The member of Dimitar Berbatov's team in the presidential elections for the BFU - Georgi Velichkov, expressed bewilderment at the fact that the home headquarters do not develop football in our country in any way, bTV reported.
The reason for this was the national team's game against Luxembourg in a Nations League match, which they won with difficulty 1:0. Velichkov is indignant at the lack of any attempts to improve the game of the "lions".
"I hope my memory serves me right, but I think it was 2008 when I took the coaching course at the Bulgarian Football Union.
Maybe on the second day of the course, when we had a lecture by a specialist, a Bulgarian living and working abroad (whose name I unfortunately don't remember, may the man forgive me), in this lecture I heard the term "mental football speed" for the first time. The man told us in detail what "we're talking about" and gave truly unique examples to illustrate how important it is to make quick decisions in football.
One of the examples that the specialist in question gave was with the Barcelona school and more specifically, how a large part of the exercises for adolescents there are aimed precisely at developing the mentality or, in other words, improving football intelligence! He told us about an exercise from a team in which 16-year-old children play (from the Barca school), in which 10 football players play against 10 football players in the central circle, and they are allowed to touch the ball only 2 times during the game, in general you only have the right to control the ball and pass it, and the winner or the one who scored a point is the team that made 10 consecutive passes without the opponent taking the ball away. The specialist told us the following:
The children were teenagers, only 16 years old, and they easily made 10 passes in a field with a radius of 9 meters (that's the radius of the central circle) in the presence of 10 opponents!!! Just imagine how quickly you have to act with a ball at your feet when you are in such a dense environment and how quickly you have to have a ready solution when the ball comes to you when there is at least 1 or 2 other opponent players within a radius of 2 meters?!?! Then our lecturer told us that at a camp of the Bulgarian U19 national team, he suggested and asked the then coach to try the exercise in question after the warm-up, but in the central circle to make it easier for the youngsters, there would be two teams of 6 people!
(I would like to note that the suggestion was a consequence of the specialist's lecturing activity and in order to prove the idea that in modern football the most important thing is mental football speed!)
The coach of the little lions agreed and after the warm-up, explaining in detail the conditions of the exercise, gave the signal for it to begin! The exercise lasted about 5-6 minutes and the coach told the specialist: Let's not torture them anymore, you see it's not working!
The children made an average of about 4 passes, after which the ball was taken away by the other team. Many years have passed since then and yesterday I came across a post with a quote from the phenomenal football player from the Barcelona school, Xavi, who talks about how important it is to make quick decisions in the game of football and how mental speed is actually many times more important than physicality and speed…. Reading Xavi's words, I thought of the example I mentioned above, when back in 2008 I realized that people work mainly towards developing mental speed. I also thought of the style of the team in which Xavi played, a team with at least 5-6 players who are solid starters from the Barça school and all of them with phenomenal football intelligence and exceptional mental speed!
Later in the evening I sat on the couch and turned on the match of the Bulgarian national team... Our boys won, but what of it? We all saw that this victory was the fruit of luck, but in reality we were outplayed by a country with a population slightly larger than my beloved Plovdiv.
I do not blame our boys for the weak game, NO, unfortunately they are capable of so much. I blame and will not stop blaming the INACTION OF THE BFU!!! People have been working daily for years in search of innovations and improvements, and our men's national team still has problems with receiving and passing the ball! How, I ask, can we talk about mental speed when you have a problem with A and B ?!?!?!?!", writes Velichkov.