To all MPA team members

One problem that a couple of us have pointed out that we have during our games is spacing. What does that mean? Allow me to illustrate.

Too often, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone, our team gets sucked in around the ball, particularly when we are on offense. By gathering around the ball, we draw more defenders to the ball and make it very difficult to move it up the field. The following illustration might help illustrate my point. We are the X's and the X surrounded by the black rectangle has the ball.




By flocking to the ball, our midfielders are allowing three defenders to get close to the ball, making it exponentially more difficult for the ball carrier to effectively pass or shoot.

However, if we spread the field out both vertically and horizontally, we open a ton of passing lanes and give the ball carrier room to maneuver, as shown below.




Let's try hard to spread the field a little more and make them cover a larger portion of field. I'm very confident that we'll look better this game than we have yet.