Soccer Defender Quotes

To defend my fear of sudden change, I chose to believe that life was incremental, that the tiny decisions you make every day determine your fate, that your job is to captain an enormous ship subtly into ever-clearer waters. But that’s not how it works at all. Life occurs in moments. You get into college. You propose. You get the job. You get cancer. You get fired. She leaves you...Because I was born in a stable country at a stable time, I falsely extrapolated that change is incremental. But if you zoom out just a little bit, you see that life is soccer, not basketball. It’s revolution, invention, war. It’s big bangs, exploding stars, asteroids killing the dinosaurs. Which means that all the action is in the risk taking, whether I want it to be or not.

Cagliari central defender Comunardo Niccolai became celebrated for his ability to score bizarre own goals in the 1960s, so much that self inflicted problems in general are often referred to as 'Niccolai-like'.

There were seven people on a Quidditch team: three Chasers, whose job it was to score goals by putting the Quaffle (a red, soccer-sized ball) through one of the fifty-foot-high hoops at each end of the field; two Beaters, who were equipped with heavy bats to repel the Bludgers (two heavy black balls that zoomed around trying to attack the players); a Keeper, who defended the goalposts, and the Seeker, who had the hardest job of all, that of catching the Golden Snitch, a tiny, winged, walnut-sized ball, whose capture ended the game and earned the Seeker’s team an extra one hundred and fifty points.

Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might

It was too embarrassing to admit that a young woman was the most popular politician in the Islamic Republic. In the official tally she came in second, with slightly fewer votes than the older cleric—an injustice that must have riled Hashemi, given the nature of her platform. Hashemi had made her debut in politics by challenging conservative clerics who opposed women’s right to exercise in public. Using her standing as Rafsanjani’s daughter, she argued that there was nothing wrong with fully covered women exercising. An increasing number of old and young women already crowded parks to jog or play volleyball or badminton. But the Basij often harassed and intimidated them to discourage women from exercising. As part of her campaign to defend and expand women’s right to exercise, Hashemi built a bike path for women, increased women’s access to sports facilities such as golf courses and tennis courts, and set up the first women’s soccer and, eventually, rugby teams since the revolution. She also founded the Islamic Women’s Sport Foundation, through which she held games in Tehran involving Iranian athletes and Muslim women invited from other countries.

You saw how busy and popular the battle arena was the other day, right?” “Oh, I see where you’re going with this.” The mayor nodded. “The sports stadium could have that same effect. It would draw more and more people to our city.” I nodded now that I understood. “So, what will they be playing in the sports stadium?” “Soccer. It was the only sport proposed by the proposer.” “Soccer? I’ve never heard of it,” I said as I scratched my head. “According to the business proposal, it’s a fun game that involves a lot of running.” “A lot of running? I guess it’ll be good exercise.” “Most likely,” said Bob. The mayor continued explaining, “The objective of the game is to score goals or points by kicking a ball into the opposing team’s goal. Players compete over control of the ball, and at any time, one team will be the attacker and the other team will be the defender.” “Oh, I think I understand how it works now.” The mayor nodded. “It sounds like it could be a lot of fun, right?” “Yeah, but it’s a pretty big project, isn’t it? It will require a lot of space, time and effort.

Set up sessions where your defenders see a variety of serves and have to meet them with one-touch clearances with both feet. Set up competitions where each clearance over midfield is worth a point.

Safe-side’ is the term used when you want to pass the ball to the receiver on the opposite side of where the defender is. For example, if the defender is marking the player’s right shoulder, the pass is played to the left. The defender therefore will find it more difficult to intercept. ]

These maintenance drones shouldn’t be equipped with guns, so I would say, no, but just in case.” Linaria moved in front of Hiran and me to block us. “Why should you get shot?” I asked, edging out from behind her to stand in front. “Would you guys stop? We should all get shot equally.” Hiran squeezed between Linaria and me. Soon we were standing in a line like the defending soccer team during a free kick. We elbowed each other trying to be the one out front.

In addition to defenders who know when to drop off, your cause will be helped mightily by a goalkeeper who understands when to come forward… way forward… like sweeper-keeper, out-of-the-eighteen forward

Lloyd got the ball in the USA’s half. She turned and flicked it past a Japanese defender and then ran around the player to receive the ball, almost as if Lloyd passed it to herself. When she got the ball back at her feet, she picked her head up and noticed goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori was way out of goal. In a moment of pure audacity, Lloyd took a full swing at it from the center line and kicked the ball nearly 50 yards. Kaihori desperately tried to scramble back in place but could barely get a hand on the ball. Goal, USA! It was the sort of goal that was so brazen it would happen once in a while in a random high school game—no one would ever try such a thing in a World Cup. But Lloyd did. She had a hat trick . . . in 15 minutes . . . in a World Cup final. That sort of performance on the world’s biggest stage was simply unheard of. It looked like the USA had been playing a video game on easy mode.

