Total finishing: Warm up

A warm-up that will teach attacking pairs to move the ball about quickly in order to create scoring chances in the goal zone.

Difficulty rating ★★★☆☆

The difficulty in the warm-up is coordination of movement, one touch and first-time shooting. Players need to get the ball out from under their feet quickly with crisp one-touch passing.

Set up

For this useful finishing warm-up activity you will need balls, cones and a goal. Use half of your normal pitch. We have used nine players for this session but you can use as many players as you need.

How to do it

You will need a goalkeeper and two servers to run this warm-up, while the rest of your players need to be split up to work in attacking pairs, who take turns to attack the goal. One player in each pair passes into the first server and then runs around to the second server, while their partner runs to receive the ball from the first server and passes to the second server. The second server then passes to the first of the pair and both attack the penalty area. When each pair have had a go, then run the routine again from the other side of the area, so each player in the pair has a chance to shoot at goal.

Technique

As 80% of all goals are scored in the goal zone, it’s obvious that moving the ball quickly and supporting each other in pairs to attack the goal is a vital skill. This is about one-touch passing and support play in the attacking zone.