7 min
The model with thirty principles is not a model
If your players cannot recite it at 3–2 down with eight minutes left, it is a document rather than a model.
I have been handed club game models that run to forty pages. They are usually excellent documents. They are never models, because a model is not a description of how you would like to play — it is the set of things a tired seventeen-year-old can still do when the game has gone badly and nobody is telling them what to do.
Three principles and nine sub-principles is not a limitation I arrived at for elegance. It is roughly what a group of players can hold, and holding it is the only test that counts. Everything beyond that lives in the session plans, where it belongs, and gets trained one at a time.
The practical test: stop training on a Thursday, pick three players at random and ask them what the team does when the opponent plays backwards. If you get three different answers, the number of principles is not your problem — the fact that none of them arrived is.
Writing
Why your possession drill teaches nothing
A rondo with no direction trains a skill the game never asks for. Here is the version that does, and the one line you have to add.
Coach less in the first four minutes
The most reliable improvement available to almost every coach I watch, and it costs nothing but the discomfort of standing there.