But while U.S. Soccer was making a windfall with higher ticket prices, the players didn’t see anything from it other than the $1.20 per ticket they’d negotiated in 2013. While U.S. Soccer’s merchandise for the national team flew off the shelves, the players didn’t get anything from that. The team’s popularity was surging, but they weren’t in any position to capitalize on it. “I thought it was bullshit,” says defender Meghan Klingenberg, who played every minute of the 2015 World Cup as a left back. “All these people are making money from our likeness and our faces and our value, but we’re not. We’re only getting money from our winnings, and that doesn’t seem right.” “We didn’t have any rights,” she adds. “We had basically assigned our likeness rights, for sponsorships and licensing, to U.S. Soccer to do with them whatever they wanted.

That never-say-die mentality, Sundhage says, was something she found in the American players when she took over as the USA coach. She certainly didn’t teach it to them. “In Sweden, we talk about attacking, defending, positioning, this and that,” Sundhage says. “I think we are fairly smart when it comes to tactics. But here, the Americans have another component: They just go for it.” Marta was once asked by a reporter why the Americans were so hard to beat. She pointed to her head, and the reporter thought she was saying they had a strong aerial presence. “No, no,” Marta interjected. “It’s the mentality.” * * * After that dramatic thriller versus Brazil, the Americans had still only advanced to the semifinal.

By this point, Solo was hardly a stranger to controversy within the national team. The world had seen how she’d criticized Greg Ryan’s decision at the 2007 World Cup and was kicked off the team. During the 2012 Olympics, she’d called out Brandi Chastain, who was a commentator for NBC, tweeting: “Lay off commentating about defending and goalkeeping until you get more educated @brandichastain. The game has changed from a decade ago.” Now, her arrest and assault charges were front-page news. But there was a history within the team of things involving Solo that needed to be dealt with, even if they were never made public. Pia Sundhage admits she had to deal with a couple of issues while she coached Solo, but she didn’t let it become the focus of what she was doing. “There were one or two things, but you have to be respectful, you have to be smart, and you have to just talk to people,” Sundhage says. “We worked it out. We wanted to train. We wanted to improve the game.

Shooting and finishing, dribbling and foot skills, and defending are oftentimes more beneficial for soccer players to learn first, so focus on these before spending time on the upper areas of the pyramid. In addition, reading about each of these areas will help you to understand what your opponent wants to do.

At one point with the San Diego Spirit, Foudy was getting to know Chinese defender Fan Yunjie when the conversation went something like this, at least as far as Foudy heard: “What’s your husband’s name?” “Who?” “Your husband.” “Yeah.” “No, what’s his name?” “Who?” “YOUR HUS-BAND. WHAT. IS. HIS. NAME?” Yunjie finally looked at Foudy and said: “Julie, my husband’s name is Hu.” Everyone burst out laughing.

With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar. The players demanded to know how U.S. Soccer could justify skipping the tournaments. Flynn replied that it was “the technical director’s recommendation” to play a lighter schedule. The technical director? April Heinrichs. The players wanted to figure out if Heinrichs really believed the team should play so few games in 2005, so Julie Foudy reached out to her. “Is that true? Did you tell U.S. Soccer we should only play five games?” Foudy asked. “I never said anything like that,” Heinrichs told her. “I told them you should play 20 games.” If Heinrichs hadn’t recommended such a sparse schedule and, in fact, recommended around 20 games, it seemed that U.S. Soccer was making a decision that went against what was best for the players. The players saw a clear double standard—the men’s team hadn’t played so few games since 1987, almost two decades earlier. They concluded U.S. Soccer’s real reason was the same one behind most disputes between the players and the federation: money. The federation, it appeared, did not want to spend the money for training camps, player stipends, and travel for overseas competitions, even as it was sitting on a $30 million surplus at the time. “In 2005, they had no plans for us and wanted us to go quiet so they didn’t have to pay us the entire year,” says defender Kate Markgraf.

In defending his decision, he later said: “My veteran players told me over and over again that they felt much more comfortable with Briana and less so with Hope because Briana communicated well with the defense.” Solo was furious, and as soon as she left her meeting with Ryan, she set out to confront her teammates. Lilly didn’t want to be involved, but Solo says that Wambach didn’t flinch when asked about it, telling her: “Hope, I think Bri is the better goalkeeper.

A physical education expert, asked to visit a grade school in East Orange, is astonished to be told that jump ropes are in short supply and that the children therefore have to jump “in groups.” Basketball courts, however, “are in abundance” in these schools, the visitor says, because the game involves little expense. Defendants in a recent suit brought by the parents of schoolchildren in New Jersey’s poorest districts claimed that differences like these, far from being offensive, should be honored as the consequence of “local choice”—the inference being that local choice in urban schools elects to let black children gravitate to basketball. But this “choice”—which feeds one of the most intransigent myths about black teen-age boys—is determined by the lack of other choices. Children in East Orange cannot choose to play lacrosse or soccer, or to practice modern dance, on fields or in dance studios they do not have; nor can they keep their bodies clean in showers that their schools cannot afford. Little children in East Orange do not choose to wait for 15 minutes for a chance to hold a jump rope.

Movement at the right time is the key to creating separation.  Move too early and you will have to wait for the ball giving the defender the chance to react.  Move at the right time in coordination with the incoming pass and the defender has no chance.