Footspeed is vital to goalkeepers

By Tony Carr

Getting your goalkeeper to practice his footspeed is vital to their ability to get in position to block shots. Goalkeepers that are quick off the mark will save your team time after time if they can get it right. Mistakes by goalkeepers are the ones that get punished the most - there is often no chance of righting the wrong.

One of the mistakes that goalkeepers often make is to stand rooted to the spot when faced by advancing attackers. In this exercise you can get your goalkeepers used to moving around and anticipating where the ball will go.

When you are coaching this look out for good positions the goalkeeper gets in to using quick, reaction footwork. Point them out and praise your goalkeeper, they need encouragement so they do it more often.

This coaching session gives them a good work out and should make the goalkeeper work hard. Depending on the amount of space you have and the age of your players you should give your goalkeeper more time to start with so the shooting players should be further away then move them closer as the session continues.

Do not continually point out how poor their position or handling of the ball is. Use more positive instructions like "not a bad move but it would be even better if you used your feet more or were quicker" rather than "that's wrong do this" - they will soon get fed up of the criticism and lose confidence.

Arrange the set up as the diagram shows, using three attackers to fire in shots. Make three goals, red, white and blue using cones. When you call out a colour the goalkeeper runs through the white goal to the red or blue goal, depending on the colour you have shouted out. The player opposite those goals can only shoot once the goalkeeper has gone through the white goal.

If you shout "WHITE" the player can shoot straight away and the goalkeeper must try to get to the goal before it goes in.

Award a point for each goal or save and see if the goalkeeper can beat the attackers. You can also add in some one on ones so the player runs at the goalkeeper rather than just shoots.

You will need a couple of helpers behind this exercise because there will be a lot of balls to retrieve!