Notes from Froggy's Pad: Week Eight

Patrick Mulcare
May 22, 2008

This week saw the return of goalkeeping coach Vadim Kirillov, it was the first time I've seen him this season. Former OSU goalkeeper #40 Casey Latchem (sp.) also made a return to the fold after a much shorter hiatus.

Another guest player was #29 Eddie Hertsenburg, fresh from his Ohio Dominican graduation. He was at training to get acclimated in time for this Sunday's reserve game. Nicolas Hernandez & Stefani Miglioranzi did not participate at all but Gino Padula & Adam Moffat were partially involved in training.

The weather was generally pleasant and sunny but it was a wee bit wet, cold and windy. The Crew started the day passing in small groups then the fitness coach had them running before they did some stationary stretches.

The team then performed three sessions of a passing drill that I haven't seen before. Each phase got progressively shorter as their running speed and distances increased, the last portion lasted four minuets. Everyone would change speeds as they went through a combination of overlapping runs, laying the ball off and direct passes.

Coaches Mike Lapper and Robert Warzycha were engaged in a competitive match of soccer tennis while all this was happening. I don't know this for sure but Warzycha has been the reigning champion for the several years.

The Crew then worked on a possession drill that was played on a square about 40% the size of the pitch. The three teams were decided by the uncommon method of having everyone pick their own bib color. Most people seemed hesitant to make a decision until they could assess who their teammates would be.

The teams ended up like this:
Blue-8, 13, 24, 21, 32, 9, 17, 9
Orange 12, 10, 16, 7, 19, 25, 23, 3
Yellow 29, 14, 26, 5, 6, 27, 11

The first match-up was Orange vs. Blue while team Yellow made two touch passes to each other while lined up ten feet short of the width of the field. Adam Moffat was a neutral player that either team (Blue or Orange) could pass to while they tried to maintain possession. Team Blue dominated the first two games beating Orange and Yellow. Sigi said this happened because they would frequently make one touch passes while everyone else would add extra touches even if it wasn't necessary. I'm not sure who won the Orange/Yellow game because they weren't loudly counting off the number of times each team strung together a certain amount of passes. Gino Padula took the place of the neutral player and Andrew Peterson joined team Yellow in the third game.

Andrew Peterson, Eddie Hertsenburg, Cory Elenio, Gino Padula and Adam Moffat didn't participate in the final drill of the practice session but continued to train elsewhere. Guilherme So picked up an upper body injury and ended his day early, this will likely delay the introduction of what I believe will be an impact player.

The final official part of practice was a look at some of New England's tactics; the Crew's "starting" team was 1, 23, 2, 14, 5, 7, 10, 3, 16, 12, and 19. The "scout" team was 30, 9, 25, 21, 27, 17, 32, 6, 24, 6, 8. The drill was played on the full pitch at full speed but the game would be stopped and started over to create certain scenarios likely to be seen Saturday.

The last part of the day was not mandatory but the strikers were not quite ready to end their day with the customary stretching, instead they practiced their finishing with Coach Sigi Schmid. The strikers (17,9,7,32,10,25, 3) shot against goalkeepers (1, 30) while most of the other players practiced centering passes and scoring against goalkeepers 18 and 40.

In the next few days I'm going to submit some written questions to Ryan Junge and try to get some insight on the life of a Crew player on a developmental contract.