2 Advanced Defensive Concepts

Two extra things you can add to your game on defence

These are aspects of defence that some players do naturally. They’re incredibly simple - I think -and done well and done often will improve your team’s defence. But they are subtle and rarely result in an obvious block. I think having vocabulary for these really helps either as an individual looking to improve or a coach wanting to help your team.

It’s tempting to only look for defensive techniques or tactics or tricks that will result in a very evident shut down of the offence - like Clapham’s sagging and switching against Mooncatchers and BFD Shout suffocating zone against Jinx as they comfortably won the EUCF finals this year. 

However, those sort of comprehensive wins aren’t common*. More often, you are trying to win games on narrow margins. These concepts are ways to start moving percentages into your favour on defence.

One and a half person defence 

1.5 person defence means fully concentrating on guarding your own player but when they are inactive giving as much help as you can while still being able to recover. 

This is probably easiest to illustrate using an example. Here, Daan De Maree is staying in the open lane, seemingly ignoring his player but is actually fully aware of how close he needs to stay to recover for the block. He’s adding an extra body to the active lane, while still doing his primary job. Beautiful.

so - this is just poaching, right? well, I think it’s similar but with the priorities swapped. If I ask someone to poach deep their main priority is being in the deep space, and if they can recover to their own player that’s a bonus. This is the other way around: I want the player to cover their own matchup, but if they can help out somewhere else that’s a bonus. Players often learn to poach against bad offences - where they don't have to recover because the offence isn't skilled enough  to find the free player

What you want is for your thought process to be: I am fully responsible for covering my player, but how far away from them can I be while doing that?

This needs you to take a number of factors into account, the most important of which are:

• How fast am I? (or; how much ground can I cover through a combination of speed, height and layout)

• What throws are available to the thrower? (in the clip from De Maree above - he clearly doesn’t think a deep hammer is coming so he take the aggressive position he does and back himself to jump the lane on a flat break)

• What can I help out on?

There’s a lot more but you get the idea - you need to be able to rapidly process a situation, make a decision and act on it. And keep doing that.

Here is a very extreme example of this done well - and also my favourite block I watched this season.

It is a great showcase of how you can sometimes have your cake and eat it too. Santucci is in the stack, able to help out if the offence looks into the center of the pitch. He’s also able to recover and get the spectacular block on his own player. So he’s got his own man covered and providing some help for his teammates - or you could say he’s guarding one and a half players.

But I don’t want to oversell this. It’s not always going to be spectacular and it won’t always get you a block. Sometimes it’s just about making the field smaller for the offence, and creating doubt and hesitation for throwers about how open a player really is. These are small but important victories for a defence that over the course of a game can add up to the extra break or two you need to swing a tight game. In the diagrams below of a typical horizontal setup from static, the difference is the position of grey defender #4 - how much of that open lane can they squeeze without giving an open throw to their own player? Maybe 95% of the time their positioning makes no difference to the play at all - but if this concept is done consistently and intelligently over the course of a game all that space squeezing results in more errors from the offence.

If I have a criticism of a lot of the advanced defences I see it’s that they are essentially 1v1 defences still - or rather they are 7v7 defences. In particular switching can be a very useful tool but it’s still 1v1 defence with all the weaknesses of that. In order to counter the inbuilt advantages the offence has you have to figure out how to create extra defenders out of thin air - hence 1.5 person defence. If everyone can do their job plus a little bit more then you can start to level the field. 

Actions per stall

Very simply: How many different defensive actions can you perform in one stall.

Are you guarding your player when they’re active and chilling out with them when they aren’t? You have to outwork the offence to counter the offence advantages. For example, while your matchup is clearing to the wing you could follow them, or take the opportunity to sprint back into the action to help cover another option, then immediately sprinting back to cover your matchup who is going to be trying to exploit you leaving them. You need to outwork the offence to beat them. One way you can hold yourself or your teammates to that standard is by looking at your actions per stall. How many ways can you get involved during each offensive phase?

One of the players I’ve coached that did this the best was Daire McNulty, who played a huge part in Ranelagh’s EUCF win in 2022. Daire was constantly on the hunt for something to do on defence. If his player wasn’t doing anything, Daire wanted to make something else happen. This is a good example in the clip below - Daire is the ginger at the bottom of the screen - because here it doesn’t go well. I posted this on instagram a few months back and said it was our worst defensive point of the final. In this clip Daire is always trying to do something but his timing is off and he never really gets a grip on the offence. But I love that he’s trying to dictate terms to the offence and not the other way round.

In this next clip Daire is jogging with the reset handler but always looking around - finds something to do in stopping a reset cut from downfield, then realising his player has sensibly taken off deep so he chases them down and gets the block - with an assist from Dean McCreary who was also watching for an opportunity to do more jobs.

Then finally, again following a clearing cut away from the disc but always looking out for an opportunity to help when he spots the opportunity to ghost into the lane to steal the pass.

So, how did I coach Daire to do these things? I didn’t. And I’m really proud of that as a coach. There’s nothing more rewarding than giving players the right environment and platform and then staying out of their way. I read something recently that said: most people see coaching as ‘filling up’ i.e. the coach is responsible for putting knowledge into the player. But what it actually is is ‘drawing out’. Your job is to help the player realise the potential that is in them. I love that and it’s completely accurate when I think about the most successful coaching relationships I have had.

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*which absolutely doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be trying to find these big solutions, but you aren’t going to win all your games by like 8 breaks. If you do, congrats you’re the best team in history