Thursday, December 11, 2008

Thursday

Today we actually got to watch the 1st team Barca boys practice. They walked right by us and said hello. We saw Victor Valdez (who has a striking resemblance to Josh, coincidence?) Xavi and Henry up close. The practice was incredible. Puyols the captain was a workhorse. He worked extremely hard and was always the 1st one back to the coach. I was very impressed with the amount of skill and pace with the exercises. It was very cool to see the team in a different atmosphere. They had fun and worked hard at the same time.

The morning session focused on tactical. Barca systems are always 4-3-3 or 3-2-1 no matter who is on the team. They train their players to be successful in these systems from day 1. Oscar showed all of the descriptions for each position on the field. Barca will develop the right players based on their strngths to match the job they have on the pitch. 

A couple of other interesting ideas:
  • there is no specific fitness work under the age of 14 (all fitness is done w/ the ball)
  • after training - never do stretching
  • after easy session - static stretching
  • warm up is dynamic stretching
  • the escola that Oscar teaches in always uses size 5 balls for the players, regardless of age - it was very interesting that he didn't even really understand using a size 3 or 4 ball, the concept didn't even seem to register with him
Tonight when we were watching the escola train (Oscar trains 7-8 year olds) it was impressive to see all of the session being trained exactly the same way. There were about 10 sessions happening at the same time! Oscar showed us his training plan. They actually use the same plan all 3 nights for a month before they move on to a new lesson. No wonder why they have such sick skills! The boys were very nice and respectful, they shook all of our hands as we left the pitch.

In general, people seemed very excited to meet us and liked our US logo.

Tomorrow is the big day before the big game. We met a gentleman w/ Paul this evening that was very excited about us seeing the match saying it was bigger than the superbowl and will be an incredible event that we would enjoy. I'm sure we will! 

We are supposed to meet the players tomorrow so hopefully we will get some good pictures and autographs.  

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