for ages up? That's what you've got to think. Thinking long-term in the short-term is a nice way of working on a framework. Absolutely.
Great advice from you then, mate. Thank you for your time and we will look forward to another PDP Q&A very soon. Thanks for joining us on the Play to Development Project podcast. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram, appplayaddp or find us on Facebook.
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